I am currently on track to read or listen to 100 books in 2022. I’ll probably slow down next year, but it’s a good goal to have. And by the end of this year, I’ll have read two more crime novels and start 2023 off with a third. What are they? The Devil Takes You…
Once upon a time, I wrote for the helluvit. Writing was my happy place. I’d rather knuckle down on a story than deal with real life. It was okay to dwell in the land of make-believe. I was creating! Eventually, I had to decide whether to do this for real. And frankly, I probably should…
A friend of mine is on a 1970s binge as he tries to finish a novel. It could be nostalgia. We’re both the same age and can remember seeing shows like Mannix and Cannon as young boys. The Rockford Files, however, looms larger in both our memories. We were preteens when it came out, so…
I attempted to write a second follow-up to Holland Bay this summer. It reached sixty thousand words when I realized it was falling apart. Now, the advice to neophyte writers is always, “Don’t give up. First drafts always suck. You’ll never get it done if you quit.” Years ago, one writer going through a serious…
National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. Whoever thought this up knew how to throw a monkey-wrench into it. After all, the holiday season begins, at least in the US, on Thanksgiving. To those attempting their first novel, it sounds daunting. The problem with writing a novel without ever…
I wrote here a while back about how great it was to rediscover vinyl. During the lockdown, as we were 100% remote, I implemented what was called Vinyl Friday for my coworkers. I would find the Amazon Music link to a particular album, as that was the most common streaming service among my coworkers, and…
There are a lot of complaints about Hollywood. Too political. Not political enough. The most egregious (and really, the most obvious) one is originality. Everything’s a reboot or a remake or a big-budget franchise. Really, how many Fast & Furious movies do we really need? And it’s all so homogenized. Everything looks like it came…
1999 was a good year for cult classics. If you’re an IT guy or even just an office drone, then your bible sprang into being in the form of Office Space. Nearly 20 years after 9 to 5 debuted, Office Space stepped back from the former’s feminist focus to show the rot in corporate America…
They call Bosch: Legacy a spinoff, but is it? Frasier was a spinoff of Cheers, but Frasier Crane was not a central character to the original show. That honor went to Sam and Diane (and later, Rebecca), with Carla being that sitcom’s Fonzie. You knew Frazier from Cheers, but his show most definitely wasn’t Cheers….
Recently, on Sleuthsayers, I wrote about the PI and how the archetype might work in the present day. Gone is the guy in the trenchcoat and fedora skulking in the back alleys. Writers would get laughed out of the slush pile for attempting Raymond Chandler’s poetic similes. The psycho sidekick is a one-way ticket to…