Despite all of the press releases, despite all the bookstore banners, and despite the groundswell of media attention, I managed to miss Banned Books Week. Last week! Perhaps I was blinded by its ubiquity — I couldn’t see the forest for the trees (before it was pulped into paperbacks). Or maybe there is something more sinister…
Category: Creative & How-To’s
Every creative operandi needs a modus — this one’s for you: We write, therefore we am. These are the prose and cons.
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AI Writing Obituaries
Last week I received some trade-pub spam from Editor & Publisher topped by the headline: “Optimizing obituaries to drive traffic and increase revenue.” Ugh. I’m all for driving traffic and increasing revenue, but not as a digital grave robber. Reconciling how our words are read by both humans and the search bots that feed them is par…
As the saying goes, “If you remember the ’90s, you were there and bored.” That’s unless you were a reader of an inky supermarket tabloid that boasted headlines about the fabled “Bat Boy” and other “journalistic” meshugas that instantly turned your coffee table into a Ripley’s Believe it, Or Not exhibit. Well, believe it or not—it’s back: The Weekly World…
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Brand Plan
James Bond just underwent a redemptive reckoning onscreen. The latest iteration of Superman is, as the New York Times reports, “Up, up and out of the closet.” Rebranding cultural icons seems all the rage. And not just for superheroes. Many public-facing entities have endeavored to refresh their image, some to fix longstanding cultural offenses—looking at you,…
Until this week, the only thing Rodney Dangerfield and I had in common was a penchant for one-liners and general anxiety about our respectability. Then we both went “back to school.” His experience was fictional—apart from the cameo by a real-life Kurt Vonnegut—and arrived in the local cineplex as the movie Back to School. My back-to-school…
Like every other writer I know, I’m the voice of my generation. Apparently, my voice just isn’t loud enough to overcome our collective screams of desperation. That said, I feel obligated to continue trying, partly because I have the rare privilege of being a writer with a day job, which is being a writer—but with some…