It was fantastic, of course (so go and see it). What’s really interesting about this film is how much of a clash there is between the tone of the original author (Roald Dahl) and the adapter (Wes Anderson), and yet the adaptation still works beautifully.
Dahl’s work always has a particularly ironic but unrepentant zing to [...]

Check out my guest post on Dead Things on Sticks. Mostly about indie Internet TV, somewhat about the Canadian TV regulatory system.

I recently gave a critique to someone about their story – which was a relatively funny piece – and then I got an email reply to my comments that was loads lighter than the story they’d written. Why was this? Because in the email they were relaxed. They were just trying to get back to [...]

These last few weeks I’ve been sitting down for two hours every night to write, Sundays through Thursdays. So far twice I’ve stepped away from my TV script – once to write a treatment for a fairly long story, and then last night.
I hadn’t written a short story in two years. I wrote one last [...]

Because I’d like to place samples of a couple of my short stories on my website, I’m thinking about podcasting readings of a couple of them. But I’m not sure if this would affect my ability to sell First North American serial rights. I assume it would be totally legal to sell those rights after [...]

I have gone through the last of my old stories. I sifted out what I can maybe sell, what I have to rewrite, and what’s going nowhere. Then I rewrote what I could. Finally tonight I went through magazines to find a suitable home for some of these stories.
I have a total of six stories [...]

One of the things I learned at WorldCon: the big writing workshops aren’t about helping the writers make something publishable. It’s about helping them make something that’s going to fail in the biggest ways.
Why? Because you learn more from failure than from success.
I used to be a big proponent of this sort of writing. I [...]

It’s coming up on September, and I remember how much I love autumn.
Some people think of autumn as the end of something. They’re right: it’s the end of summer. But they’re wrong: it’s the beginning of winter. Every ending is a beginning to something else.
I’ve been thinking about how much I prefer endings to beginnings [...]

I have been thinking a little about how my writing has changed over time – why I got better sometime in those eight years of hardly writing any fiction. I think that I can attribute some of the change to fear.
I always wanted to be a good, famous writer – and for a long time [...]

I thought about not watching this one, but I finally bit the bullet. I’m glad I did.

**SPOILERS AHOY!**