Putting that dream into action, you st★r f**ker

Speaking of mining dreams for content. My pal Tamara over here has a call out for talented playwrights interested in a prompt based on a real-actual-honest-to-spaghetti-monster-dream someone had. She writes on Facebook: I am lucky enough to be a producer and actor of new short plays once a year, every summer. It is one of…

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4 reasons most book clubs just don’t work

Finding the right book club feels like dating. Many will be tried, few will succeed. At least, that's been my experience. Over the years I occasionally feel a need to actually share my reading experiences, which are wide and varied and as much about finding book-lovin' folk as it is to talk about the specific…

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You can’t go home to Arrakis again

Recently, a link popped up all over my Facebook thread, informing me how I could begin breezing through books at a much more rapid rate than I do. If I don't know anything more about that particular link, it's because, f that noise. I see no need to read faster. I probably need to read…

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Dream mining for story inspiration: Check and check!

Who says dreams are dead time? I woke up with an idea for a short story on Sunday morning and pounded out a good start. The only problem now: Where to take the darn thing. Secondary problem: Finding the time to finish it up. The important part is starting. It's even more important when you're…

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Wherein Bradley Cooper has a question for Sean Penn

Life rarely melds together this neatly; if there wasn't video/audio proof of this Louis C.K/Bradley Cooper/Sean Penn connection, I'd have to think the following video was a hoax.   But it goes to prove that you never know where life is taking you next, that one day the handsome nobody in the front row asking…

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Kick your own can, jump in your own tub of marshmallows

This morning, I watched Veronica Roth jump into a bathtub full of marshmallows. I'm a bit behind the times — she did this in 2010 and posted it on her blog, a promise fulfilled to her readers about what she'd do if she landed a book deal. And when "Divergent" got her that deal, she…

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