My Blog

Pen Pals

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TV Writer Paul Guyot talks about how important it is for writers to have other writers as friends.

The intangible. See, I can talk to my wife about story, and she
reads everything I write, but even though she actually worked with
writers for a living, understands story and structure, gives very good,
precise notes, there is still something altogether different when it’s
a writer talking with another writer. There’s some nebulous thing
that’s shared.

My advice to any "aspiring" writers, be it screen or prose, is to find yourself a writer buddy.

Just don’t date another writer. I’ve made that mistake.

Buffy The Con Slayer

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Variety reports that the organizer of Slayercon ’05, celebrating BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER down under, has disappeared with the $500,000 raised by ticket sales.

Edward Schumacher, topper of Scooby Gang Promotions — who organized
Slayercon 2005 in Adelaide for July 2-3 — is under investigation by South
Australia’s Office of Consumer and Business Affairs after dropping off the radar
in late April with all the event coin.

"We are trying to contact him to see if he has a bona fide intention to hold
the convention in October or to see if we can get the money back," said Mark
Bodycoat, OCBA topper. "But it doesn’t look hopeful, in my experience if things
start to happen like this it is not going to happen at all."

Unconfirmed reports speculate that he’s donated the money to the  Colonial Fan Force and their righteous cause.

There’s No Need to Fear, Another TV Remake is Here…

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Following on the heels of SCOOBY-DOO, Variety reports that Disney is developing a live-action version of the TV cartoon UNDERDOG.

Underdog"Anything where you have a dog in that superhero context, that’s appealing on a
global basis," producer Gary Barber said. "Those films do very well, and there’s no better
brand than Disney for this kind of movie."

…The tongue-in-cheek "Underdog" skein, created by Buck Biggers and Chet Stover,
made its debut in 1964 on NBC and ran until 1973. The character was an unlikely
superhero: a beagle who sheds his milquetoast identity of Shoeshine Boy to
become a caped superdog who speaks in rhymed couplets. Wally Cox provided his
voice.

In the feature script, by Joe Piscatella and Craig A. Williams, a diminutive
hound named Shoeshine gets superpowers after a lab accident. When he’s adopted
by a 12-year-old boy, the two form a bond around the shared knowledge that
Shoeshine is really Underdog.

How Hated Am I?

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I got this email today:

Do you realize that EVERYBODY in fandom hates your fucking guts you asshole?

I think it was from my Mom, but I’m going to answer it anyway. No, I had no idea. So, for fun, I thought I’d take a look at what some people are saying. Here’s a sampling:

From Jocelyn’s Other Desk:

Thy lips rot off, Lee Goldberg!  Thou jarring, fat-kidneyed scullian!  You speak an infinite deal of nothing!  […] Goldbergs one and all, thine sole name blisters our tongues.  Thou hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs.

From Nobody Knows Anything Blog:

I understand the impulse to write and read fanfic—you want to live in
this wonderful world as much as you can, and twenty-four hours a year
or one book every two years or whatever just isn’t cutting it for you.
There are several novel series that I am forever hoping will just happen to have a new installment at the bookstore every time I check. But
fanfic is like a steak dinner made out of meringue—might look the real
thing, but it’s not really going to fill you up.

From Dawn Rivers Baker’s Blog:

You know, it’s all very well to nitpick about the legal shimmies and shakes of fanfic,
but the legal stuff doesn’t cover what it must be like for the author
who feels violated by other people dipping their fingers into the
author’s creation. All you really have to do to "get" the author’s perspective is to ask a victim how it feels to have just been raped.

From Nick Mamatas:

Mystery writer and TV producer Lee Goldberg picks up a stick and whacks a hornet’s nest by taking on fanfic.
I have no dog in the fight; after all, what can I say? NOBODY had
better RIP-OFF my ORiGINAL CHARACTERS like … uh … Jack Kerouac and uhm Cthulhu and William S. Burroughs and and and…
However, I do like a good brawl, especially when everyone is so
obviously speaking past one another. "It’s illegal!" "It’s a hobby!"
"It’s illegal!" "It’s a hobby!" Haven’t these people ever heard of an
illegal hobby before? They sure seem to be acting like they run their
neighborhood meth labs.

Read more

Tod on Walter Scott

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The best reason to read my brother Tod’s blog is his hilarious weekly dissection of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade column. I open the Parade magazine that comes bundled with my LA Times each Sunday trying to guess which stupid questions and inane answers are going to become the topic of Tod’s blog post. This week’s column was tough to guess, because it was a goldmine of inanity. You can see the questions that Tod tackled here. I knew he’d pick the Desperate Housewives question, but I was surprised he let this question-and-answer go:

I was surprised that Kenny Chesney was at the Academy of Country Music Awards without his new bride, Renee Zellweger. Where was she? Stella Wilson, Charlotte N.C.

The pair prefer to say out of each other’s spotlight, so Zellweger,36, was not in the audience last month in Las Vegas when Chesney, 37, was named Entertainer of the Year. (Our sources say she was at the hotel next door, but Kenny’s rep would only tell us "Renee was busy elsewhere"). The actress did attend a party afterward with her hubby.

Care to correct the oversight, Tod? 

Do I Read Everything?

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I got this email today:

I’ve written several comments on your blog and you’ve never responded to any of them. Do you read all the comments on your blog?

Sadly, no. If a post gets five or six c0mments, I might read them all. But in general, I usually browse the comments on a blog entry of mine for the first day or two after I post it and then I move on. It would take way, way too much of my time to keep up on all the comments posted on all my blog entries… especially when the numbers of comments on the fanfic posts can number in the 100s (there have been 5308 comments posted on my blog in the last 14 months).  Besides, the blog comments often spin off into other topics or become personal squabbles between anonymous strangers who have nothing to do with me.

What’s the Best Way to Destroy a DVD?

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All the members of The Producers Guild of America have to sign a legally binding agreement before they can receive screeners of movies and TV shows.  By signing the agreement, I promise to  never to sell, copy, loan or giveaway the DVDs and tapes to anyond, and:

If at some point following the relevant awards season I wish to dispose of some or all of the material I have received, I agree to do so by destroying the cassettte or DVD in a manner that prevents its recovery and reuse by any third party. I agree that any violation of this agreement may constitute grounds for discipline, including censure, suspension, or expulsion from the Producers Guild of America and may also result in civil and criminal penalties and that the owners of the rights in the works I recevie are third party beneficiaries of this agreement with the rights to enforce it.

As I menti0ned a while back, my office is already swamped with Emmy screeners. So…anybody got any tips on simple and effective ways to destroy the DVDs I don’t want to keep?

The Fight to Save Science Fiction

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Yesterday on this blog, I refered to a post by Richard Wheeler lamenting the demise of the western. According to an article syndicated by the Associated Press, the Science Fiction genre is also fighting for survival. They talk to author James Gunn, who heads the University of Kansas’ Center for the
Study of Science Fiction…

…which he started in 1982 as an extension of
the writers’ workshops he conducted and courses he taught to teachers looking to add science fiction to their lesson plans. These days, he and the center are gearing up for a new mission – to save science fiction, itself.

…The economics and social shift Gunn and his supporters face are daunting, however.

Andrew Grabois, director of publisher relations at Bowker, said the combined science fiction/fantasy category published 3,197 new titles last year and sold $484.8 million, its highest total in three years.

That’s dwarfed by romance novels, which sold $1.6 billion last year, and is even behind the production of mystery writers, who cranked out 4,181 new titles in 2004.

…Gunn, who considers "Star Wars" closer to a fairy tale than science fiction, says there’s less room these days for what he calls the "mid-level" books that may not sell as well but contain the most imaginative and thought-provoking writing.

"(Science fiction) has to change to remain relevant," he said."That’s harder to do today because the best seller needs to have broad appeal, so they’re less likely to be on the cutting edge. You need that to drive the genre forward."

It seems that every genre, with the exception of Romance, feels threatened with extinction. And yet Romance Writers, whose works outpace the sales of mysteries, scifi and westerns combined, complain (and rightly so) that they get no critical respect or recognition despite the enormous commercial popularity of their work.

The moral of this story? Writers are never happy.