[Originally sent out December 24, 2021 in my 24 Days of Christmas newsletter] And now, the final story — which was going to be longer and include more thorough legal analysis, but I ran out of time — SANTA V. SATAN. Satan sues Santa for trademark and trade dress infringement and dilution. Santa’s name and …
Category: All
Diogenes
The lantern guy — you know the one, went around with a lantern saying he was looking for a single honest man? Or was it righteous man. Either way, that story always annoyed me and if anybody talked approvingly about it, I suspected I wouldn’t like them either. Because how hypocritical to make a performance …
Does Twitter own my posts
A long reply to a short question: Hey uh, lawyer friends, clarify this for me. Let’s say I post a log line to a script, or a page from one. Does Twitter now have the right to steal it? https://t.co/Xz7eWVI0Xk — Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama) May 16, 2022 She’s referring to Section 4 of the Twitter …
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
I read and loved this book back in January. Months later, I still have the book next to my bed and reread the stories often. Searching through old files on my computer, I came across these impressions I wrote down when I first read each story. Notes on Deesha Philyaw’s “The Secret Lives of Church …
The spine of Hitchhiker’s Guide
See also: Mini-essays on chapters 1-2 and chapters 3-4. In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about the “spine” of a work — not the inspiration, which could be a story or image that sparked the initial idea, and not the theme. But the underlying story you started out wanting to tell, no matter how …
Hitchhiker’s Guide, chapters 3 and 4
Here’s my mini-essay on the first two chapters. Chapter 3 starts with the Vogon ships gliding unnoticed toward Earth, zoomed way out into space. “On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge …
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, chapters 1 and 2
In which I spend 14 or so days reading sections of one of my all-time favorite books, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and trying to understand how he wrote it. Nothing about Arthur is actually funny or appealing, which I imagine is intentional. There’s so much weirdness around that Arthur’s slight resistance …
Draft upon draft
I’ve lost count of how many hundreds of pages of my novel I have written and thrown away, but here are my drafts.
DIY Writing Retreat
“What I really want,” I said to a writer friend, “what I was going to request for my birthday this year, is to go on a writers’ retreat.” “Why don’t you?” she replied. She told me about her recent solo retreat, a 5-day Airbnb rental 45 minutes from home. I thought about this every day …
Generativity versus stagnation
For months I have written so much in my head and so little on paper, except scenes of my novel which will be rewritten until the original words are buried deep underneath. In Lori Gottlieb’s excellent “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” a memoir of her experiences as a therapist, she pauses to recap Erik …