M.L. Rio's Blog, page 6

Sh*tty First Drafts

To borrow a famous phrase from Anne Lammott’s Bird by Bird, I’ve just finished a shitty first draft. As her later use of the phrase implies, that is something to be proud of and excited about. I’ve been chipping away at this manuscript for almost a year, averaging about 600 words a day in that amount of time. That might not sound terribly impressive, but because it’s happened in tandem with full-time doctoral study, I’m honestly relieved it didn’t take me ten years instead of one. (This is, o...

Guest Posts: The Folger Collation, Pt. 3

The third part of the What Acting IS feature is now live on the Folger’s Collation blog! This post explores the idea of mentality in actor-centered criticism and is where you’ll find most of my contributions (in regard to signifiers of madness in early modern drama and culture). You can read it here.

M

Guest Posts: The Folger Collation, Pt. 2

The second part of the What Acting IS feature is now live on the Folger’s Collation blog! This installment addresses the question of temporality in actor-centered criticism; you can find it here.

M

 

Guest Posts: The Folger Collation

Last semester I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library which explored the tensions and collaborations between academic and practical approaches to dramatic texts. At the end of our sessions, the members of the seminar co-authored a series of blog posts, the first of which has been posted to the Folger’s Research & Exploration blog, The Collation. If you have any interest in Shakespeare, theatre, or actor-centered criticism, I hope you’ll take a minut...

Writing, Reviews, and the Emotional Labor of Social Media

Having any sort of public persona in the 21st century makes you a potential target for hate mail and internet harassment. This is news to no one, and accepted by most people as an occupational hazard–unpleasant, but unavoidable. Across my own social media platforms I usually accrue a handful of unpleasant messages and mentions each week. Nine times out of ten it’s a mundane variation of some criticism of my work or myself which I’ve already heard a thousand times and it’s easy to delete it an...

Tyranny of the Mind

I’ve always been a sucker for a melodramatic title. You’ll have to forgive me for this one, which jumped to the tip of my tongue this morning as I reviewed the work I did yesterday and considered my half-formed plan for today. I stuck it in the title bar of this post as a placeholder, but the more I thought about it the less I wanted to change it, because it’s a prime example of exactly what I wanted to talk about. Why was this phrase bouncing around my brain in the first place? Because I’ve...

Time is a Construct, but New Beginnings Are Nice

Like most sane people, I’ve never set much stock in new year’s resolutions. They’re usually overly ambitious, often the remedy for some perceived personal failing, and nearly always forgotten by February. However, there’s something to be said for taking a moment to reflect at the start of a new year and ask yourself what you could be doing differently—whether you’re interested in improving yourself or your quality of life or some combination of the two. I think writers are particularly prone...

Signing 12/1

Good news if you’re in the MD/DC area–my signing with Howard County Library has been rescheduled, and I’ll be at the Miller Branch on December 1. Hope to see you there! More info here.

P. S. Signed books make great Christmas gifts.

–M

October eBook Sale!

If We Were Villains is a Kindle Daily Deal this month, which means you can buy the eBook for just $2.99!

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Click here to buy! It might just be the perfect read for Halloween.

–M

Guest Post

This week I had the opportunity to share some thoughts with Superstition Review about politics, writing, what I’m working on, and making art in the age of Trump.

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The full post is here, and I hope you take a few minutes to read it.

–M