Christopher Meeks's Blog, page 13
July 23, 2011
10 SWEET TIME-SUCKING THINGS TO SAVE YOU FROM WRITING
I recently met a writer friend, Gary Phillips, at Versailles, a fabulous Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles where a mixture of citrus juices slam into garlic to create a sauce that makes chicken and fish like Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio hugging on Titanic's bow. After we swapped each other's recent books, Cowboys, a graphic novel crime story, and Love At Absolute Zero, we found ourselves ...
July 22, 2011
GROWING UP WRIGHT-ISH
I grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house--or it would have been an official one if he'd had lived a little longer. In a few tours that were given before the house was knocked down last year, people asked me what was it like growing up in an "organic architecture" home. I've thought about it a lot since then because my brothers and I didn't think of the house as art--it was just a ...
July 16, 2011
DANCING DOG AND DEAD MAN IN GARDEN
John Lennon's quote, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," rams into me as a truth perhaps too often. Just over a week ago, my wife Ann and I planned to grab dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant. In the car a half-block down the street, we saw three people surrounding two giant dogs, one a pit bull. The people were wrestling with the dogs-very odd and eerie because ...
July 5, 2011
Ten Simple Things for Becoming Rich-Rich-Rich in Self Publishing
I'm new to Twitter. Now that I'm there, I'm seeing all sorts of Tweets on self-publishing, which is clearly the new Gold Rush. Here's one tweet (love that word): If I Were a Newly Self-Published Author, What Steps Would I Take To Succeed? http://bit.ly/dh8I7N It's from @Bob_Mayer, a New York Times best-selling novelist who also has a blog for writers. If you follow the above ...
June 29, 2011
THE EVENT THAT SHAPED MY LIFE
Perhaps the biggest touchstone in my life--though I didn't know it at the time--was when President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University's football stadium in Houston, Texas, in the late summer of 1962, the day before my tenth birthday. He said, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are ...
June 21, 2011
MUST SEE: "HOT COFFEE"
Set your sites (or your DVR) for HBO on Monday, June 27th, for the documentary Hot Coffee. It will change your perception of justice in America as well as how you sign contracts. My son and I saw it by accident at the Los Angeles Film Festival a few days ago. We couldn't get into Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, and Hot Coffee had seats and was about to start. We didn't know it was a ...
June 12, 2011
WHAT DO I WANT FROM MOVIES? ("The Tree of Life" vs. "Love and Other Drugs")
I might even go farther and ask what do I want from any story? I happened to see two films this week, Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning The Tree of Life and Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs, co-written with frequent partner Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph. I liked both movies and yet I was frustrated by each. They made me examine what it is I want.I went to The Tree of Life knowing ...
June 8, 2011
MUCH ADO ABOUT BLOGGING
Normally I'm not prompted much by blog suggestions, but I just read, "What would Shakespeare blog?" That instantly got me to thinking is the question as if Shakespeare were alive now or as if he were blogging on June 8th, 1601? If he were alive now, would he get so wrapped up in technology that he'd be writing film scripts and writing on a laptop between meetings? Maybe he'd feel as I'm ...
June 4, 2011
MICHIO KAKU AND OUR FUTURE
As much as I've written about how the book industry is changing, there are changes about to happen that you may not be prepared for. First, think how much technology has shaped our lives in the last ten years. People have home movie theatres now with large flat screens and quadraphonic sound systems, watching movies streaming from Netflix. Better yet, my doctor emails me test results from my ...
May 30, 2011
FOLLOW YOUR BLISS -- THE HUMOR OF MARK HASKELL SMITH
I just finished reading Moist by Mark Haskell Smith. A friend had suggested his books, saying Smith writes funny ones as I do. I don't think of myself as a humorist, just that funny things pop out of serious situations. The same is true in Smith's fiction as I quickly learned in the first novel I read of his, Baked. In that, a young man, Miro Basinas, hadn't discovered his calling until he ...
