Christopher Meeks's Blog, page 22
October 18, 2009
SHAKESPEARE AT MY AGE: The Richards Come to Roost
I never took a full-fledged course in Shakespeare. Rather than pine for something interesting I missed, I'm taking a class at UCLA Extension, taught by the knowledgeable Dr. Russell Stone. I thought I would be one of the older people in the course, but there seem to be many older than me. They may have had my same motivation, which the clown Touchstone offers in As You Like It:"It is ten ...
October 9, 2009
"CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY"—AND A WAY OF LIFE AT BACKWORD BOOKS
I've been trying to wrap my head around Michael Moore's new movie Capitalism: A Love Story. The film is highly involving and tugs at one's intellect and emotions--and afterwards makes viewers consider where they fit in economically in America. As I've mentioned before, I'm part of a consortium called Backword Books. We're seven independent authors who have banded together to pool our marketing ...
October 7, 2009
Theatre in Los Angeles
"Theatre in Los Angeles" is not an oxymoron. There is so much theatre here that I embraced it to the point of writing plays (I've had four productions) and reviewing theatre for Daily Variety in the nineties. The people who create theatre in Los Angeles are passionate--even if it's difficult to make a living at it.While my own creative interests have moved into writing fiction, plays ...
September 28, 2009
GRAM PARSONS and ROOM 8
This weekend, we slept in a desert death room. Let me explain.If you don't recognize the name Gram Parsons, he was known for his work in two bands, the Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, both in the late sixties. In the early seventies he recorded two solo albums, known for their duets with Emmylou Harris. Parsons is credited with creating country-rock, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked him ...
September 23, 2009
A View Into the Future
I continue to be amazed by readers who use the Kindle. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, people who use the electronic reading device clearly are voracious readers. Most of them had been avid readers of books who either travel a lot and don't want to carry books or are people who simply find that books are less expensive on the Kindle. The books also arrive instantly using cell phone ...
September 20, 2009
"Inglourious Basterds:" The Ugly Beneath the Beauty
Today I happened to be reading a New York Times theatre review by Charles Isherwood. It began, "When it comes to acts of murderous vengeance, bread baking cannot compete with scalp collecting in terms of lurid allure. On the other hand, the toxic loaves that figure in Daniel Goldfarb's play The Retributionists can lay claim to some factual history, in contrast to the bloody deeds visited ...
September 17, 2009
BOOK CONTEST: Win Books
As you may know, a few independent literary authors and I formed a book collective called Backword Books. It's not a publishing company but a way for us to gather our marketing talents together and see if we can get the word out about our books. One of the members noticed that a lot of book reviewers give away books to draw readers to their literary websites. We thought we'd try the same thing ...
September 12, 2009
Sometimes the Magic Works
"Sometimes the magic works," said the theatre impresario in Shakespeare in Love. As much as I muse on the subject of marketing in this blog, I can't always explain things. I can't explain my ranking today.Probably the worst habit many writers have is checking sales rankings on Amazon. It's as if our self-worth is on parade. My last two books have done particularly well during the ...
September 11, 2009
The Two Hats of the Writer
Today's writer is both creator of a product and a marketer. I do not like to think of my books as "product" any more than I would think of my children as items for consumption. The angst, love, hope, and insight I put into books and with my kids demand another category. Something personal. That said, the practical side of me says I need to market. My sometimes-obsession of checking ...
September 7, 2009
FINISHING
Did it. Here on Labor Day I made it to the end of my novel, nearly two years in the making. A mystery, Ten Days to a Bad Habit begins after a well-meaning man does something he's never done in his life. While at a convention in Las Vegas, he sleeps with someone other than his wife. When he wakes up in the morning, the convention helper is dead. His wife, of course, doesn't like learning ...
