K.M. Soehnlein's Blog, page 3

Ten Years, Twenty Films: My Favorites of the Decade

I love talking about movies almost as much as I love watching them, so the chance to share my list of favorites of the past decade is really the hope for more conversation. The films on my list (below) are mostly those I've watched more than once, and will likely watch again. This was the decade that married movie-watching with instant gratification—DVD, DVR, Netflix. I probably saw more movies in the last ten years than I'd seen in the previous twenty, and I saw them when I wanted to see...

To Be Gay With You

This week's gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in
Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the
rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional
wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing
visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer
dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard's...

Learning to Love Your Work

Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out...