Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 88
October 20, 2019
Ken Atchity Quote...
“If you have a dream, you have a responsibility to yourself and to us to make it come true. That’s the most important thing in your life. Don’t let anything stand in its way.”
― Kenneth John Atchity, The Messiah Matrix
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
― Kenneth John Atchity, The Messiah Matrix
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
October 18, 2019
October 16, 2019
Build your brain. Read a book.
I've read some truly excellent books lately. The kind where you grow attached to the characters, miss them when they're gone. The kind where the haunting, lilting quality of the prose lifts you up, makes you think, expands your consciousness, has you emit little gasps of astonishment.
The kind you remember.
I am a voracious reader. I go through probably two to three books a week. Reading is my escape, my haven, my inspiration, my fascination.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was to come across research from the Yale School of Public Health demonstrating that reading books likely extends your lifespan by two years or more.
("Great!" I thought, "I'll have two more years to read.")
The Yale researchers were reviewing 12 years of data from the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is a longitudinal panel study that administers surveys to around 20,000 Americans over the age of 50 every two years. It is supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration, and is one of the largest longitudinal studies of its kind.
What the Yale researchers discovered was that in analyzing the health statuses and reading habits of over 3,600 men and women over the age of 50 in the HRS, a distinct pattern came to light.
It turned out that people who read books for at least 30 minutes a day were living, on average, two years longer than those who didn't read anything. Plus (and this part is important), the book readers were 23 percent less likely to die than people who were only reading newspapers or magazines.
In other words, if you want to live longer and have a more resilient brain, read books. Not just newspapers, magazines, tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram posts, or online articles. It doesn't matter whether the books are fiction or nonfiction; it just matters that they're books.
The Yale team had the same question you're probably asking right now: What is it about reading books specifically that boosts brain power and overall health, when things like newspapers and magazines don't?
The researchers had a few theories. First, books encourage what they deemed "deep reading." Rather than just skimming over a headline and the bite-sized information in an article or social-media post, reading a book forces you to make connections between chapters--and to the outside world.
When you make those connections, you forge new neural pathways between regions in both hemispheres of your brain, as well as in all four lobes. (It has been repeatedly demonstrated that establishing new neural networks is one of the best ways to stave off dementia and other cognitive decay.)
This concept was backed up by research out of Stanford that looked at the fMRI images of study participants tasked with reading a novel by Jane Austen. The researchers had participants first leisurely skim a passage (like you might do when deciding whether to purchase it at a bookstore), and then perform what they called "close reading"--reading as if you were studying it for an exam.
According to Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar leading the project, brain scans showed significant increases in blood flow during close reading. This, she suggests, shows that "paying attention to literary texts requires the coordination of multiple complex cognitive functions."
This makes sense to me on an intuitive as well as intellectual level. Because I feel different after reading disparate Instagram posts versus spending 30+ minutes reading a book. It's much like the difference between eating junk food and having a real meal; the shorter posts are fun and pleasurable to read, but I feel empty after scrolling. When I read my book, on the other hand, I feel filled up. Nourished.
If you're like most people, you want to live a long, healthy, and meaningful life. You want to contribute to the world. You want to be a leader.
But if you're constantly running around, scrolling through feeds, and never actually sitting down to relax and focus on something like reading a book for half an hour--half an hour!--you're doing your body and brain a disservice.
Taking care of yourself means more than just making sure you don't have three venti coffees in one day.
Build your brain. Read a book.
For those interested, here are the three best books I've read lately. They've each touched me in a different way, but they've all had a lasting impact...and likely added years onto my life:
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith (fiction): Some of the best writing I've seen in years. Stunning. Themes of redemption, aging, class, theft of all kinds, and love.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson (nonfiction): The true and riveting story of the 1893 Chicago World Fair, told alongside the story of a serial killer operating in the city at the same time. If you're from the U.S., you'll be stunned that didn't know more about this major part of American history.
The Land of Love and Drowning, by Tiphanie Yanique (fiction): You have to pay close attention to this one--its themes are many and its eerie, lovely prose is as melodic as it is disturbing. Highly recommended.
---
"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them." --Lemony Snicket
By Melanie CurtinWriter, activist@melaniebcurtinRead more
October 14, 2019
Tome Tender Reviews A Potter's Tale by Dave Davis
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
A fascinating and intriguing tale of life, love, betrayal and murder, Dave Davis’s A POTTER’S TALE challenges readers with mysteries from the past, the brilliance of a present day life snuffed out too soon and long held secrets that could spell the destruction of the universe.
When a former physician now reporter teams up with his tenacious partner, they had no idea that the story of the murdered teen would lead them across continents, civilizations, religions and scientific research facilities. Who is trying to cover up hidden secrets of the universe? To what end?
Dave Davis has added enough twists and left enough imaginative breadcrumbs along the way that science fiction buffs, history buffs and lovers of all things mysterious and suspenseful will each find a compelling reason to turn page after page! Taut writing, believable characters and some “didn’t see that coming,” moments make this one of those tales that boggles the mind, because, what if?...
SYNOPSIS:
Love. Betrayal. Murder. Then the universe started to collapse. They say it all started in 1935 when Roz Lhulier and his team unearthed the massive tomb of Pakal, the greatest Mayan king, and with it, an ancient text, called a codex. They're wrong.
The codex is deciphered by Alan Turing, the genius who broke the German's Enigma Code during WWII, but its message is jealously guarded by the Astronomers, a lethal offspring of the Catholic Church. Astronomers have compromised or killed anyone with knowledge of the secret--presidents and prime ministers, just for instance.
The codex pulls others into its deadly orbit: Noah, a former physician, and his partner Kate, reporters for the Washington Post. They investigate the murder of DiShannia, a precocious teen, who's achieved national recognition for her research on the demise of Mayan civilization. They're led from Washington DC, to the British Museum, to the Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, to Melbourne, Australia.
Each step enlightens them, offers clues, frightens them. And us.
The two strands of the novel--the codex and its rich human stories--are joined by another narrative, creating a kind of weird DNA. This third strand involves the Potter, who crafts the story. And the genes that craft us all.
Does the universe collapse? The Potter knows the answer. Noah, Kate discover it. We learn it too--on the last page.
October 11, 2019
October 9, 2019
October 7, 2019
Writer/Director Nicole Conn and Producer Lissa Forehan Enjoy an Extraordinary Evening at the Out At The Movies Closing Night!
More Beautiful For Having Been Broken Film Festival Line Up!
October 1, 2019
September 30, 2019
Are Screenwriters Really No Longer Looking for Agents? By Nancy Nigrosh
Misdirection in how to get or ‘manage’ an agent, has always been abundant
I wrote what I believe to be a still useful Indiewire article, If You Want Screenwriting Career Tips, Ask A Literary Agent, in 2015. For those of you who believe writers need an agent in order to have a writing career, my advice, then as now, is the same: be open to learning about and appreciating agents as uniquely trained professionals. They’ve been taught to carry on basically the same work ethic and industry practices handed down to them since the Golden Age of Hollywood. No joke.
Every class I teach, I ask: “What does an agent do?” and then wait. There’s silence until someone finally volunteers. Typically, it goes like this:
“They make calls…”
“They make deals.”
"They’re gatekeepers.”
Many people seem to think the relationship between agents and writers as being some form of doctor/patient relationship — a dreaded necessity due to illness or injury that requires clinical intervention, but much harder to appreciate. It seems to be a lot more logical to trust a physician’s skills than your average literary agent’s. Not so with managers, who generally receive a globally hearty thumbs-up. “They really care about you,” is the comfort meme, while the conventional sentiment “agents only care about the deal” won’t go away.
All the managers I know personally or professionally care just as much as the agent and the client do about the deal. But, managers also care about the essential role agents play. Yet, unless that manager was once an agent, or trained to become an agent, even the manager might consider the literary agent’s playbook to be as mysterious as a magician’s hat. One thing everybody does know for certain is that lit agents zero in on high-profile media buyers in order to broker intellectual properties. While they’re sharpshooting in the stratosphere of the insider media-marketplace, they can also secure gainful writing employment for their clients. But, no one is sure exactly how they do that. I can assure you it would take a few hundred pages to explain the how and why of what lit agents do.
Some aspects are deceptively simple: agents are clinicians to clients, and magicians to buyers, and vice versa. Nevertheless, their skillsets, though obviously invaluable, can also generate doubt. Doubt creates instability within the intimate alliance between a writer and an agent, a situation that is routinely disrupted by the demand that literary agents be experts in negotiating changing realities in an evolving marketplace, while also staying in touch with a writer’s usually static expectations.
Yet, even when they are far apart about one issue or another, agents and writers have more in common than you might think. The majority of literary agents, like their clients, work alone in organizing meaningful information from multiple sources in a committed effort to convert that intelligence into calculated opportunities. From raw to refined data on any given day, agents customize complex immediate and long-range strategies to further their client’s overall career. These are skills that are not fungible to a writer’s immediate and long-range overview of their tangible creative work, so it’s harder for a writer to evaluate or measure what an agent is doing for them. The efforts made in representing a client appear to be awfully subjective, making the agent’s job hard to appreciate. When it comes to paying up the ten percent generated by mutual success, nearly every writer becomes a stingy tipper. Add to that the often universally expressed suspicions both inside and outside the industry about what agents do, and it seems everyone is quick to denigrate them as a whole population.
Whether they’re understood or appreciated, lionized or devalued, literary agents, often in close tandem with managers and entertainment attorneys, professionally orchestrate more than 99% of all screenwriting careers.
Yet the web contains no end of screenwriting career recipes snapped from the lens of one person’s single literary or literary-related career in declarative “listicles” of career must-haves and must-do’s. Doesn’t insight from the lens of only one career seem a little… narrow-minded? Those who know most about the professional screenwriting trade are literary agents, whose seasoned expertise encompasses thousands of careers.
I was often told I didn’t “seem like an agent,” as though this were a compliment. I was proud of the job, handed down to me by my mentors, Phil Gersh and Scott Harris, who created his own fiercely independent agency that consistently books high scores in the daily talent hunger games. Scott was trained at what was once the William Morris Agency by TV maven, Jerry Katzman. Also, Scott’s dad had been among the well-armed ranks of Lew Wasserman’s MCA, once upon a time the largest talent agency in the world. Wasserman invented the 16-hour workday and broke the long-term studio contract system. Jack Valenti likened Wasserman to a God, rather than a mere Hollywood “Godfather.”
Phil represented a dazzling array of talent — among them, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Wise, and Don Siegel. He didn’t dwell on his own past, but preferred to toss me Golden Age nuggets about the career-steering feats of legendary agents Charles Feldman and Ray Stark. Feldman invented packaging and profit participation in 1942. His clients included Cary Grant and John Wayne, while Stark started out as a literary agent representing Raymond Chandler, then branched out into talent and shepherded the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton and Ronald Reagan. Phil also enjoyed reminiscing about lesser-known participants, like the raspy, chain-smoking studio business affairs attorney, who invented rolling “breakeven” — which may have been inspired by his tobacco habit, since it was as inexhaustible as a studio’s overhead expenses.
Conversations with Phil made it clear to me that agents had the best access to information by virtue of their incentivized maneuverability, especially when it came to the guarded inner-workings of the entertainment machine. He taught me about very specific insider-business behaviors, gauging predictability and unpredictability as part of the art (and science) of the deal. I learned that in Hollywood, a negotiation could be as grubby as a wrestling match over the cash drawer, yet at the same time, as cerebral as chess.
He explained many other important concepts, while warning me about routinely camouflaged snares. He was also quick to give tough love. While I was still a baby agent, I made the mistake of insisting that a production start date for a script I’d sold was poured in stone, though no star was set. The director’s pay-or-play date passed, so to update the agency’s talent and below-the-line departments, I announced the film’s production start at the staff meeting, to which Phil retorted, “She’s right. They’re starting on that date… with or without actors!”
The key difference between a missile and a rocket is that one is guided while the other isn’t. Agents strategically calibrate career trajectory for maximum impact using their unique tactical training in service of creative storytellers. If you want to know all about what it takes to have the screenwriting career you want, ask a literary agent.
Read more
I wrote what I believe to be a still useful Indiewire article, If You Want Screenwriting Career Tips, Ask A Literary Agent, in 2015. For those of you who believe writers need an agent in order to have a writing career, my advice, then as now, is the same: be open to learning about and appreciating agents as uniquely trained professionals. They’ve been taught to carry on basically the same work ethic and industry practices handed down to them since the Golden Age of Hollywood. No joke.
Every class I teach, I ask: “What does an agent do?” and then wait. There’s silence until someone finally volunteers. Typically, it goes like this:
“They make calls…”
“They make deals.”
"They’re gatekeepers.”
Many people seem to think the relationship between agents and writers as being some form of doctor/patient relationship — a dreaded necessity due to illness or injury that requires clinical intervention, but much harder to appreciate. It seems to be a lot more logical to trust a physician’s skills than your average literary agent’s. Not so with managers, who generally receive a globally hearty thumbs-up. “They really care about you,” is the comfort meme, while the conventional sentiment “agents only care about the deal” won’t go away.
All the managers I know personally or professionally care just as much as the agent and the client do about the deal. But, managers also care about the essential role agents play. Yet, unless that manager was once an agent, or trained to become an agent, even the manager might consider the literary agent’s playbook to be as mysterious as a magician’s hat. One thing everybody does know for certain is that lit agents zero in on high-profile media buyers in order to broker intellectual properties. While they’re sharpshooting in the stratosphere of the insider media-marketplace, they can also secure gainful writing employment for their clients. But, no one is sure exactly how they do that. I can assure you it would take a few hundred pages to explain the how and why of what lit agents do.
Some aspects are deceptively simple: agents are clinicians to clients, and magicians to buyers, and vice versa. Nevertheless, their skillsets, though obviously invaluable, can also generate doubt. Doubt creates instability within the intimate alliance between a writer and an agent, a situation that is routinely disrupted by the demand that literary agents be experts in negotiating changing realities in an evolving marketplace, while also staying in touch with a writer’s usually static expectations.
Yet, even when they are far apart about one issue or another, agents and writers have more in common than you might think. The majority of literary agents, like their clients, work alone in organizing meaningful information from multiple sources in a committed effort to convert that intelligence into calculated opportunities. From raw to refined data on any given day, agents customize complex immediate and long-range strategies to further their client’s overall career. These are skills that are not fungible to a writer’s immediate and long-range overview of their tangible creative work, so it’s harder for a writer to evaluate or measure what an agent is doing for them. The efforts made in representing a client appear to be awfully subjective, making the agent’s job hard to appreciate. When it comes to paying up the ten percent generated by mutual success, nearly every writer becomes a stingy tipper. Add to that the often universally expressed suspicions both inside and outside the industry about what agents do, and it seems everyone is quick to denigrate them as a whole population.
Whether they’re understood or appreciated, lionized or devalued, literary agents, often in close tandem with managers and entertainment attorneys, professionally orchestrate more than 99% of all screenwriting careers.
Yet the web contains no end of screenwriting career recipes snapped from the lens of one person’s single literary or literary-related career in declarative “listicles” of career must-haves and must-do’s. Doesn’t insight from the lens of only one career seem a little… narrow-minded? Those who know most about the professional screenwriting trade are literary agents, whose seasoned expertise encompasses thousands of careers.
I was often told I didn’t “seem like an agent,” as though this were a compliment. I was proud of the job, handed down to me by my mentors, Phil Gersh and Scott Harris, who created his own fiercely independent agency that consistently books high scores in the daily talent hunger games. Scott was trained at what was once the William Morris Agency by TV maven, Jerry Katzman. Also, Scott’s dad had been among the well-armed ranks of Lew Wasserman’s MCA, once upon a time the largest talent agency in the world. Wasserman invented the 16-hour workday and broke the long-term studio contract system. Jack Valenti likened Wasserman to a God, rather than a mere Hollywood “Godfather.”
Phil represented a dazzling array of talent — among them, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Wise, and Don Siegel. He didn’t dwell on his own past, but preferred to toss me Golden Age nuggets about the career-steering feats of legendary agents Charles Feldman and Ray Stark. Feldman invented packaging and profit participation in 1942. His clients included Cary Grant and John Wayne, while Stark started out as a literary agent representing Raymond Chandler, then branched out into talent and shepherded the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton and Ronald Reagan. Phil also enjoyed reminiscing about lesser-known participants, like the raspy, chain-smoking studio business affairs attorney, who invented rolling “breakeven” — which may have been inspired by his tobacco habit, since it was as inexhaustible as a studio’s overhead expenses.
Conversations with Phil made it clear to me that agents had the best access to information by virtue of their incentivized maneuverability, especially when it came to the guarded inner-workings of the entertainment machine. He taught me about very specific insider-business behaviors, gauging predictability and unpredictability as part of the art (and science) of the deal. I learned that in Hollywood, a negotiation could be as grubby as a wrestling match over the cash drawer, yet at the same time, as cerebral as chess.
He explained many other important concepts, while warning me about routinely camouflaged snares. He was also quick to give tough love. While I was still a baby agent, I made the mistake of insisting that a production start date for a script I’d sold was poured in stone, though no star was set. The director’s pay-or-play date passed, so to update the agency’s talent and below-the-line departments, I announced the film’s production start at the staff meeting, to which Phil retorted, “She’s right. They’re starting on that date… with or without actors!”
The key difference between a missile and a rocket is that one is guided while the other isn’t. Agents strategically calibrate career trajectory for maximum impact using their unique tactical training in service of creative storytellers. If you want to know all about what it takes to have the screenwriting career you want, ask a literary agent.
Read more
