Steven Savage's Blog, page 29

The Future of Conventions: Modular

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Conventions have been part of my life for nearly 40 years. For many people, much like me, the story is the same – a majority of our life has involved attending, hosting, and even being guests at conventions. Now that they are threatened by COVID-19, we rightfully wonder what will happen to them.

Since COVID-19 has struck, I have wondered how conventions can survive. This is really a two-...

Steve’s Books 10/8/2020

I write a lot and have quite a few books.  So now and then I’m going to post a roundup of them for interested parties!

My sites:

www.StevenSavage.com – My personal website, with my blog and latest updates.www.InformoTron.com – My press site, with the links to my books and some extra goodies!www.SeventhSanctum.com – My random inspiration website, with generators for all sorts of stories, characters, and more!

Fiction

I’ve been returning to fiction with a techno-fantasy setting of seve...

The Artist As Art

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Friends and I regularly run movies and videos for each other online, a wonderful tradition it only took a pandemic for us to devise. We recently watched The Horse’s Mouth, a film based on a well-regarded book, starring Alec Guinness as an artist who destroys as much as he creates. At first it seems to be a relatively standard comedy, but as I sat with it, I felt it was more like Spinal Tap a...

Confidence In The Undefined

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

It’s hard to plan for the future right now, as so many crises and potential crises bedevil us. We must make plans to have some order and confidence, but its hard, and plans have limts in the best of times. It is difficult to have surety in our goals and our plans to reach them when they’re so often interrupted.

With that lack of confidence in our plans, we lack confidence in ourselves. W...

The Pandemic In Fiction

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We know, inevitably, the Pandemic of 2020 (and sadly, 2021) is going to eventually work it’s way into fiction. Humans use fiction to make sense of things, humans use real events in fiction to ground them, and known things sell books.

But what will the Pandemic of 2020 do, specifically to American media and fiction? I asked myself that recently – and then found myself standing on a precipi...

Work From Home: Different Experiences

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

I know. I keep thinking “hey, I’m about done with this,” then some new wrinkle shows up and next thing you know, blog post. I also like it as some of my career advice has aged out, but this is relevant and fresh and helpful.

I was chatting with some friends about our different experiences in Work From Home (WFH) and then something struck me. As much as many of us are WFH, as many of us h...

Career Advice: Your Climate Plan

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As I’ve noted before, I kind of give less career advice lately. Some of it is that my advice has changed, some of it is that I am evaluating what I can share as a more senior professional, and most of it is the world has changed. However, I can provide some useful insights, repeating and expanding on what I’ve said before.

Work climate change into your career.

Sure I’ve said it before,...

Work From Home: Work From Home Training

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

And the series continues. I guess because I have A Lot Of Thoughts on this.

Me, I’ve worked from home (WFH) a lot, and I’ve had friends who have done it for over a decade. We’ve got certain work from home skills and abilities, that we probably don’t see as we’re used to them. I realized that recently, and it came to me that as we do more WFH people will need training to do it – and people p...

Creativity, Resistance, and Results

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As I have written about regularly, creativity is necessary to get a better world. It is a power that dissolves the grip of tyrants, a kind of Alkahest that dissolves in a disarming matter. But one of the powers of creativity is that well-done creativity is about results.

For all its power and adaptability, good creativity is also strangely solid.

Think of the power of a single book. It i...

Crunchyroll Expo: Thoughts

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

So I attended some of Crunchyroll Expo, and wanted to share a few thoughts about the event. It’s actually pretty positive, though keep in mind I was mostly observing and wasn’t doing everything.

Still, what I saw impressed me – and gives me ideas for how we can manage cons in pandemic times. In fact, more on that later.

METAPHOR: In general there was an attempt to copy the feeing of a...