book review

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First buy a book . . .

It’s awards season, the time when people all across our great country are thinking, “I could write a better screenplay than THAT.”  In an incredible show of goodguyship, my husband Rob took a break  from writing episodes of “The Simpsons” to read and review some of the top screenwriting how-to guides for those who want to plunge in.  The rest of this post is all him:

Aspiring novelists who walk the fiction aisles at the bookstore wonder how it must feel to finally have a book published after years of hard work, and then they all have the same thought:  maybe I should just write a screenplay.  Movie scripts are a lot shorter, pay a LOT better than novels, and if you do sell one, you’ll have time and money to write your novel, for which, of course, you’ll write the screenplay.  Or maybe you should just write the screenplay first.

The problem is, how do you go about writing a script?  Might there possibly be a book out there that tells you in insufferable detail how to go about the process?  Actually, there are several hundred of those–leading to the thought that maybe the aspiring writer should skip both the novel and the screenplay and go right to publishing his own writing guide. 

Anyway,  Claire and Kim asked me to come up with a list of the best screenwriting how-to books, but after agreeing, I realized that I haven’t bought one of these books in years. 

So I headed over to The Writer’s Store in Los Angeles.  I spoke with Anthony, one of their extremely knowledgeable salesmen, and asked him to name their top-selling screenwriting book.  He immediately said, “Save the Cat” and pointed to a big empty space on the shelves where it sits when it’s not sold out.  I bought several others he recommended, found my old favorites, and borrowed Save the Cat from a friend, knowing full well that just because it was the flavor-of-the-month didn’t mean it belonged on my list.  From those choices I compiled my top-five list of screenwriting books: Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m Bitten

We spend Thanksgiving in Yosemite with many friends and family.  Six weeks ago I badly sprained my ankle and it hasn’t healed as quickly as I hoped, so hiking, even walking any real distance, was out.  This sent me into a funk before we left.  The best cure for a funk?  An engrossing book.  As the mother of Kelsey, my 11 year old, it was imperative that I take her and her girlfriends to see the movie “Twilight” the weekend it opened.  Guess who is the most surprised that I liked the movie the best?  It’s an old-fashioned schmaltzy love story with a vampire thrown in.  I was hooked.  SPOILER ALERT – PLOT DETAILS FURTHER IN POST

I devoured Twilight on Tuesday in Yosemite (really Wednesday morning because it was 2:30AM) and panicked because I didn’t have New Moon.  Reprieve arrived at breakfast with Maya, a teenager in our group, who was reading Twilight and had New Moon.  It was read by 1:30AM Thursday morning.  I began to wonder, all of this unproductively in the nation, is it due to economics or are we all just reading the Twilight  saga and mentally living in Forks, WA?

Phooey to the Criticism

My girlfriend, Kenwyn, a retired lawyer and fellow book group member, admitted she raced through the Saga, and then the partial Midnight Sun on the Internet.  We chuckled about the people who criticize the book because of the writing (no Pulitzer material here) or the sexism (most romance books have sexism) or the fact that Edward is decades older than Bella in human years.  These books will not stand up to analysis, there’s nothing really to discuss other than the atmosphere they create.  The point of the books is to have a fun engrossing experience.  They’re plot oriented, so read them fast to get to the plot.  As a reader, don’t think about the story, just follow it and be swept away. 

One issue is the appropriate age of the reader.  Kelsey read all but the last one while away at church camp, so I didn’t have much of Read the rest of this entry »

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  I tripped over when talking with the author about my favorite charity, Heifer InternationalA Mindful Christmas:  How to Create a Meaningful, Peaceful Holiday  by Barbara Elizabeth Kilikevicius is part guide book and part cheerleader for having a sane Christmas season with the moments of the kindness and love expressed in Capote’s Thanksgiving story.  The book starts with two overarching questions–what are my intentions for the holiday season and what can I do without.  With these two answers in mind, the first task is to think about what you and your family truly want from this holiday season.  The premise of the book is that we all crave less craziness and, especially this year, less money spent.  That’s a bandwagon I’m happy to jump onto (remember, books make terrific reasonably priced gifts).   Read the rest of this entry »

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