Gifts for writers and would-be writers from the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. Anyone want to contend that The Writer magazine is better than Writer’s Digest or vice versa?
The Word for 2007
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is w00t. You can celebrate with by styling your bod in this.
Great Beethoven Fest
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s five-program Beethoven Festival, which took place over five weekends, was a hit. Two programs sold out.
Lost Mark Twain play heading to Broadway
Lost Mark Twain play is heading to Broadway. A researcher “was not thrilled to find the drawer crammed with Twain plays she had not yet read and didn’t care to.” But when she did read through that drawer, she found Is He Dead?She said:
“He had even managed, and this was not necessarily his strong suit, a plot, with memorable characters and hilarious scenes. I thought it held great promise.” She wasn’t the only one. In a letter dated Feb. 5, 1898, Twain wrote that his wife found the new comedy “very bully.”
The play had never been performed. Why?
The explanation left politely unspoken in rejections he received was that the play as it stood was lumpy and only intermittently funny.
“It has a great idea,” [playwright David Ives] allowed. “In movie terms, La Boheme meets Tootsie. But even at first reading I thought it really does need help. The construction is like a shack that is not very well buttressed; at the slightest touch, pieces of it would fall off.”
China Gives Up Ground on Religious Intolerance
Apparently the Chinese government wants to look so good for world visitors at the Olympics that it will allows some groups to distrubute Bibles. Ah, God bless ’em.
I’ll Buy That Guy’s Coffee Too
In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, one woman at the Starbucks drive-through decides to pay for the guy behind her too. That guys pays for the guy behind him, and two hours later, people are still paying for the next customer’s order.
Post-traumatic stress
My cold (I’m pretty sure by now it’s a cold) is still with me. The sore throat is better, but I’m more stuffed up today. And yet I went in to work, good soldier that I am. Now I’m home and I plan to lie down a bit after I’ve posted this, and before I get to some more Christmas cards.
There are a couple Minnesota connections to that Colorado shootings story. One is that one of the dead at the YWAM facility was a Minnesota native, Tiffany Johnson. Another Minnesotan, Charles Blanch, was wounded in the leg. And of course you’ve heard about Jeanne Assam, the volunteer security guard who shot and stopped the shooter (who will not be dignified by the use of his name in this post), although apparently he took his own life at the end.
According to this report, Assam was fired from the Minneapolis police force in 1997. This information caught my attention right off, since I can think of many possible reasons why a Christian might be fired in the politically correct climate of Minneapolis city politics today. But apparently she was fired for lying about an incident on a bus where she swore at a driver. Sounds more like a pre-conversion incident, though one never knows.
What is certainly true is that right now, on top of the trauma of having been involved in a fatal fire fight, and survivor’s guilt, she is facing public scrutiny directed at a past she may have hoped to have put behind her. So a prayer for her, as well as for the wounded and the families of the victims, would not be out of order.
Amazon’s Kindle May Not Be Available
Amazon’s popular new e-reader, Kindle, does not have wireless service throughout the U.S. Even in Georgia, the coverage looks sparse statewide. The same with California, and there’s nothing in Montana.
Density
Mr. Bertrand writes, “A story is not a bag of potato chips. I don’t want to rip it open and get a face-full of air. It should be full to bursting. The beginning shouldn’t present a yawning void and a glimpse of substance near the bottom. Instead, I want it to spill everywhere, to get all over everything, to untidy my life for as long as it takes to get to the end.”
Sci-Fi Is a Telling a Good Story
Author John Scalzi discusses science fiction, saying it’s a commercial genre. “Academia generally wants you to show you can write [hence literary fiction]; science fiction generally wants you to tell a story.” The idea is that if you can write and tell a great story, then you have a blockbuster or enduring classic on your hands, but that ain’t necessarily so.