From the monthly archives:

July 2008

Lazy Writing

July 30, 2008

Lazy writing.  We’ve all done it.  I’m doing it right now.  You’ll be lucky to get one coherent thought out of this entry.  There’s some obvious signs of lazy writing.  ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ let’s you know right up front.  Recently, my wife handed me a novel and asked me if it [...]

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Images in the Tapestry: An Archetypal Approach to Literature

July 28, 2008

One of the tasks I face as a high school English teacher is helping my students learn to read a text both critically and analytically.  There are numerous ways to do this, of course, but a method that I have found to be particularly effective is approaching stories from an archetypal perspective.  An archetype is [...]

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Joker’s Wild (And Always Has Been)

July 22, 2008

I was pretty sure The Dark Knight was going to be the best Batman movie yet and it was.  I wasn’t fully prepared to be quite so blown away though.  For me, Batman Begins raised the bar and The Dark Knight jumped over that bar on a souped up rocket-bike.  Pretty much left the bar [...]

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How we’ll watch the Watchmen – making the comics fit on screen

July 21, 2008

I’ve been a deep fan of Alan Moore’s graphic novel for twenty years now, but I’m torn on the upcoming film version.  It was written to be a comic, and it works brilliantly in that format.  It doesn’t need to be a movie. Yet part of me would love to see these images move and [...]

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Phoenix area writing workshops for July/August

July 14, 2008

Writing is a lonely occupation. You fight the blank page into submission (or at least to a draw), sweat over the details, rewrite it a million times, then hand it off to someone else who says “It was nice.”  It’s one reason I’m such a fan of writing groups and other ways for writers to [...]

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