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If you miss these posts, catch me on BlueSky. That's mostly where I post these days...though I do miss Tumblr!

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I'm so excited about this event that I made my own flyer for it. This is it! Some friends and I put these up around Oakland last weekend.

If you don't know Cory Doctorow, consider that he found success as a writer despite completely rejecting the corporate copyright system. Imagine having the courage of conviction to give your books away for free. I'm a big believer in open source and digital rights, but like most writers I cling to the rights to my own work, as if poems could be collectors items if we just make them scarce enough. So I'm eager to hear what Doctorow has to say on writing to make change.

If you don't know Carol Queen, I can tell you her collection Pomosexuality was life-changing for me when I was in college. I still reference it to this day. She's author of many books, including the classic Exhibitionism for the Shy. Like Cory Doctorow, her writing and her activism are intertwined. She was one of the founders of the one of the first gay youth groups in the US, and during the AIDs Her writing on safe sex during the AIDs crisis left the page and led to the development of improvements to the SAR training vital to sexologists. She's cofounder of the Center of Sex and Culture.

David Holper is the poet laureate of city of Eureka. This rising star revived the Dharma Bum spiritual pilgrimage on Mt. Tamalpais. His first novel grapples with climate change, capitalism, fast food and patriarchy...and did I mention it's funny?

If you are a writer and you want to make change in the world, this is the event for you.

Well it's the event for me, anyway. 💅

Oh and you can get tickets here.

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A clip in this psychoanalysis lecture that made me think: "the past only matters in the degree that it continues into the present."

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxX9wQ_3B3Ee33oJEh5Vav74RmnbYWApvP?si=JPVsOyFe1mHS_XgC

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Oomph---those last three lines.

What it's Like to be a Black Girl (for those of you who aren't) by Patricia Smith

First of all, it’s being 9 years old and feeling like you’re not finished, like your edges are wild, like there’s something, everything, wrong. it’s dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering their burn in silence. it’s popping a bleached  white mophead over the kinks of your hair and priming in front of the mirrors that deny your reflection. it’s finding a space between your legs, a disturbance in your chest, and not knowing what to do with the whistles. it’s jumping  double dutch until your legs pop, it’s sweat and vaseline and bullets, it’s growing tall and wearing a lot of white, it’s smelling blood in your breakfast, it’s learning to say fuck with grace but learning to fuck without it, it’s flame and fists and life according to motown, it’s finally have a man reach out for you then caving in around his fingers.

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I’ve been so busy lately, writing the Alibris blog with my pal who runs SpaceStamp.tumblr.com. Today for Earth Day I wrote a post on The Best Climate Change books. Check out alibris.com/blog to find out what other stuff we’re writing about.

Happy Earth Day 4-22-2015

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I love your plot point generator. You wrote hundreds of them... clearly, you're rad. <3

Omigosh! Just saw this, thanks! It really helps motivate me to get messages like this. So often reviewers think it’s not random, or that there aren’t many plots, just because they don’t understand how randomness works.

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"We don’t read: we skim, parse, bookmark, copy, paste, and forward. We become information hoarders and amateur archivists who frantically collect, store, and move artifacts that we’ll never interact with."

The Writer as Meme Machine, The New Yorker article on a new kind of poetics born of the Internet. The article asks: has poetry been reborn in our collective archiving? Can curation be its own art?

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Man just when you think your birthday party was cool, you realize there was somewhere cooler you'd rather be. #Geekgasm

One of the highlights of the weekend was kellysue and mattfractionblog party where great comic artists filled in their hallway comic panel wallpaper.

that’s Matt Wagner, skottieyoung, tony moore, Matthew clarke and many others.

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Every Death In 'A Song Of Fire And Ice' Books, Tabbed | Geekologie

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Character Art Painted on Stacks of Books by Mike Stilkey

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 Sylvia Plath. 1932-1963

 “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I  want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the  skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades,  tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in  life. And I am horribly limited.” 

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Heh.

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Hitchcock on Suspense Vs Surprise

“Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense. And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! the bomb goes off and they’re shocked—for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock—it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one—show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. “Look under the table! You fool!” Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds.”

From "Get Out of the Shower": The “Shower Scene” and Hitchcock's Narrative Style in 'Psycho' By Despina Kakoudaki

This gets at something I find challenging in writing a novel: when to reveal and how much to reveal. I've heard some advise that the author should never hold information back from the reader, more like Hitchcock is advising here. But then at the other end of the spetrum you have writers like J.J. Abrams who specialize in using a lack of info to get the audience to ask "What's in the box?".

"Get Out of the Shower": The “Shower Scene” and Hitchcock's Narrative Style in 'Psycho'

By Despina Kakoudaki

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Oh I love Peter Lorre.

Does anyone in Hollywood go by their real name?

Happy Birthday Peter Lorre [László Löwenstein]: 26th June 1904 - 23rd March 1964

Lorre - perhaps it is a misfortune - can do almost anything. He is a genius who sometimes gets the finest effects independently of his director, but he is also a throroughly reliable repertory actor…I have a horrible fear that film directors will find it easier to follow in Hitchcock’s footsteps and provide Lorre with humorous character parts than discover stories to suit his powerful genius, his overpowering sense of spiritual corruption. He is an actor of great profundity in a superficial art. - Graham Greene writing in 1936

He was a delight to work with and a joy to have as a friend, as he possessed a rare talent for gaiety. There was not a pompous or even solemn bone in his body. - John Huston

Peter was a very cultured man, a very sensitive person, a very loveable man, and with a great sense of humour. - Robert Mamoulian.

He was a remarkable innovator…a man who built his part with little tricks that were almost indiscernible, with his eyes, his face, with his body, and with a little look at the right time, a little shrug of the shoulder. Each of these built a character and built up a love in the director for that person who’s thinking of things that he should be thinking of. - Frank Capra

I am less complicated than anyone I know. My interest and instincts, I am afraid, are strictly normal, but I have always had, even as a child, a fantastical absorption into getting into people’s character - in trying to unmask them and their motives. This, I suppose is what has interested me so much in playing pathological roles, but has not, I want to say emphatically, circumscribed my ambitions, for I want to play all kinds of parts. I don’t care whether it is tragedy or comedy if it is authentic portrayal of life. - Peter Lorre

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Battling Clichés & Tired Tropes: 5 Ways to Let Out a Breath

Kelly Loy Gilbert shows five ways to rewrite a cliche.

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Another sneak peek at the book I am working on for Neil Gaiman, to be published by Dark Horse. Pencil.