It is a night of great sadness, for our friend and comrade had gone down the road where we cannot reach her. But as with all things, we will catch up with her in time, and I believe she will have many stories to tell us, and many new roles to share with the universe.
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The stunning thing about the news coverage over the last couple of days is the sheer number of pundits saying we're in "uncharted waters" to have something like this happen during a political campaign, and that's only true if you ignore the fact that it's not. In 1972 --
-- Alabama Governor George Wallace was running for President. Wallace was batshit crazy, a stone racist and segregationist who, per Jimmy Carter, had previously run "one of the most racist campaigns in modern southern political history." This was the same George Wallace --
-- who personally stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to prevent black students from entering after integration had been ordered. So, as noted: racist, segregationist, batshit crazy, and everybody except the people who were --
Variations on this question have been coming up a lot lately, two in the same day (did you guys carpool?) so I’m going to go micro on this for future reference to save writing it again. When casting, you’re looking for someone who is, or can be, the very specific character --
-- that you, the studio, the network, and the producers have all refined and, ideally, made different from everything else out there. You see person after person, waiting for that one perfect match, the actor who is that character.
Having FINALLY found the actor who can be --
-- that character, which was the whole point of the exercise, why would you then just toss aside the character you fought so hard to create and find in an actor? The role exists to be filled by someone who can give you what you need to make what’s on the page feel real and --
For the last coming-on-three-years I've seen my primary responsibility as publishing and promoting Harlan's work--GREATEST HITS, the first two DANGEROUS VISIONS reprints and the debut of THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS--to the detriment of promoting my own work because I didn't want--
-- to distract by putting too many things out there. So now that all of the editing. So when in doubt, Harlan's work came first, and I snuck in my own where and when I could. But now that copyediting and design on THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS is finished, I wanted to back up --
-- a second and just let folks know that there are four of my books out there that I'm very proud of that might merit checking out. The first came out in 2019 right before the pandemic, so kind of fell off a lot of radars, is one I've mentioned here recently --
If I may whisper a word or two into your shell-like ears for a moment…because I’ve been thinking about all this day and my options are to keep chewing on it indefinitely or get it out, so this is me getting it out.
The other day I heard a comment I’ve noted with increasing --
-- frequency, spoken by people to creative folks, “You have to get out of your comfort zone.” It’s become so ubiquitous that it borders on cliché. And yes, I understand the validity of the statement, I’m not here to dispute it or discredit the notion; it has value and purpose --
-- But what bugs me is that you almost never hear people talking about the flipside to that equation, and I think it needs to be addressed.
Because the thing about creative people is that they’re always being pushed out of their comfort zone – telling stories, making music --
The job of the writer is to avoid falling into the trap of accepted cliche, one of which is the idea that humans are monolithic and everything changes once and never goes back or alternates from that point. We have streaming audio but also a huge industry for vinyl; by your --
-- that should simply not exist. Digital music is great, but we're seeing a rise in digital-to-audio tech because it sounds better. There's the cliche of "computers mean the end of paper!" when more paper than ever moves through my office. A writer's job is to step outside --
-- the cliche of what you're suggesting. Yes, you can get information via screens on B5, but why *not* have a little place where you can also get a printout? I invariably print up articles and other material to review even though I can read it on a screen. Even if it's just --
Here's what folks need to bear in mind about the reimagining. 1) We have this in process, we don't need to go out and try to drum up interest in something nobody's heard about before. 2) The B5 story was a "documentary" covering 5 years of history, like a real-world doc --
-- covering the 5 years in Germany before WW2. Yes, WW1 happened before, with consequences, and we see the seeds of WW2, *but WW2 is not what the story is about. So things happen that we refer to before and after the 5 year history of B5, but there was never any --
-- intention to tell those stories, they're *background* to the that very specific slice of history. Finally 3) When Warners asked what story I wanted to tell, this was/is the story I want to tell, same as I wanted to tell the original story. Fans seem to like that I fought --