We recently started watching Glee for the first time here in Camp Brain Jar. It’s not a choice I expected to fall into, given my dislike of the musical as a format and my partner’s dislike of autotune, but I was lured in by some smart writing, some really sly dialogue in the opening episodes, and their ability to sidestep the thing that I dislike about musicals for the first half of a season (to whit: everyone verbalising internal states through song, rupturing my feeling of verisimilitude). Also, Harry Shum Jr, who is the best part of the Shadowhunters TV series and criminally underused as a back-up dancer here. Of course, now we’re in the second half of season one and the musical conventions are seeping through a lot more often. I’ve grumped through the last two episodes, which have been very music-heavy and very light on plot as they work to get the conflicts for the second half of

I finished The Artists Way over the weekend. It did less of the stuff that really irritated me in the back half of the book–a tactic that only served to irritate me more when it did intrude. I don’t necessarily regret reading it–there’s plenty of useful points to noodle over–but I don’t know that it’s a book I’d ever recommend. The most useful part of it was comparing the spiritually tinged processes laid out with something like The Accidental Creative, which gives you a toolkit for much the same kind of focusing-in-on-process and refilling-of-the-well in a much more pragmatic (and, to my mind, sustainable) way. I’m following Cameron’s book full of frothy writing-and-spirituality with Lilith Saintcrow’s collection of writing posts, The Quill and the Crow. It’s an interesting contrast–Saintcrow’s very much from the school of “So you want to be a writer? Have you tried, say, actually writing? This shit is work” school of advice, but it’s undercut by a

So I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way for the first time this week, following close to two decades of people recommending it. I’d been resisting it for a long time because the first person to recommend it to me was a friend with rather undiscerning tastes when it came to self-help books, the kind of person who’d press books about becoming a millionaire into my hands then seem put out when I argued that it was basically a ponzi scheme wrapped up in woogy language and siphoning expertise from others like a vampire, while the writing engaging in rhetorical cheats on par with Who Moved My Cheese. So I was primed not to like The Artists Way, despite the fact that it seemed to help an awful lot of people over the years. Right now, I’m about three chapters into the book, and I’ve thus far come to two conclusions: the first is that I really, really hate the

So I’m gearing up to release the next Short Fiction Lab release in two weeks, and the pre-orders are going out with a 99 cent price-tag in the US. Naturally, this meant today started with me dropping a Macklemore Thrift Shop reference while writing up the promo for the newsletter, because that song always gets in my head every time I price something at 99 cents. Given that song was everywhere in 2012 you probably don’t need a refresher, but here’s a link in case you were very young, trapped in Antarctica for a few years, or you’re just feeling nostalgic. Going down the youtube hole obviously led me to the Post Modern Jukebox cover, which deploys Thrift Shop in a swing jazz style and is just all-around fantastic. You can go listen to it here, and I recommend you do. Which, of course, now means I’m reading Kelly Link’s The Faerie Handbag because it’s the greatest thrift-shop-based fantasy story