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 |    My primary Writing.com blog. |
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Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics). Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:  "The Soundtrackers Group"  "Invalid Item" "Blogging Circle of Friends " "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" "JAFBG" "Take up Your Cross" Thanks for stopping by!  |
It's the end of 2023, which means it's time to review all the reading and listening I've done over the past calendar year. Here's how this past year broke down in terms of titles and numbers: = favorite = also really enjoyedBooks (click to expand full list) ▼ After eight straight years of reading over 100 books a year, I intentionally scaled back this year and set a goal of 50 books. Overall, I enjoyed the much slower pace this year; I definitely was able to enjoy and appreciate books more than when I was powering through them at a rate of two a week. I didn't end up writing much more than in previous years or picking up any additional habits, but it was nice to take a more relaxed approach to the things I read this year. I'm looking forward to doing the same in 2024. Podcasts (click to expand full list) ▼ Last year, I wondered if the 900-ish podcasts I've listened to annually over the past few years would be some kind of equilibrium and it seems like it very much is. I listened to about 100 more than last year, but that's probably owed to the fact that there are a few new shorter-length podcasts that I've found and really enjoyed this year, including The Economics of Everyday Things (which are usually only 15-20 minutes long), as well as the fact that Scriptnotes did a series of about 50 mini episodes during the WGA writers' strike this year. Comics (click to expand full list) ▼ I read fewer comics than last year. For some reason, it just never occurs to me to open my comic book app (probably because I have a long list of books I want to read), but like last year, I'm going to resolve to read more comics in 2024 because I really do love the medium and want to get more familiar with what's being released. Scripts (click to expand full list) ▼ I only read about twenty scripts this year, same as last year. I still haven't quite gotten my mojo back when it comes to screenwriting, so it makes sense that I haven't been reading a lot of screenplays lately. I'd like to change that in 2024, but I'm also hesitant to be too prescriptive about what I'm trying to read. If scripts pop up that I want to read, I'll read them. TOTALS: 50 books, 971 podcasts, 13 comics, 18 scripts According to Goodreads, my book reading resulted in the following stats: Total Pages Read: 16,828 Average Pages Per Book: 336 Shortest Book: 78 pages Longest Book: 1,152 pages That's it for my 2023 reading... time to see what 2024 has in store!  |
| To qualify for my Watch List every month, the following has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish. Movies  Cold Pursuit In the Line of Fire Leo The Omen Damien: Omen II Omen III: The Final Conflict Trolls: Band Together WishTelevision Parks & Recreation (Season 2) Selling Sunset (Season 7) Undercover Billionaire (Season 1)There wasn't anything I watched in November that I was absolutely in love with. I thought Disney's new animated movie Wish was enjoyable, but not particularly memorable, and In the Line of Fire was a compelling thriller but pretty dated at this point. For some reason I had never seen anything in The Omen franchise, so I thought it would be a fun bit of post-Halloween movie watching and wasn't disappointed. I still have two more entries in the series (the fourth one is about Damien's daughter, and there's a recent remake of the original) that I'll probably get to eventually. My favorite thing I watched this month, though, was Undercover Billionaire (which I talked about in more detail here: "Undercover Billionaire" ), which was an interesting experiment where a very wealthy person (the title "billionaire" is questionable) gets dropped off in a random city in the United States with $100, an old pickup truck, and a smartphone with no contacts or other resources... and his challenge is to build a business worth a million dollars in 90 days. It's an interesting (albeit somewhat flawed) theory about proving whether achieving the American Dream is still a possibility in this country.TOP PICK: Undercover Billionaire |
| It's the end the month of writing a blog post a day (or, more accurately, 30 blog posts in 30 days... some days I had to double-up (or more) to catch up). Overall, it was a surprisingly rewarding experience. Not because I think a ton of my blog entries are particularly great, but because - between this activity and NaNoWriMo - I got back into a daily writing habit for the first time in years and I really felt like I've started shaking off the rust and lethargy. I feel like I'm at the point in working out where you finally get into a groove and start to notice the first signs of not just being totally out of shape and lethargic anymore. A little more energy, a little more excitement... I really don't want to lose this momentum. It's been a long time since I've prioritized my writing and it feels good to make it a daily focus again. I might focus on a screenplay in December, and I'm definitely going to compete in "I Write in 2024" to keep active and make sure that I'm regularly putting stuff out there again. I might try to pick up a few more other activities and challenges to keep me on my toes.I'm happy with all the writing progress I've made this month and look forward to seeing what I can accomplish next month. |
| Today at work we were finally notified of what our end of year bonuses were going to be. They weren't great... but not as bad as they could have been considering the company went through layoffs, austerity measures, and two labor strikes in the past several months. Still, it's kind of a bummer to work really, really hard all year and have the bonuses be underwhelming. It's becoming a bit of a trend too... each of the past three years the job has gotten harder and the total compensation (including bonuses) has been less and less. It's a bit of a bummer, but I'm grateful to have a job with relative security, and that provides bonus compensation at all. I'm just hoping that next year is a little better and that we have better-performing projects that will result in improved financial rewards next year. One of these days, I'd love to actually be able to afford to buy a house... |
| I'll admit, I enjoy getting Spotify's end of the year "Wrapped" report, which summarizes listeners' habits for the year. With the caveat that my Spotify is also used by my family as our primary music-listening service at home, here's how my 2023 sorted out: I listened to music in 56 different genres, the five most popular of which were: Christian Contemporary, Movie Tunes, Pop, Alt Z, and Rock. The place that my musical tastes most identify with is Lynchburg, USA apparently. I played a total of 3,365 songs. The song I listened to most was "This Is How I Thank The Lord" by Mosaic MSC, which I played 76 times. The other four songs rounding out my Top 5 were: "Since You Been Gone" by Rainbow, "Psycho" by Taylor Acorn, "Every Hour" by David Leonard and Josh Baldwin, and "Surrender My Heart" by Carly Rae Jepsen. I listened for a total of 33,370 minutes this year and peaked on August 8 at 384 minutes that day. That puts me in the top 10% of all listeners on Spotify. There were 2,155 different musical artists I listened to last year, and Taylor Swift was - by far - the artists I listened to most with 6,113 minutes (almost 20% of the total amount I listened all year!). The other four artists in my Top 5 were Elevation Worship, UPPERROOM, Taylor Acorn, and Phil Wickham. Taylor Swift had 16 of my top 100 most listened-to songs of 2023. I guess we're a family of Swifties...   |
| I know I'm late to this topic but apparently Patrick Dempsey is People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" for 2023. And there's really only one correct response to the choice: That would have been an understandable choice during the early 2000s when he was playing leading man characters... or in the early late 2000s/early 2010s when he was at the height of his "McDreamy" era on GREY'S ANATOMY. But what has he done since he left that show in 2015? A whole lot of minor roles and not much else. Probably the biggest role was reprising his ENCHANTED character in the 2022 Disney+ sequel DISENCHANTED. So why now?  Were more-relevant-to-2023 handsome celebrities like Henry Cavill, Jacob Elordi, or Ryan Gosling not available?  I've always found People Magazine's choices for "Sexiest Man Alive" each year a little oddly-timed, but this one really takes the cake. Nothing against Patrick Dempsey, but it's strange to be naming him a good 10-15 years after his prime. |
While I've been noveling this month, I've been thinking a lot about my screenwriting. That tends to happen a lot (yearning to write something else while I'm in the middle of an existing project  ), but it really has been a long time since I've written a screenplay. It's been years since I've developed anything new and, after listening to a bunch of screenwriting podcasts and behind the scenes content for work, it's made me nostalgic for the times when I was focused on that medium, both writing and producing my own projects, which was my passion long before I started to become aware of the possibilities of novel writing and self-publishing.I'm considering taking the month of December to decide if I want to flesh out a new screenwriting project, maybe even a short film or something similar to produce. It's been an even longer time since I've produced a short (almost since film school), so I feel like I'm overdue for a low budget short film project that I can really immerse myself in for a bit and see where it goes. That also makes me wonder if I should resurrect "The Screenwriting Group" here on Writing.com to have a place to explore it...  |
| There was an article in Fortune Magazine's website today titled, "Starbucks new CEO reveals his favorite coffee order after spending 6 months working side by side with baristas " that caught my attention. Not because I particularly care what Starbucks' new CEO Laxman Narasimhan's favorite drink off the Starbucks menu is (spoiler alert: it's a Doppio Espresso Macchiato with hot skim milk on the side), but because the other part of that title caught my attention. He's allegedly spent six months working side-by-side with Starbucks baristas at their stores. Apparently, this was the deal: Narasimhan honed his varied taste through the 40 hours he spent training—and six months he spent working—as a barista alongside Starbucks partners while gearing up for the CEO gig. And while some Starbucks employees pointed out on social media that they don't need the CEO of a coffee chain with just under 500,000 employees across nearly 36,000 locations to learn how to make lattes as much as learn how to solve grander-scale corporate issues like paying a living wage, unionization efforts, etc., I can't help but think while that may be true, spending a substantive amount of time in the trenches with employees is actually a great use of a C-suite executive's time when he's first starting the job, to better understand the good and bad elements of the public-facing aspect of the company. Of course, if it's just a PR stunt or a token amount of time (a lot of CEOs will spend, like, one day every so often with the rank-and-file for a photo op or bragging rights), that's different... but 40 hours of training followed by six months working in stores (although no word if it was full-time or not) is a real effort to get to know your employees' day-to-day successes, struggles, and concerns. I kind of wish this practice was required of all mid-to-senior level executives. Before starting a job, you should spent a significant amount of time learning about the rungs in the ladder below you and how they contribute to your job. I'm in a position now where I'm volunteering in a fairly high-level position at our small church (President of the Board of its nonprofit community development organization, and Director of Operations for the church itself), and I couldn't imagine hiring someone beneath me to do a job that I wasn't familiar with. Obviously there's a certain amount of tradeoff (it's hard to, say, learn an entire accounting system just so you can process payroll for a few weeks... or to learn how to send all-organization emails and maintain the organization's social media presence if that's not a core bit of knowledge that will be useful later), but actually getting to know what your employees' day-to-day experience is like is critical. At my day job, it's incredibly stratified. Within my own business unit of Marvel, which is much better than Disney as a whole, there are still situations where direct supervisors don't actually know what their direct reports do, and wouldn't be able to cover for even a day if something happened and someone was out. At Disney, there are some departments where supervisors only speak to their direct reports once a year (for their annual performance reviews), and go years without speaking to someone two levels below them. To me, that's a less than ideal way to run an organization, so I'm always happy to see articles like this where some new CEO or other higher up is taking the time to get to know their business on the ground level. That feels like time well spent and relationships well cultivated. |
| I just finished The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin and while it was... not really what I thought it was (full review is forthcoming for the "Book Brothel" )... I did find one particular piece of it really useful. Rick Rubin put together a list called "Thoughts and habits not conducive to the work" which I thought was worth posting here. THOUGHTS AND HABITS NOT CONDUCIVE TO THE WORK: 1. Believing you're not good enough. 2. Feeling you don't have the energy it takes. 3. Mistaking adopted rules for absolute truth. 4. Not wanting to do the work (laziness). 5. Not taking the work to its highest expression (settling). 6. Having goals so ambitious that you can't begin. 7. Thinking you can only do your best work in certain conditions. 8. Requiring specific tools or equipment to do the work. 9. Abandoning a project as soon as it gets difficult. 10. Feeling like you need permission to start or move forward. 11. Letting a perceived need for funding, equipment, or support get in the way. 12. Having too many ideas and not knowing where to start. 13. Never finishing projects. 14. Blaming circumstances or other people for interfering with your process. 15. Romanticizing negative behaviors or addictions. 16. Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work. 17. Prioritizing other activities and responsibilities over your commitment to making art. 18. Distractibility and procrastination. 19. Impatience. 20. Thinking anything that's out of your control is in your way. For anyone who struggles to write or otherwise complete creative endeavors... see anything that hits home? There are a lot of them that apply to me, but #6 and #9 and #13 and #17 and #18 are things I really struggle with. I think #6 and #17 are probably the core underlying problems, and the other three are manifestations of how those underlying problems play out. There are some other ones in there that I also definitely struggle with, and it's easy to see how one or more of these could quickly derail someone's ability to create art. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about this month as we head into the end of the year is what I want to accomplish next year. Every January, I think about goals for the new year and what I want to accomplish, and they're always some lofty thing that's tied to specific achievements (see the first part of #6). In preparation for next year, I'm trying to think about where I'm at right now, and an achievable goal I can reach that isn't some nebulous or arbitrary thing like, "Finish writing a book" or "Write X number of pages, words, etc." ... I'm thinking about how to go from near-zero to "back in shape." The same is true for me and physical exercise. I'm not at the point where I can think about wanting to run a marathon, or lift a certain amount of weight; I'm at the point where I'm severely out of shape and need to get back into healthy habits. The thing I like about lists like the one Rubin provided, is that they often name the hurdles we struggle with. And naming things can take away their power. Rubin's book is definitely one of those "take what works or makes sense to you and discard the rest" kind of nonfiction title, and this list is probably the best thing I've taken from the book. I anticipate referring to it a lot in the future, whenever I need a reminder of the habits I'm falling into that aren't conducive to what I'm trying to accomplish with my writing. |
My wife and I just finished binge-watching a show called Undercover Billionaire (Season 1 was released in 2019). The basic premise is that Glenn Stearns, the show's eponymous "billionaire" ... although I put that term in quotes because it appears he might be just a multi-hundred millionaire  ... decides to test whether the American Dream is still possible by getting dropped off in a random city somewhere in the country with only $100, a cell phone with no contacts, and an old pickup truck. His challenge? To build a company worth $1,000,000 at the end of 90 days. The bet he made was that if he couldn't build a company valued at a million dollars, he'd invest a million dollars of his own money in to ensure it had stable funding to give it a fighting chance.He's dropped off in Erie, Pennsylvania and the first ten days or so are more about survival: figuring out how to get more money so he can afford food and a place to live, trying to get a job, etc. This to me was interesting, but felt like it should have been for a different show (a how to build yourself up from rock bottom challenge, or something like that), but it detailed how he got his feet on the ground, basically investing all of his capital on ventures that would give him a positive return on investment, allowing him to invest more in the next thing. That's the part of the show I found most interesting. Not how he went from $100 to $3,000 to afford to live, but how he went from only having living expenses to getting capital to start investing in the business. The show repeatedly highlighted the value of motivating good people with helpful skills and convincing them to invest their time and energy in growing the business to the point where they could all benefit in its success. I don't want to give away too many more details about it because it really is a good show worth watching, but I had some thoughts in the whole thing. First, I actually know the guy (well, know of the guy) who was featured in the show. Stearns Lending was a leading mortgage company coming out of the Great Recession, and I recognize the name because their headquarters is about five minutes from my house. I see the company's logo on their building as I drive by it almost every day. Second, I learned a lot about local resources that entrepreneurs can use to help them with their businesses. There's actually Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) that operate (though the United States Small Business Administration) in many cities around the country, and they can help you with market research, putting together a business plan, access to computers, and even offering up meeting and/or office space as needed. It's an amazing resource for people who are just starting out, and I had no idea such a thing even existed. There's an office less than ten minutes from me. Third, I learned that there's a lot of risk and setbacks involved in pretty much every aspect of running a business. Not that I didn't already know that, but when you're watching someone actually try to build a business in realtime from scratch, it really highlights the unpredictability of the process. As much as I have a real issue with the income inequality in this country, I definitely think people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and build a successful company from nothing deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor after such a rollercoaster of a process. Overall, I really enjoyed the show and it got that entrepreneurial part of my brain working again. I've always wondered if I'd be good at running a company. I have a really diverse skillset and I think I've got pretty good problem-solving abilities ... but I'm also really risk averse and have yet to really take a leap and put myself out there investing in something that might not make it (I've always preferred the security of jobs at established employers, and the few times I've gone to work for startups, they haven't panned out). At the moment, I'm on the board of my church's community development nonprofit corporation, and it definitely got me thinking about how to invest in that organization and take more risks to see if it can succeed. I definitely recommend this show to anyone who likes SHARK TANK or any other business-type shows. |
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