The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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Literary archive

The Sextant Press

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Electronic screenwriting tutorial

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Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:

"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.

Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.

scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.

The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.

Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.

Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."

Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."

boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."

Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."

2020 Hindsight
By Susan.

downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.

Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.

Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.

Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company

The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.

Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it. From concept to completion, it'll be here."

SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.

Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.

Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).

'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."

I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.

John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.

The Writing Life With Dorothy Thompson
What goes on during a writer's busy day?

The Rebel Housewife
Not just a housewife!

Barry's Personal Blog
A running commentary on writing and the writing life.

Bonnie Blog
Maintained by Bonnie Burton of grrl.com.

Writer's Blog.
By easywriter. "From the walls of caves to cyberspace."

Flogging the Quill
Pursuing the art and craft of compelling storytelling, by an editor, Ray Rhamey.

Man Bytes Hollywood
Sharing tools, strategies and resources for the screenwriter's journey.

Mad for the smell of paper
A writing journal.

The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
A screenwriting blog by a young Canadian screenwriter.

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life, the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.

Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.

Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.

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The Writing Life...
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
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The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

 
Thursday, January 16, 2003  
Writers, computers, and the digital revolution
I came slowly to computers. I was still working on a manual Remington when some of my writer friends discovered word processing and urged me to enter the computer revolution. I resisted.

My turnabout came by accident. I'd just received a nice writing grant (this was in the mid-1980s), and I'd decided to use part of it to buy a used car. I had just the one in mind, a late 60s VW bug like one I used to own, and I went to the lot to buy it with the cash in my pocket. Then fate intervened. I got one of those pushy salesmen who wasn't satisfied that I was ready to buy and leave in a flash, who tried to "upgrade" me into a more expensive car. His determination outlasted my patience. I split, went to a bar, and reconsidered the entire plan. In the neighborhood where I lived, parking was impossible. I'd need to buy car insurance. Slowly I convinced myself that I didn't need a car. But an increasing number of people said I needed a computer.

I ended up buying a Kaypro 2x with a CP/M operating system. It was love at first site. This machine was indestructible. With its green screen, I had flashes of my youth, watching the green screen of a Hoffman "easy vision" TV set. With its aluminum body and fold out legs, the Kaypro made me feel like I was a WWII radar man whenever I used it.

Unfortunately, what I didn't know is that I'd bought a machine that already was obsolete. Mr. Gates had just made his deal with IBM for a DOS operating system. Within a few years, people stopped writing programs for CP/M machines. My next computer was DOS.

By the time the digital revolution and the Internet came around, I was near the front of the popular line. I went online very early, via Prodigy, and started my first website in 1994, putting up the original website serving the interests of playwrights and screenwriters. This was called The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page, which I took down in 2001 but have made available (5.6M!) for a nominal service fee. Having this online presence opened more doors than I could have imagined.

Later I started teaching screenwriting online. At first I wanted to do this at the college level but I was ahead of the curve, I couldn't find an institution that would accredit it. Then a colleague recommended I talk to the distance learning people at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. Isolated in location, they were ahead of the curve, and they accredited my course in an instant. I was teaching online! Later I expanded my courses to include non-accredited workshops, which were sponsored by Writers on the Net, which itself was so ahead of the curve that they have the domain name writers.com.

Later I put up my electronic screenwriting book and tutorial, Screenwright: the craft of screenwriting, amazed once again that this electronic book earned me much more royalties that a traditional screenwriting textbook would have. It wasn't that the sales were greater but that I got the entire pie on those sales that were made and that overhead was so low. Moreover, the ebook had a wonderful feature: it could be updated in an instant. Today Screenwright is in version 6.02, in its first revision since the 6th edition released at the first of the year. I am constantly adding commentary to it, usually in the form of examples from recent movies that make a point about a craft issue. I do use a "lite" paperback version of my ebook in the University classroom (because I still can't rely on all my students having computers) but I find myself constantly passing out additional pages that I've added to the ebook.

So computers and the digital revolution have changed the way I work and the way I make money writing. And this revolution still has a long way to go. I think ebooks will become more popular than traditional books as soon as a reading device with the feel of a book (size, screen, weight) is released. This will happen. Then one can carry around the works of Shakespeare on a CD-ROM the size of a quarter. We will download movies from the Internet onto our home entertainment screens as a matter of course. All this, it seems to me, is bound to happen.

And look at all the writing going on right here on the net today. Blogger, which hosts this blog, says it now has over a million customers! Earlier this week, my literary archive was visited by over 400 folks in a 24-hour period. The books I have in libraries don't generate anything close to this sort of traffic. The younger generation, much more than mine, is used to reading things online.

I believe an ebook has already been nominated for a Booker Prize. Eventually an ebook will win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Eventually a writer who writes primarily online will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The world for writers is still changing -- and changing swiftly into directions only now hinted at.

1/16/2003 05:05:00 AM | 0 comments

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