A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

How do you come up with writing ideas? It depends on the circumstances, really, as well as my current state of mind. As it stands, other than my blog and my answers on Quora, I can point to three things that I have written for public consumption: Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer: Alex Diaz-Granados: 9781475075045: Amazon.com: Books Reunion: A Story: Mr. Alex J Diaz-Granados: 9781722120474: Amazon.com: Books Each of these projects had a unique “point of origin.” The oldest of these is  Reunion: A Story.  Although I self-published it last summer, it began life as a creative writing assignment in my sophomore year in college, circa 1987. I don’t remember what the assignment was now, but I do remember that I wrote a dream sequence set during the protagonist’s last day as a high school senior. It only earned a B, but I kept it in my college work files with the intention of...

Cover Designed by Alex Diaz-Granados. (C) 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados  Pros:  Well written and extensive on movies covered... Cons:  though the book as a whole lacks a unifying focus. A love of movies since childhood and a passion for writing combined long ago to drive the author into creating an account at Amazon and later Epinions so that he could write movie reviews. While those reviews have expanded into other content areas, movies remain the primary driving force for Alex Diaz-Granados. The result is this self-published book featuring just some of his eight years of movie review work at Epinions.com. After an introduction that discusses the passion the author has had all his life for movies¸ it is on to the reviews. The book is broken down into four chapter sections covering movies he liked and movies that he didn’t. The reviews are extensively detailed both in terms of plot and storylines as well as analysis of the films regarding these same details...

Started working on my second book today even though the first one's paperback edition has only been "available" at Amazon for a week or so and has sold only a handful of copies. Either I am being (a) an eternal optimist, (b) a writer who learned a lesson on getting started early and doing things carefully, or (c) a Quixotic dreamer who has lost his grip on reality. By "started working on my second book" I mean copying a couple of  pre-existing review from my Word document files and porting them over to WriteWay Professional Edition. I will now revise the hell out of them until I am happy with the material, then move on to adding two more reviews and editing them. .  That way I don't have to do so much last-minute editing or struggling with formatting and pagination issues that will cause me the kind of headaches I suffered during the production of Save Me the Aisle Seat  in both print and e-book formats. © 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados.  All Rights Rese...

Movies have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.   Some of my earliest childhood memories center on little snippets of black-and-white movies I glimpsed while my parents watched television in the Florida room of our second Miami home; they are vague because I was less than two years old and my dad was still alive, but sometimes I still see, in my mind’s eye, little fragments of old John Wayne Westerns and war movies which my father had enjoyed. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my childhood relationship with the movies was one of the key influences during my formative years.   Because I had very few father figures beyond my maternal grandfather and several uncles before I entered junior high, I tended to mimic certain traits of actors and movie characters I admired.  I wanted to be as brave as John Wayne’s many cowboys and military heroes, as idealistic as Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, as dashing-and-daring as Errol Flynn and Clark Gab...

After nearly nine years of being an online reviewer at both Amazon and Epinions (and, for a time, anyway, at the now-terrible Viewpoints), I have decided to compile some of my reviews and publish them in book form.  (We can't survive on IS income alone, right?)  I can't take the time or money to hire an agent or go through the process of sending out manuscripts to the big publishers in hope of getting published, so I decided to "self-publish" through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace (both Amazon companies). The book, Save Me the Aisle Seat , is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, and within a week it should be available in print at Amazon and maybe a few other places. I'd like to thank my friend Leigh Egan for her valuable assistance in completing this challenging project. I hate to have to shill my book like a medicine salesman selling snake oil, but if anyone here has a Kindle (of any model), please, please consider buying it!  It's price...