A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Image by  Sabrina  from  Pixabay    After working on the revisions and edits in the second edition of my novella Reunion: A Story, I will get to see the results of my weekend's labor later today. Sometime this afternoon, an Amazon Prime delivery van will drop off my copy of Reunion at the front door of the house where I live in Lithia. And shortly afterward, I will see for myself if the edits I made between last Friday afternoon and Monday night are present in the paperback edition.  Currently, the only place where I can see my revisions as I intend them to be read is the Kindle Create app I used to make them.  The view from the Kindle Create app. I had just finished reformatting the "song lyrics" (copy marked in boldface ) when I took this screengrab.  Amazon says that it takes up to 72 hours for revisions and other changes to make their way into the system. I made the last adjustments to Reunion  late on Monday night and early Tuesday morni...

Photo Illustration Credit: Pixabay Last night, while I was on Twitter, I came across a tweet by novelist Harry Turtledove, the guy who writes alternative history novels along the lines of Guns of the South and Ruled Britannia. I follow him on Twitter, and although I can't say we are "friends" or even "acquaintances," we have exchanged tweets and replies on that social medium. He has even liked quite a few of my tweets, especially if they are about writing, books, or politics. (On that topic, we both share a dislike for Donald Trump and his divisive brand of "conservatism.") Anyway, before I logged off from my computer last night before dinner, I came across one of Harry's typically clever tweets: Harry Turtledove @HNTurtledove · Jan 28 #AddAWordRuinABook For Whom the Jingle Bell Tolls To Have Lunch and to Have Not The Great Big Gatsby Catcher in the Rye Bread The Halloween Mask of Apollo Johnny Got His S...

Hey, there, Dear Reader. Hi and welcome to another installment of Bloggin' On,   the blog-within-a-blog section of A Certain Point of View where I step out of my usual roles of media product reviewer and political commentator and share my thoughts and observations about other topics that I think might be of general interest. Well, my friends, a cold front has passed through the part of Florida where I live; the current temperature is 39℉ (4℃) under clear skies, and the National Weather Service has issued a freeze watch for our area. It's still dark outside (it's not quite 7 AM as I write this), and it will warm up some by the middle of the afternoon; the forecast calls for a high of 54℉ (12℃) and, at night, a low of 32℉ (0℃). Inside the house, we will be relatively warmer, and I doubt that I'll have much reason to wander outside. If you're a regular reader of A Certain Point of View, you probably remember that on January 10 I reviewed the Blu-ray edition of w...

In Quora, someone asked: How much of Star Wars did George Lucas actually write? My reply: If you’re asking about the original screenplay for  Star Wars  (aka  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ), the film that begat the franchise, he wrote every one of the four drafts, most of them without a co-writer. However, whenever he showed the script to his peers (Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola), they would critique his efforts (which is what Lucas wanted them to do) and suggest revisions or rewrites. Lucas, as fans have learned over the years, is a dedicated  filmmaker,  and a talented one at that. However, he is happier when he is in the editing room and shaping his movies, while the actual tasks of writing scripts and working with actors are simply not in his comfort zone. (That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like people; Lucas has a reputation for being a super nice person and generous to a fault. He’s just not into...

© 2016 MGM-UA, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment; 007 logo and related James Bond Tradeworks © 1962, 2015 Danjaq, LLC and United Artists Corporation  Well, gang , it's Sunday afternoon here in my nook of Florida, and the weather outside is nice and spring-like. It's 77 degrees Fahrenheit, and the skies above are mostly cloudy. Perfect day for lazing about with a good book and a cool drink! I was going to write a review of my latest Blu-ray find, The James Bond Collection, a 2016 box set from MGM and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment that has all of the existing official James Bond films, starting with 1962's Dr. No  and ending with 2015's Spectre. That's 24 feature films in one set, which for me is a record-setting purchase, at least when sheer number of movies is concerned. (Cost-wise it was on par with buying the 2011 Star Wars: The Complete Saga;  I paid $86.60 - $79.96 plus Florida sales taxes - for the James Bond Blu-ray set, which is pretty mu...

Hi, there, Dear Reader! Well, last time we talked, I told you what my plans were for this week regarding "A Certain Point of View." They were, you'll recall, modest in scope; I'm not working on any big literally projects at the moment, so I've pretty much decided to focus on the blog until I can get my shit together as a writer and crank out a story I can be proud of no matter what the format is; ideally I'd like to do a novel, but every time I've started working on one, I either listen to bad advice from well-meaning people or I become intimidated by the prospect. And, yes, I know; novels, short stories, and screenplays don't write themselves. Either I write one, or I should stop calling myself a writer and give up. I'd rather write one - even if it's bad - than admit defeat. But until I can figure out what story I want to tell, I'll stick to the blog and see if I can get it to the 1000-posts mark. Anyway, about those plans I announc...

(C) 2010 Simon & Schuster  Long, long ago, at an early age so far back in my timeline that I can’t exactly remember, I decided that I would become a writer someday. Sure, like most boys in my peer group, I had dreams of pursuing other, more traditionally “manly” careers. At various times in my childhood I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, a pilot, a soldier, a Marine, and – at one point – even President of the United States. But reality – in the shape of a physical disability – flattened most of those naively unrealistic career dreams as surely as an African elephant will squash a ripe tomato. Luckily, I fell in love with the written word early in life; family lore has it that my maternal grandmother Ines taught me how to read – using ABC blocks – before I was two years old. (Mom used to tell a story – perhaps apocryphal – about how she and my father returned to Miami after their last trip to Paris and my grandmother proudly showed them the unlikely spectacle of ...

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past - and a trip to his home town of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago. Q.: How - or why - did you choose your characters' names? Did you go through a phone book and choose names at random or did you name Jim, Marty, and Mark after people you know? A.: Jim Garraty - or as Stephen King would put it, my I-guy - was, in every iteration of the story (from a CRW-2001 assignment to finished product), Jim Garraty. I'm not sure why I chose James/Jim/Jimmy as his first name; I just knew that...