Search Results: resistance
Today, the 20th, is publication day for Do the Work in all three versions—hardback, electronic and audio—so please forgive me if I do a little marketing pitch for a sentence or two. Here’s how I described the book to a friend: Do The Work isn’t so much a “follow-up” to The War of Art as it is an action guide that gets down and dirty in the trenches. Say you’ve got a book, a screenplay or a startup in your head but you’re stuck or scared or just don’t know how to begin, how to break through or how to…
Read MoreLast week’s post, this week’s and next’s all come from Do The Work, our new book that comes out, on amazon.com only, a week from today. The e-version is available for free right now, though it won’t go “live” till pub day. At that time, a hardback and an audio version will go on sale, along with a collectible. By the way, you don’t need an e-reader to download an e-book; it’ll work on your iPad, your Mac or PC, your Android. Here’s a link to free apps that make this work. But enough salesmanship. Let’s get down to today’s…
Read MoreHere’s a trick I use on every project. I learned it from my friend and mentor, the novelist and documentarian Norm Stahl. Norm and I were having lunch one day at Joe Allen’s in Manhattan and I was complaining about how hard it was to get a novel started. Norm happened to have a pad of yellow legal-sized foolscap paper in his briefcase. He took it out and set it on the table in front of me. “Steve,” he said, “God made a single sheet of foolscap exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel.” That was…
Read MoreWhen I first started blogging, I wasn’t really hip to the ethic. That, I learned from Seth Godin. A blog is about giving. Or, perhaps more accurately, giving back. A guy like Seth, who has started many businesses and failed and succeeded in about equal measure, has acquired a thoroughgoing education from the University of Hard Knocks. When Seth blogs, he shares that knowledge. He’s not asking for anything, he’s giving. But one thing I didn’t know about Seth was that he has also passed along that knowledge in an extraordinary free MBA program. 48,000 people visited the announcement page…
Read MoreToday we launch something new on the site. Some people may hate it. (We’ve already had one high-profile colleague flee, screaming, from his first sight of it.) It’s called The Warrior Ethos. It’s an ongoing series about exactly what the title says. The primary audience I’m writing it for is our young men and women in uniform, but I hope that other warriors from other walks of life will give it a chance as well. The first Warrior Ethos post will appear in this space today, Wednesday 2/9, a couple of hours after this intro runs. After this week, the…
Read MoreHave you seen the movie, The Fighter? It’s already won Golden Globes for Melissa Leo and Christian Bale–and looks like a strong Oscar contender in a number of categories. I loved it. The movie is also–in its depiction of the psychological dynamics within the Ward family of Lowell, Massachusetts–one of the great cinematic evocations of Group Resistance, or what we might call Collectively-Enforced Mediocrity. How does Resistance play out within a family? Let’s see what the film’s writers and director–Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson and David O. Russell–have to say. A collective myth Early in the opening…
Read MoreHailing from the hills of rural North Alabama, Scott Oden’s fascination with far-off places began when his oldest brother introduced him to the staggering and savage vistas of Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb. Though Oden started writing his own tales at the age of fourteen, it would be many years before anything would come of it. In the meantime, he had a brief and tempestuous fling with academia before retiring to the private sector, where he worked the usual roster of odd jobs—from delivering pizza to stacking paper in the bindery of a printing company to clerking at a video…
Read MoreMy friend Paul is writing a cop novel (I mentioned this in an earlier post, on the subject of trusting your instincts, even the darker ones–particularly the darker ones.) Paul has written screenplays and stuff for TV, but he’s never tackled a novel, which is really his native medium. At the same time, he’s writing more from his true center than he ever has. Paul’s about halfway through and, though he puts up a brave front when I ask him how he’s feeling, I can tell from his eyes that he’s in full panic mode. He looks like a rabbit caught…
Read MoreSean Van Vleet is a Chicago-based musician, songwriter, and lead singer of the alternative-rock band Empires. In March, Empires released their highly-anticipated sophomore effort Bang and have spent much of 2010 on the road in support of the release, with stops at SXSW, Verve Music Festival, and CMJ Music Fest. MTV.com called the album “great, all ethereal and doomy like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or the Black Angels, but with a little bit of My Chemical Romance snarl thrown in for good measure.” Alternative Press said the band has “set about doing this right. It’s a sentiment reinforced by these…
Read More[The blog is on vacation this week. Happy Thanksgiving to all! Here’s one of my fave posts from a little while ago:] Two of the most popular movies of the past few years are The Hangover and The Bourne Identity. What do they have in common? They’re both amnesia stories. I love amnesia stories. What could be more fun? Guy wakes up face-down on the floor of a villa in Vegas, or floating in a wetsuit off the coast of Marseilles. He remembers nothing. Who is he? How did he get there? And where the hell did that tiger in the bathroom…
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