Aeons ago, when I was young and was still a serious musician, there were performances—I can count them on one hand—when the Muse was with us. We all knew it, every musician on stage; we knew. This concert was special.
Once such concert was when I was studying in San Francisco. It was in an old stone church in off Van Ness Avenue, a grand old place with soaring, pieced-stone walls and a nine-second hang time. We were playing Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique and everything was perfect, everyone was “on.” Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, muse, Music, novel writing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | Leave a Comment »
A quick swing through this blog-site or just a brief glance at my gravatar (what a stupid word) to the right will clue you into a fact: I like old, low-tech things. As an old, low-tech thing myself, I feel an affinity with the slower pace, the more thoughtful process they require. A clock requires winding. A pen requires filling. A letter requires consideration and preparation.
Letters…I know. How 19th century! But I write letters. I have always written letters. I communicated with distant cousins with letters. I wooed women with letters. I have built friendships with letters. To this day, I write letters to pen pals, to my father, and on occasion, to my wife. Letters take time. Letters make me slow down. Letters make me think about what I want to say before I put pen to paper, because you can’t backspace through a handwritten letter or cut-and-paste your way out of an awkward syntax.
In our world of instant communication—IMs, emails, tweets—even a phone conversation can seem old-fashioned. To set aside ten minutes or an hour for a chat is just too much effort for some people. Why? Why is it so much work (or too much bother) to plan some time with a friend or relative? How superficial do our relationships become when we reduce our interaction to 140-character bursts? Continue Reading »
Posted in Low Tech, Writing | Leave a Comment »
I have often said, “Every book has its own lesson to teach, even the bad ones.”
Okay…now you’re looking off to the right and seeing the cover for the latest Richard Castle book and you’re thinking…”Oooh, guess he didn’t like that one.”
Wrong.
I liked it fine. It’s a tie-in, meta-reality, police procedural mystery, and as such, it worked just fine. It’s not high art or lasting literature, but it’s a fun read, and filled with all the little “Castle” and “Firefly” jokes that come from this clever and, dare I say, unique confluence of reality and fiction.
However, it wasn’t perfect, and through its imperfections, I learned something as a writer.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Television, Writing | Tagged browncoats, Castle, creative writing, editing, Firefly, Frozen Heat, Nathan Fillion, NBC's Castle, Nikki Heat, novel writing, Richard Castle, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | Leave a Comment »
There are some times when life opens up the box in which you’ve been thinking since…since you’ve been thinking. Last week, that happened to me. It wasn’t earth-shattering or life-changing. It was a small, simple idea about a small, simple thing. I love moments like that.
Last week, I wrote about consommé and received a comment from my friend, Iron Chef Leftovers, over at the Cheap Seat Eats blog. He mentioned how his stock never got cloudy because his stock never boiled.
When I read that, I guffawed. Literally. I guffawed. Reason? Because no matter how assiduously I oversee my stock while it’s coming up to the simmer, and no matter how much attention I give it during the long process, it always comes out cloudy. Even when I succeed in keeping it below the boil, there’s always a cloud of particulate matter in the stock.
But this is beside the point, and this was not outside the box of my current thinking. The thing he said that stopped me mid-guffaw was this:
Continue Reading »
Posted in Food, Recipes | Tagged beef broth, beef stock, chicken broth, chicken stock, cooking, cooking techniques, cooking tips, healthy living, making stock, recipes | 1 Comment »
All Saint’s Day. All Hallows. All Hallows’ Evening. Hallows Even. Hallowe’en. Halloween.
Not my favorite…well, you can’t really call it a holiday…not my favorite festival. Not even my second favorite. To be honest, my least favorite, which is to say, I really dislike it. A lot.
Growing up, it was just another example of social stratification, another peer-review spotlight that illuminated my inner nerd. You must understand that, back then, at that age, carrying a violin to school on a regular basis did considerable damage to one’s street cred. So did liking to read. Wearing glasses didn’t help. Neither did being sports-deficient. So, being a scrawny, gawky, four-eyed kid who walked to school, a violin in one hand, while reading a book with the other…it pretty much guaranteed that I was going to peg the lower end on the Cool Scale.
Halloween just rubbed it in.
There was only one time where Halloween and I got along. One night. In college.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture, Seattle | Tagged college, concert, halloween, halloween costume, Music, rain, Seattle, trick or treat, viola, violin | 3 Comments »
The world changes quickly, and as I get older, I start to feel the current move faster than I am. Slowly, inexorably, I’m being left behind. This is something I work hard against; I try to keep current, but I never was “edgy” or “cool” and I sure as hell don’t expect to start now. I suppose this makes me a member of the Curmudgeon Party. I’m pretty happy over here. I can rant and rave, piss and moan, and no one is surprised when I do it. So, don’t be surprised. I’m going to do it again.
Last night—on an October night—I voted in a general election. My wife and I sat in the living room, discussed each of the initiatives and reviewed the candidates, colored the little bubbles on our computer-ready form, and stuck them in envelopes to go out in the morning’s post. Washington State now has a wholly mail-in election system.
And I hated it.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture, Low Tech, Politics, Seattle | Tagged election, election 2012, election night, general election, mail-in voting, politics, voting | 3 Comments »
Well, that two week’s vacation went by in a blitz. It was very productive, with the last two books of the Fallen Cloud Saga hitting the streets, but boy, could I have used another week…or month.
Now that the hardcopies are available, I realize I have made a classic mistake. It’s all part-and-parcel of the difficulty in switching from my author hat to my publisher hat. The author in me just wants to get the book out there and get it into reader’s hands. The publisher (an admittedly weaker part of me) wants to get the best release, the best buzz, and the best notice which helps get the book into more readers’ hands.
So, this classic mistake is to rush “to print” at the detriment of any sort of planning and release strategy.
But all is not lost.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing | Tagged amazon, Beneath a Wounded Sky, CreateSpace, creative writing, ebooks, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, Kindle, novel writing, release strategy, self-publishing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | Leave a Comment »
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Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 