Chaos Theory

"For almost 25 years, that lone film has remained, for good or ill, his calling card."

“I’m the guy who wrote Groundhog Day,” he says now. “I’m not the amazing screenwriter who’s had this long and storied career. I’m not Tom Stoppard.” But if you have to be stuck with one movie, it could be a worse movie than Groundhog Day. “It’s delightful to be so associated with something so well loved,” Rubin says. “You could break your heart thinking you’re the victim of this amazing life you’ve got.”

This is the story of how Danny Rubin wrote Groundhog Day not once but twice — maybe more times than that, but who’s counting. It’s unusual for any artist to live so long under the shadow of a single work, let alone a story that is itself intimately concerned with limits and repetition. It’s more unusual still for an artist to return to that story in another medium for an encore nearly 25 years later. Yet here Rubin is, in a Broadway theater, listening to his words echo, again and again and again, into the dark."

It's kind of a coloring book

The Bloggess's new book (Washington Post)

“You Are Here” is a hybrid of art, self-help and memoir. It also makes sly fun of all those things. This is the same Jenny Lawson, after all, behind the Bloggess, the same woman who used a stuffed roadkill raccoon named Rory as a way of talking about her struggles with depression, anxiety and ADD.

On one page of her new book, she asks readers to write down five outrageous things they’ve done, “at least one of which is a lie.” Elsewhere, she suggests that you “build your dreams around you. Then build a pillow fort around your dreams. Fill it with cats and books and wine slushies. Then build a fiery moat around your pillow fort, filled with acid and razor blades, because people are going to want that fort. And your dreams, maybe.”

The book, subtitled “An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds,” comes with perforated pages, so you can hang up your creations on the fridge, above your desk or perhaps on that pillow fort."

What a sellout hack

"If there’s one overwhelming conclusion to be drawn about Hubbard’s career, it isn’t that he wrote science fiction, or even that he was influenced by its ideas. It’s that he ended up writing science fiction almost against his will, and for much of his life, he seems to have actively despised it.

In a letter to Robert A. Heinlein in 1948, toward the end of his most productive period, he wrote: “Between you and me, I hate the hell out of gadgets.”

In reality, he wrote science fiction for exactly one reason—he knew that it would sell."

The genre simply wouldn’t be what it is today without the voices of women who pushed back against its pervasive male culture.

"But a resistance to female science-fiction and fantasy authors remains. “As a publicist, I’m constantly trying to counter this bias when pitching books by female authors,” explained Ellen Wright, an Orbit publicist who repped Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy and James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series. “I think there’s a bias, likely unconscious for most people, that books by men are more serious or more scientific than books by women. I’ve heard from many frustrated authors whose books are included on lists of ‘soft science fiction’ or ‘science-fiction romance’ purely because these authors are female. There’s no substantive difference between their books and books by men that are considered ‘harder.’”

So many male authors

Here's a visual for you.

And then the murders begun.

This is fun.

Oh, some good news!

"Cat Pictures Please" to become YA novel. This is an awesome story and now there shall be more of it!

Roger Ebert’s Zero-Star Movies

What did it take for the most famous and widely read American film critic ever to hand out his lowest possible rating, issued only a few dozen times in a 10,000-plus review career?

Some people shouldn't have kids

Excerpt from "Down Among The Sticks and Bones."

Chuck Tingle on the Oscars

Yup, that happened: Pounded By The Sentient Manifestation Of My Incorrectly Announced Best Picture Winner