Sentential Links

It's that time again....

:: Clearly Someone Didn't Want The Saxophone To Be Invented (Wow. Just...wow.)

:: In my career, I’ve been on the other side numerous times. I’ve been the one reading and judging. I always write nice rejection letters, even if the script sucks eggs. I feel that good, bad, or indifferent, the person (or team) went to the effort of writing a script and the least I could do is let them down easy.

Plus, who’s to say I’m always right? I’m not. Along the way, I’ve rejected a few great people who went on to long and successful careers. When a writer friend of mine was story editor on ARCHIE BUNKER’S PLACE he rejected a script by the Coen Brothers. It happens to all of us.

So when you get rejected – and we all do – take heart. You never know who’s going to turn out to be an A-lister. (You know, no matter how many pieces like this I read, my reaction to a new rejection is always the same. It's a mixture of "Oh who the HELL am I kidding I'm an untalented WRETCH who should apologize to all these people for inflicting my work upon them!" and "I will etch your names on a wall of granite, such that they will remain for all time a testament to the FOOLISHNESS of turning ME away! ONE DAY I WILL FEAST UPON YOUR SOULS AND THOSE OF YOUR NEXT SEVEN GENERATIONS!!!!". Luckily, these two feelings pass pretty quickly, and then I'm onto the much more reasonable and practical "OK, who's next?".)

:: I believe that to read like a writer, the best way is to read a piece of literature as if you were going to teach it. (Interesting approach. I tend to read like a fellow storyteller.)

:: As a Doctor Who fan, one of the most frustrating things is the inability to watch a complete run of the series. 106 episodes of the series - one-in-eight of the total number - are missing from the BBC archives.

:: I was just wondering… Is there any kind of protocol for ending a texting conversation? (I wonder about this myself. It's kind of like discussions on blog comment threads, which inevitably just kind of peter out as the post drops down the front page. It reminds me of something someone said back in the hey-day of political blogging: If you touch off a controversy and invite lots of traffic and bile on something you write, just keep posting. The post in question will drop farther and farther down until it vanishes into the Archives, and it'll be forgotten. Not quite about text messaging, but conversations in texts just seem to stop, don't they?)

:: Don’t you people get it? There’s only one way out of autumn. No matter how nice it seems, it always dumps you right in front of that spooky shed out back where you must sit inside on the dirt with your knees pressed against your chin while blowing into your hands for three months. Watching your breath quickly appear and disappear like memories of basking on the beach under golden light the summer before. (Old post, but the author linked it on Twitter yesterday. He's a fine writer, which is a shame because he's SO SO SO wrong! I adore Fall and Winter! Come, cool weather and snow! Huzzah!!! Check out his site, by the way. Lots of interesting and well-written stuff there.)

:: When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

More next week!