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The Rock Band With Horns Remembers How to Rock: Chicago 19 at 35
Chicago 19 arrived in record stores thirty-five years ago today and it marked a change for the band. After a three-album run, producer David Foster and the band parted ways. But Foster had made his mark and helped revitalize Chicago for a brand-new decade and audience and, in doing so, put the spotlight on Peter Cetera, who, after singing the band’s biggest hits in the early 80s, departed for a solo career. Back in 1986, Cetera and his former band each had new albums, but with Foster behind the boards for Chicago 18 and Cetera sticking close to the sound of Chicago 16 and Chicago 17, Solitude/Solitaire and Chicago 18…
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How Do You Keep Track of What You Read (and Watch)?
On New Year’s Day 2023, I decided to try something new. I have long kept scattered notes about the things I consume. This includes books, movies, TV shows, music, and various other things. But these lists and such remain, well, scattered. Over the past couple of years, the writer Ryan Holiday landed on my radar. He is the bookstore owner who writes about the Stoics and their philosophy and how it is still relevant in the 21st Century. In my reading about how Holiday researches and studies his subjects, I learned he keeps an extensive notecard system. His research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer, also keeps an extensive set of notecards. He…
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FDR, Ted Lasso, and The Value of Kindness
Television this week boiled down to two things: the three-part, six-hour FDR documentary on The History Channel and the series finale of Apple TV’s Ted Lasso. In reflecting on both shows, I realized both programs demonstrated how one man can show those around him the value of kindness. FDR Based on the works of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “FDR” highlighted the life, career, and presidency of our 32nd president. Privileged from birth, FDR’s life was turned upside down when he contracted polio at age thirty-nine. His incapacitation meant he had to rely on others for nearly everything. It was in the long, slow process of learning to live with polio and…
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What Are You Going To Do With the 99 Days of Summer 2023?
Veteran writer Dean Wesley Smith dubs the summer months the Time of the Great Forgetting. It’s that point in the year when the good intentions of New Year’s Resolutions made in the depths of winter fall by the wayside in bright light of hot summer days when the pull to do just about anything other than writing draws writers away from their keyboards. It’s only in later summer and early fall when writers remember their annual goals and either charge full-stream ahead and barrel to the end of the year, desperately hoping to achieve their milestones, or just give up and do something else. He speaks the truth. But I’ve…
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It’s an Easy Choice: Don’t Wait a Year to Read Falling by T.J. Newman
Look at that cover. How cool is that? For me, it stopped me in my tracks last year when I saw it for the first time. Isn’t that what a cover’s supposed to do? Well, mission accomplished. I promptly put that book on my To Be Read list. And a year later, finally got to it. When I finished the debut novel by former flight attendant T. J. Newman, I chastised myself. Why did it take so long to pick up the book because it was a good one. The premise is a great example of an elevator pitch: on a transcontinental flight from LA to New York, veteran pilot…
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Season 2 of Perry Mason Continues to Reimagine the Characters
The second season of Perry Mason played more or less like how the original series television show used to: introduce some characters you don’t know, witness a crime (but conceal the culprit), and bring in our main characters. There will be a courtroom scene and there will be a confession of the real culprit on the stand in front of… Okay, so the analogy only goes so far, and that’s why I am really enjoying HBO’s revamping of Perry Mason. I say revamping because it many ways, it’s not an update, but a throwback. The TV show was broadcast in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the stories were…
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Two-a-Day Writing Sessions to Speed Up Your Writing
For those of us with a day job that is not fiction writing, we have to choose to carve out time in our day to write our stories. But there’s never enough time, is there? Optimizing one’s time becomes crucial in our day-to-day writing experiences. You want to ensure you are making visible progress despite wanting more time to write and not having any. I’m pretty sure most of us know what a writing sprint is. You set a timer for any length of time and then you go, go, go and write until the timer sounds. Fifteen minutes is cited as a good number, and, depending on how fast…
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The Inspirational Nature of the Movie “Air”
I knew next to nothing about this story (even though I’m old enough to live through it) but very much was looking forward to seeing it. I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed this movie. It arrived at a good time as I can coming out of a bad mental health week. The positivity and perseverance of Matt Damon’s character was good to see as well as Phil Knight’s (Ben Affleck’s character). I enjoyed the movie so much that I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog, before I got home. Damon’s speech to convince Michael Jordan to sign of Nike was excellent. I got…
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Sometimes Spoilers Are Fine AKA I Knew How The Last of Us Ended Before I Started
I never thought I’d watch The Last of Us, the popular show by HBO based on a video game of the same name. In fact the closest I’d gotten to the show was the hilarious Saturday Night Live spoof of MarioKart done in the same, post-apocalyptic style. I’m not a huge fan of the genre and I was completely fine with skipping out on all the excitement. In fact I was so okay with missing out on everything that when one of the recent episodes of the Fatman Beyond podcasts dropped and co-host Marc Bernardin began talking up the ending, I didn’t skip ahead. I just listened. Bernardin is a…
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When You’re Down in the Dumps, Be Open to the World Helping You
Sometimes, creativity is hard, discouraging, and challenging. In every creative project, there is always a moment (or moments) when you question what you’re doing. It’s an inevitable part of the process. What do you do? Be open to the signs the world is sending you. By the way, I’m using “creative” here because this applies to any type of creative thing you do, whether it be writing, painting, composing, researching, or building something. The Challenge of the Tedious Work I experienced a couple of challenging days earlier this week. They were days in which I began to question why I do the writing stuff and all the surrounding things an…