Celestial Chicken Blog

I’ve been hanging around on the NaNoWriMo forums the last few days, reading and responding to posts. People are getting wound up, as am I, for the first of November. We are about a month away at this point. What I noticed was the over-abundance of teens who are spending time on the [...]

NaNoWriMo is virtually upon us. In just over a month, I will once again be pounding away on my laptop, trying to finish another novel. Never mind I haven’t finished the last THREE YEARS worth of Nano’s! I’m trying hard to finish up last year’s. It needs some editing and I’m working [...]

As we drove all day to come home from Wisconsin, we listened to some old radio shows on the satellite radio. What a luxury that thing is, there was every type of music and etc. you could ever want. Most of the rental cars we get have it, and we’ve gotten to where [...]

I just read about a youngish (46 years old) author who killed himself. This, in some ways, seems like a trend in writers and artists. I don’t quite understand it, as, although I have my moments, I have never been suicidal nor do I ever see myself being that way. Many a good [...]

I recently checked out a book called The Actor Performs, by Mel Shapiro. I wouldn’t normally be looking at an acting book, but a couple weeks ago I was editing for audio a portion of this book, and a particular part caught my eye and I talked about it in a blog post. [...]

J.K. Rowling just won a well-publicized lawsuit over a fan creation called the Harry Potter Lexicon. I find it really hard to understand why she would have sued in the first place, rather than come to some sort of financial agreement with the author of the lexicon. Steve Van der Ark spent many [...]

That title is misleading, in a way. Today on a mailing list I’m on, a member asked the following: “It has seemed to me that some works of fiction seem to hold more kernels of truth within them than many works of informational non-fiction. I wonder why that is. Has anyone else felt [...]

Hubby was upset the other day about hearing a comedian use a joke on air that he knew another comedian had written and used years before. The joke wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar, and he felt that it had been “stolen” by the other comedian. I reminded him that there is [...]

I got this bit of a quote from an Actor’s Workshop handout. This is from a characterization section in An Actor Performs, by Mel Shapiro. “It is helpful to keep a scrapbook of anything that you feel might be of interest later: faces for makeup studies, photographs of people in situations that are personally [...]