If you’re still on Facebook, you’ve probably seen those birthday fundraiser requests: “For my birthday this year, I’m raising money for [your cause here] …” Maybe you’re sick of them. I think they’re Facebook’s best feature. During the pandemic, I started looking for ways to increase my charitable giving. Facebook donations are my favorite way […]
Back to writing about writing! But still riding the poker high … If you’re a poker player it’s a thrill to see your favorite game up on the big screen—except when they get it maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wrong. Fair warning, James Bond fans, I’m going to beat up on Casino Royale a lot. As refreshing as […]
Playing the Main Event of the World Series of Poker has been a dream of mine for a while, but because it’s typically held in the summer (my busy season), I haven’t had the opportunity. [1] This year, thanks to the pandemic, the Series was pushed back to fall, so I jumped at the chance. […]
The Young Siward fight from Macbeth in the style of John Scalzi. Scalzi is one of my favorite living authors. His style is heavy on dialog and tends toward comedy (which I’m obviously going for here) but also features tremendous emotional depth, especially in his empathy for peripheral characters. I’m doing him a disservice in […]
The Young Siward fight from Macbeth in the style of Mark Twain. [1] I asked him his name, and he said, “Thou’lt be afraid to hear it.” Well I didn’t put much stock in that. I can’t think of a time I ever met a man and was afraid to hear his name. I wondered […]
Long, long ago, I took a stage combat workshop where we had to choreograph a fight scene but were limited to a single move (for contrast, a typical stage fight might be 10-20 moves long). [1] What could we do to make one move interesting? Eventually we realized that we’d have to focus on the […]
The Young Siward fight from Macbeth in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. [1] I originally wrote this as an exercise after reading some Poe for an assignment at Stonecoast. A few things struck me about Poe’s writing (aside from the gloomy subject matter)—he tends to over-description, piling on the adjectives, never settling for one […]
Another series, in which I plan to rewrite the Young Siward fight from Macbeth in a variety of styles, experimenting with person and tense (first person present, third person past), restriction (no adjectives, no letter e), emulation (in the style of Poe or Twain) and format (as a series of tweets or a Kickstarter campaign). […]
So, I recently directed Henry IV, Part One for the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, and I noticed something curious—the title character, the main character, the protagonist and the hero are four different people. Check my math: Title character—King Henry. Obviously. Main character—Falstaff. He’s got by far the most lines and scenes. He’s also the most memorable […]
Ouch. This is a post I’ve put off writing for more than nine months because 2020 was so personally and professionally painful. These review posts are important for accountability and self-assessment. There were some highlights; let’s start with those: I rewrote my twelve-episode web series, Calliope, tailoring it to the pandemic, and shot it with […]
Love, Blood & Rhetoric 