Christopher Meeks's Blog
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Nov.15.2011
A day can turn like spilling coffee. It’s dry one minute, wet and hot the next.
My wife Ann and I were planning to see the play The Vigil at the Mark Taper Forum when two hours before the performance, she said her stomach was suddenly queasy. She didn’t feel sick per se but was worried she’d have...
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Nov.12.2011
When my wife and I saw a trailer for the movie The Trip, we each thought it might be something worth seeing. Two English comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, go on a road trip to visit gourmet restaurants in North England for a set of Observer newspaper stories. Along the way, they banter and...
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Nov.04.2011
I’m not sure when “genre” became a dirty word in creative writing programs. I certainly didn’t want “genre.” I wanted Art (capital A important.) Every one of my fellow writers down in the trenches of great writing at USC's Master of Professional Writing Program imagined Sales (capital S important...
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Nov.02.2011
I noticed there was a similar title to a blog last week, but I guess good ideas come in waves. The Huffington Post had asked me to write for them, and I gave them this idea before I saw it elsewhere on Red Room (in a couple places that I now look.)
I happened to be inspired when I came across a...
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Oct.21.2011
A few years ago, I read a post about short stories and the challenges book groups had to them. Short story collections rarely get discussed in book clubs because as Dawn explained in her above post, how do you discuss not one story but many?
Last year, I took this very challenge to my college...
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Oct.16.2011
“You must come to my class,” said the beautiful young woman with the Scandinavian name and face. This was when I was in USC’s MFA professional writing program. “Thomas Thompson is a big-deal writer," she said, "and just because he teaches nonfiction, people are missing a great teacher.”
If she...
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Oct.15.2011
AMERICAN AUTHORS AS ARTISTS
Last week I heard fabulous story on NPR about American authors. Guy Raz spoke with Alexander Nazaryan about how Americans don't deserve a Nobel Prize in Literature. While I expected someone in an Andy Rooney voice curmudgeonly calling American authors cry babies,...
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Sep.27.2011
THE 99-CENT EBOOK DILEMMA: ROAD TO SUCCESS OR A SUGGESTION “IT SUCKS”?
When Amanda Hocking first made news earlier this year that a 26-year-old out of Austin, Minnesota, could become a millionaire by selling her books for 99 cents on Kindle, anyone with a flicker of a story hammered it out and...
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Sep.21.2011
While I’ve written a lot over the years about my writing process either in commissioned articles or in blogs, I’ve never written about humor. That may be because it’s as mysterious to me as phlogiston was to 17th century scientists who tried to understand fire. Both fire and comedy exist, but HOW...
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Sep.20.2011
Do you remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen argues with Diane Keaton in a movie line, and a pedantic man behind them rattles on about Marshall McLuhan? Pissed off, Allen disagrees with the professor and pulls out McLuhan who tells off the professor. (Click here to see the one-minute...
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Sep.08.2011
My grandfather loved Walnettos, which were chewy chocolate caramel squares loaded with walnuts and invented in Minneapolis, where he lived. Then along came Hersheys, and now we have Trader Joe organic dark chocolate with almonds. Things change.
In the old days if you were a writer, you had a clear...
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Sep.06.2011
After I wrote about the challenges of marketing literary novels (see my previous post here), I asked if anyone knew of an author writing a literary book that’s done what Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, and other eBook superstars have done. A reader on Kindleboards told me about Darcie Chan and...
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Sep.03.2011
It started when my agent at the time did not want to send out a manuscript of my short fiction that had been published in literary magazines. I was calling my book The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, to reflect both a sense of humor and literary quality. One magazine editor had already called my...
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Aug.17.2011
TRAVELING VS. WRITING
Truth be told, if the headline were dental extraction vs. writing, most people would take dental extraction. So if the choice is to sit at a blank computer screen wondering why nothing is coming or to go to Venice, Italy, lick colorful gelato and go for a gondola ride, the...
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Jul.23.2011
I recently met a writer friend, Gary Phillips, at Versailles, a fabulous Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles where a mixture of citrus juices slam into garlic to create a sauce that makes chicken and fish like Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio hugging on Titanic's bow. (if you have a choice of going...
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'Love At Absolute Zero' is a gift--and one of the many that continue to emerge from the pen and mind and brilliant trait for finding the humor in life that makes him so genuinely fine a writer.”
—Critic Grady Harp, Top-Ten Amazon reviewer
About Christopher
Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times ("poignant and wise") and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, "A...
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