Christopher Meeks's Blog
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Oct.26.2010
The reading device the Kindle has become relatively inexpensive recently. You can get a WiFi version for $139 and a WiFi/Whispernet version for $189. The difference is that Whispernet uses the Sprint cell service to download your books and the WiFi-only version means you need to connect to WiFi....
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Oct.23.2010
PERHAPS the biggest challenge for an author like me, publishing literary fiction under my own imprint, is to get the word out. One has to work mainly with the kindness of strangers, which means getting books to reviewers and hoping that among the 200,000 books published from companies each year...
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Oct.20.2010
The other night, I stumbled upon the movie Taking Woodstock on HBO. I’d already missed a half-hour, so I was going to watch just a little as I ate dinner alone. The Ang Lee-directed film quickly became a guilty pleasure because it used editing techniques, split screen, and moments from the 1970...
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Oct.14.2010
Ehrich Van Lowe, known as ""E" to his friends and fans, is a television writer, screenwriter, playwright, author, and producer who has worked on shows such as The Cosby Show, Even Stevens, and Homeboys in Outer Space. He has been nominated for an Emmy and an Academy Award. Van Lowe stepped...
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Oct.06.2010
Mystery writer Michael Connelly, known for his series of books with police detective Harry Bosch as well as his handful of books with defense attorney Mickey Haller, came out with his new book, The Reversal, yesterday.
That book brings Haller to work for the prosecution to retry a man who was let...
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Oct.05.2010
Like a couple of small meteors crashing through my roof, a few bits a Springsteenalia came my way yesterday. One is that on Thursday, October 7th, HBO will be showing a documentary called The Promise: The Making of The Darkness of the Edge of Town. You can see a glimpse of it by clicking here.
If...
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Sep.25.2010
In 1975 when Saturday Night Live was brand new, the show’s very first episode with host George Carlin offered a faux commercial for the Triple-Trac razor, which offered three blades instead of two. A caveman, played by Al Franken, now a senator, tried to shave using a club. We then saw a host of...
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Sep.19.2010
Mystery writer L.J. Sellers (The Sex Club) started an interesting thread on www.kindleboards.com, saying, "I've had to admit to myself recently that I'm more likely to try a new author in the crime genre if he's male. Don't get me wrong, I read female crime writers, but typically after they're...
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Sep.12.2010
Two good friends were hit head-on in their car on Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz on Friday. The airbags came out and they're extremely sore and happy to be alive. They're college English teachers, too. I can see the headline now: "Two College Professors Hit on Shakespeare Bridge." On...
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Sep.09.2010
For those of us who write books, our souls leap when we witness others gush over the love of a book, any book. We're reminded of how books can swim in the synapses of people, and we may flash on our own favorite tomes. In this morning's Los Angeles Times, book editor David Ulin writes about...
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Aug.28.2010
Here is an eclectic gathering of some small literary items and news that I've come across recently on the Internet, much of it thanks to Facebook:
There's an interesting debate going on about the New York Times Book Review. Best-selling authors Jennifer Weiner (Fly Away Home) and Jodi Picoult (...
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Aug.25.2010
Food is on my mind. That’s because I teach College English. In searching for ways to get the class of 2014 interested in essays and stories, I’m trying a single theme for this semester, that of “Food.” We’ll be reading three books, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, The Year of the Flood...
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Aug.23.2010
There is one person that most of us have—a boss—and as I’ve heard from close friends recently, most of those bosses are just not great. These bosses do not fire up the workplace or make anyone feel secure. They’re not empathetic or willing to fight for them or clever in how to raise morale. They...
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Aug.14.2010
There's a recent Huffington Post article by Anis Shivani on the most overrated contemporary American writers. Such an article, of course, is almost compulsory to look at in the way a burning wreck on the side of a highway is. See what favorite writers of yours gets skewered. Shivani’s list includes...
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Jul.10.2010
I didn't start teaching College English as a profession until my late thirties because I'd been a full-time journalist and a creative writer. I'd also been deathly afraid of speaking in public. I overcame that fear--among other fears. I’ve come to see the subject of English as combining nearly...
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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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