“I confess that the sensation attaching to the name of an absent person bedazzled me. I became ambitious of this glory of making people talk about me places where I was not.” – Alexandre Dumas   Paris, 13 Mai, 2016. In France, a country that reveres its authors, Alexandre Dumas is considered a national treasure. He was a prolific writer, most notably for stage plays, novels, and travel nonfiction. He is said to have written 100,000 words, an estimate which, given that he penned some 400 works, must certainly be a low estimate. Dumas was also a man who lived large and loved every moment of his life, which speaks to his character and a subject of equal or greater interest: Le Chateau de Monte-Cristo. [You might enjoy watching this short video, although it’s in French.]…

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Paris, 2 Novembre, 2013. While on a writing retreat in rural France, I read an article about the famed author Alexandre Dumas’ magnificent Chateau de Monte-Cristo in France Today magazine. Located in the small village not far from Paris, the three-story home of the novelist who penned The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and hundreds of other works, gave me great cause to want to see his palatial estate. Most particularly, I wanted to visit his writing studio, the Chateau d’If, situated within the beautiful gardens. Dumas was born in 1802. He lived through – even participated in – the Second French Revolution of 1830. He was a prolific author who helped found Romanticism and is said to have written over a hundred thousand words [with a quill pen, mind you] for dramatic…

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Safe Inside the Violence is 13 short stories about the everyday conflicts that push the common man to act in ways he never thought he would. I must admit, this is the kind of writing that I personally enjoy the most. First off, it is character-driven. Irvin knows the importance of building well-defined, realistic characters, as his stories all share this trait. Second, the situations are right out of everyday life: a man walking to the grocery store in a snow storm, a confrontation with noisy neighbors, a garbage man finding something valuable in the trash. Irvin digs through modern-day life to uncover an engaging story each time. Now, I enjoy a spell-casting adventure as much as the next person, but for me it doesn’t get any better than when a writer really captures the…

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  The box-office success of “Mad Max: Fury Road” [reviewed by Jason] and “Ex Machina” is the quintessential personification of lowbrow versus highbrow films. We Americans – indeed, most of the world, civilized or no – love both types. I have come to pick up Jason’s gauntlet and praise the latter film, but not at the expense of the former, for I, too, loved them both. And as writers and artists and students of the craft of storytelling, so should you. “Ex Machina” begins by celebrating the brilliance of the creative lions of Silicon Valley, in this case Nathan [Oscar Isaac], and the wonders of technology, like the Google-like empire he has built. Yet Nathan is now, not unlike Thoreau, retired to the woods to contemplate his next brilliant move, for nothing less than topping his earlier triumph will satisfy this…

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When I saw the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road last summer, it gave me a massive, throbbing anticiboner. I love Mad Max. I love Tom Hardy. The initial images looked like they were doing it the right way, instead of throwing a modernized and weak-sauce reboot at us. Turns out it was that and much, much more. Fury Road is the best movie I’ve seen this year, with nothing else coming anywhere close. It’s so damn good we can use it as a guide for how to improve our fiction. That’s right: we can learn about our craft from a postapocalyptic chase scene full of flamethrowers and electric guitars. This is true even if you’re writing cozy mysteries on the moor, or hilarious chicklit about designer jeans and eating disorders. For example: Fury Road Crushed the Cinematography…

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