Religionistas

It was George Orwell (not LaVar Burton) who first said "all literature is political," and I believe that.  For those who missed it, MY NAME IS WILL is, at its largest political level, about the dangers of aligning political and religious power. That's why stuff like this scares the bejeezus out of me.

I couldn't help thinking of this prominently displayed, marble-eternalized quote in the Jefferson Memorial.  It's from Virginia's 1777 "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," upon which the First Amemedment freedom of religion clause was based.

"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion."

Throw that at your rightwing neighbor, and ask 'em if they support atheists as loudly as they support guns.

Happy To Be On Blogger

Although I love Rapidweaver for website creation, I had a hell of time with its blog function, and therefore my blog was entirely non-functional for most of my summer tour for MY NAME IS WILL: A Novel of Sex Drugs and Shakespeare.  Quelle dommage!  So I've switched to Blogger, which has happily hosted LA Food Crazy for years.  Now that I'm hunkered down at home, working on my next book, I plan to post here as often as humanly possible.  Generally, directly after reading the morning newspaper, when I'm still really mad about stuff and all full of opinions and espresso.   It'll also be easy to post from The Road when I hit it.

But first, I will be importing over old posts from http://jesswinfield.com/Blog/blog.html.

Hope to see you here, often!

The Hot Chick and Other Republicanisms

Thanks to their handy convention, I think I've nearly got Republican ideology figured out.

Getting paid to serve your country is good, but getting paid to serve your community is bad. Government is bad when it tells you what to do about your tires, but good when it tells you what to do about your womb. Going to Iraq (or Vietnam) as a warrior, risking life and limb to serve God and country, is good; but risking life or limb to serve the truth as a journalist... wait, gimme a second... yeah, you're part of the left-wing mainstream media, so that's bad. Investing in alternative fuels because of global warming is bad, but seeking alternative fuels to achieve independence from evildoers is good. And drilling for oil is always really, really, REALLY good, but taxing oil company profits is always really, really, REALLY bad... and Dick Cheney had nothing to do with this message!

I just have just one remaining question: what does "moral equivalency" mean?

LA Times Reviews My Name Is Will

If you haven't read your Sunday (7/20) Los Angeles Times Book Review, don't recycle it yet. In a glowing review, Donna Seaman calls MY NAME IS WILL "hilarious," "fascinating," and "a celebration of the power of language and story," among other very nice things.


The New York Times picked WILL for their summer reading list, and The New York Times Book Review will run a full page review this coming Sunday (7/27): I've seen it... it's a little snarky about my cartoon credentials and bawdy wordplay, but it's a lively piece about the book: "A lusty, pun-drunk first novel... where there's a Will, there's a way." Look for it online or on newsstands this weekend.

And my attempt to set the World's Record for "Most Shakespeare Plays Performed Solo in a Single Day in Brooklyn" received lots of press, from The New Yorker magazine to YouTube; I highly recommend this great article and podcast about the event in The Brooklyn Paper.

There's also a nice feature in Sunday's Santa Cruz Sentinel.

For all the latest, including much more news, more reviews, announcements about upcoming radio interviews on NPR, tour dates for San Diego, the Bay Area, and Seattle, etc., hop on over to www.jesswinfield.com.

Finally, check out my new online store, where you can purchase some cool jesswinfield.com merchandise, including exclusive MY NAME IS WILL tour t-shirts.

Mushrooms In The News

Some of the news this week threatened to throw me into the holiday weekend on bit of a downer. First there's the "Obama Running To The Center" news cycle. It was to be expected, but during the heady days of primary Obamamania I and much of his liberal base conveniently forgot little things like his support (albeit limited) of the death penalty and his, shall we say, "nuanced" take on gun control. I was headed toward despair when he came out in favor of Bush's faith-based initiatives plan, but it only took a visit to BlySpace to settle my nerves.

Then there was the LA Times piece on the lawsuit between the Tolkien estate and the recently-deceased New Line Cinema. I'm not a huge fan of the Tolkien estate (J.R.R. explicitly created Middle Earth for other writers and artists to use as a mythology, but his son Christopher has stingily kept the names, places, and tales strictly guarded for his own painfully pedantic purposes), but for them to have not received a penny of the billions of dollars raked in by the film trilogy is... well, there's no adjective big enough to describe the injustice. (I find it telling that, although a picture of the Professor appeared in the print edition, Tolkien remains anonymous in the online edition; presumably Elijah Wood makes for a sexier page.) As both a former producer myself and a playwright and screenwriter who's worked with some skanky money men, it never to ceases to amaze me how rare it is to find a producer who truly respects the writer. Many give lip service; few put their money where their lips are. I'm glad to say that my experience the publishing industry is a breath of fresh air. My agent Ellen Levine at Trident and editor Cary Goldstein and publisher Jonathan Karp at Twelve Books all define the word "integrity."

Speaking of integrity... I'm thrilled to note that my good friend and great comedian/raconteur Nick Revell has begun regular blogging for The Huffington Post. Think Jon Stewart about to start a pub brawl through sheer intelligence. This is a very good thing for the world.

Finally, I've had a couple of friends point me to a recent story about the long-term therapeutic effects of magic mushrooms. This comes as no surprise; it merely backs up the very real research that my fictionalized Timothy Leary spouts in MY NAME IS WILL.

That little tidbit heads me into the holiday -- and my book launch next week -- on a happy note. Have a safe and celebratory Independence Day weekend!

Blogs, Hers and Mine

I'm also thrilled to report that favorite political blogger is back online. For progressive political opinion with a suburban punk rock mom edge, there's no better place on the web than Bly Space. I'm proud to say that my anonymous-lest-she-become-the-victim-of-a-vast-right-wing-conspiracy (does anybody really deny that they exist?) has inspired me to blog again, and I hope vice versa.

Speaking of politics, I might as well link here to an op-ed piece I wrote in the LA Times a few weeks ago. It was actually written to run on Shakespeare's Birthday (April 23), the day after the Pennsylvania primary, but the Times wanted to run it right away. It'll make more sense when you know that.

The Write Tool For the Job

font face="sans-serif">I want to proselytize a bit about a piece of software. Sometimes, software truly opens a door in the mind, makes you do something you couldn't or wouldn't do before. I only became a writer when I got my first Macintosh with Word 2.0 installed; I can't imagine writing, as both of my writer parents did, with ribbon, ink, and carbon paper. I didn't know I could, or wanted to, learn to play the piano and write a song or two before GarageBand came out, or process my own photo images before Photoshop. Software can change the paradigm.

Such a piece of software is Scrivener, a dedicated writing application that is as far beyond Microsoft Word as Word is beyond the wax tablet and chisel. Designed for writers by a writer, it works the way a writer thinks. The features are so many and so different from paragraph-and-page based word processing apps that it's hard to describe here. Scrivener assembles your work as a "project" with an iTunes-like sidebar organizing the project into different folders and documents. There are default folders depending on the type of project template, but these are entirely customizable. The current novel I'm working on, for example, I've divided into Book One, Book Two, and Book Three, with separate folders for each chapter and separate documents for each scene. There is also a folder for "research," which is a boon: you can drag and drop nearly any image, jpeg, pdf, website, or document that you might refer to, and have it at your fingertips right in the same program. A split-screen feature lets you view, say, a Google Maps street-level image of the streets your character is navigating in one half your screen, while writing in the other. The text editor doesn't really care about "pages" or other formatting until you wish to print or export to another program, at which point it offers all sorts of handy options like converting all m dashes to double dashes, or italics to underlines, entering hash marks to divide scenes, replacing double spaces after sentences with single spaces, and the like. This is liberating, as it keeps you focused on cranking out pages instead of whether the margins are lining up prettily.

You can view your project several different ways. The "Full Screen" view takes just the chunk you're working on and blacks out everything else on your computer, giving you a completely distraction-free writing space. The chunks of your project can also be viewed in either "Corkboard" mode -- a virtual pin-up environment (you can even color code the pushpins to represent different types of, or drafts of, your work) and an "Outline" mode that's better than all but the most dedicated stand-alone outlining programs. And this is the best part... move a chunk of your project in Outline view, or the Corkboard, or in your folder structure in the sidebar, and it moves in your text document, too... and vice versa. Anyone who's spent a day revising an outline to match what was actually written before being able to continue working knows this is a boon. I also love the "statistics" feature, a floating window that not only tells you your word count but lets you set targets, both daily and overall: 80,000 words for a novel say, and 1000 words for daily output, and gives you a status bar to let you know how you're doing. There is so much more: keywords that let you easily track characters or themes, highlighting features, annotations, a killer versioning tool that lets you quickly take a "snapshot" of your current version before embarking on a dubious "what if" scenario, screenplay commands based on Final Draft, autosaves practically every millisecond so you never lose work... too much to list here.

On the tiny downside, the export options can be a little daunting, and there is a bit of a learning curve because it's so different from other word processors. But if you're a writer you owe it to yourself to check it out. After all, you had to learn to throw away the wax table and chisel when you bought a word processor, too.

There's a terrific demo video on their website. The free demo version is fully-functional, allowing thirty launches before requiring you to buy a license... $39.95 for as many machines as you use. Hell, you might have your novel done after 30 launches.<