The journal and sometimes blog of author, Joseph L. Selby.
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The Bound God
My wife and I are big fans of the Starz original series, Black Sails. She’s never read Treasure Island nor played Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (which we’ll count as research for purposes of this show 😉 ), so it’s all new to her. But seeing Flint, Silver, and Billy Bones all together is wicked exciting.…
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MY Battlestar Galactica
Like most geeks, I hopped on board the 2004 Battlestar Galactica sensation. Like fewer, I was still a stalwart fan of the original series. And perhaps on my own, I still prefer the original to the reboot. The original series was what it was and it did what it was very well. The reboot showed…
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Venn Diagrams
I don’t look forward to the day physicists figure out what dark energy is. Right now it’s this “We know it’s there, but we don’t know what it is” thing, so writers can make it whatever they want and only “You can’t do that with science” assholes will get upset. This must be like how…
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I Dreamed a Dream
I’ve been watching a lot of old episodes of A Show with Ze Frank on YouTube. As part of the show, an artist animates dreams submitted by viewers. Their experiences are SO different than how I dream. I dream stories like I’m watching a movie or sometimes living as one of the characters but always…
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First Paragraph for One of the Good Days
I’ve been bumbling around a concept for a few weeks and while I was watching “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” (which you should totally watch, because it’s awesome), a few lines popped into my head and I figured I should write them down before I go to bed. So here they are: Victoria wasn’t always…
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A Notion while Watching “Little Women”
Louisa Walker named her daughter Beth after Beth March of Little Women. Louisa May Alcott was her namesake and Beth the character that inspired her to play the piano, so it seemed only fitting that she should name her eldest after the character that meant so much to her. If only she knew the influence of names…
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Click, Click, Snap!
So at any given time, I have a number of stories forming in my brain and existing at different stages of doneness. The most immediate story is the one I’m querying at the moment. After that is the one I’m actively writing. Third comes the one in the “hopper,” the one that shows the most…
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John Leguizamo’s Ghetto Klown
I just finished watching John Leguizamo’s HBO special, Ghetto Klown. It’s pretty awesome, especially if you like auto-biographies. What I liked most was his characterization of his father. Well, I liked a lot of it, but what I found most inspiration from a creative sense was his characterization of his grandfather. A Colombian communist who…
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The (Very) Basics of Roller Derby
As I’ve been mentioning for the last year or so, I’m an official with New Hampshire Roller Derby. Despite it being the fastest growing sport in the country (and possibly the world), it’s still an amateur sport that most people don’t know has made a resurgence (or if they do, they presume it’s much like…
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Don’t Get Sloppy
I was in Fort Lauderdale last weekend, officiating Beach Brawl 2014 (and yes, I’ll write a post explaining roller derby, given the number of times it’s been requested), and I left my Flash drive in the business center of the hotel. I don’t really use it anymore. Once upon a time, Dropbox wasn’t as useful…
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The Constant Struggle
Like so many creative people, I struggle with depression. I’m one of the fortunate ones in that I received help for the problem early on in my life and have been able to learn the warning signs of when things are bottoming out. That doesn’t mean anything’s been fixed. You don’t fix depression. You learn…
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In Between Times
I always take a little break between manuscripts. I consider it a “voice reset.” I used to be so jazzed I would immediately roll into a new project, but I found the voice of the next project sounded exactly the same as the one I had just finished. It inevitably led to a lot of…