Lawrence C. Connolly

Tag: fantasy

  • Looking Ahead:
    This Weekend at the Milford Festival

    Sixty-four years ago, science fiction writers Virginia Kidd and James Blish moved to Milford, PA, into a home that they called Arrowhead. It was there that Virginia Kidd founded the first literary agency devoted to the sf genre and where James Blish and colleagues such as Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm wrote stories that helped…

  • Big Things Cooking in September:
    Milford Writers & Son of Monsterpalooza

    Big things are brewing this month, with the Milford Readers and Writers Festival on the east coast and Son of Monsterpalooze on the west – both on the same weekend (September 15-17) and 3,000 miles apart. Makes me wish I had a teleporter. Nevertheless, despite the distance and the impossibility of two places at once,…

  • Writer at Work: Trusting the Process

    There’s a scene in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso, a 1956 documentary that shows the artist Pablo Picasso at work. The artist starts with random lines, splashes of color. There seems to be no method in what he’s doing, but soon a few recognizable images emerge — a boat pulling a water skier, a woman…

  • Writer at Work:
    Santas, Wizards, & Life behind the Curtain

    So it’s December 1997. I’m driving north out of Oakland, toward Bigelow Boulevard and downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a gray day, light snow falling. Colored lights trim some of the buildings along North Craig Street, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. Then I see him. I clear the rise toward Bigelow Boulevard, and there he is—fourteen-feet…

  • Writer at Work:
    Out of the Stories and into the World

    It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. There’s a good reason for that. I’ve been working. I’ve always regarded blogging as a leisure activity, fun when there’s time for it, but readily set aside when big projects hit. Last June, with a new film script sold and an ambitious novel expanding beyond expectations, I…

  • From Page to Screen:
    Talking about Writing @ The Penguin

    It all began with Robert A. Heinlein. Back in the 1940s, Heinlein gave what may well be the best writing advice ever given, a five step approach to achieving success as a spinner of tales. And last week at The Penguin Bookshop, an attentive crowd joined me in a consideration of those rules and how they apply…