Miscellaneous Helpful Thoughts

Okay, first, the good folks at Blogger have posted a fairly helpful article, BLOGGER - Knowledge Base - How To Get A Book Deal With Your Blog. Give it a read. Note that it refers to Wil Wheaton, whose acting career, including, of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation, ensures him a pretty high Google quotient. However, the main point is that a Web presence, steady activcity in what you love and what you think is fun to work on, and persistence can combine to do terrific things. So see if any of the good info and links in the article apply to you. You might also want to check out Wil Wheaton's blog, WIL WHEATON dot NET. He's a very nice, real, unpretentious guy.

Next, I would like to call your attention to the DVDs of M. Knight Shyamalan. If you rent the DVDs for Unbreakable and Signs, you will see that M. Knight Shyalaman has decided to include "early" films of his on them. By "early" I mean really early. These are things he did when he was just beginning to mess around with a camera. I applaud him for making these (charming) bits of his work public, because it allows us all to see the long road he took from beginner to successful feature film director. He's showing us how he started out. So often, we compare our work - writing or art or film or whatever - to the highly finished work of very seasoned, successful professionals. But the work of these people did not always look like it looks now. They had to do all the beginning stuff first, although for some reason there seems to pesist a myth that professional writers, or artists, or filmmakers, were doing top-quality professional work right from the beginning, with no backing or help at all. Hah! And again I say, Hah! Beginners need to compare their work to the beginning work of experienced artists. This helps you realize that everyone has to walk that path. There is nothing magical about the people who have reached their goals. They have only been on the path longer than you.