Three hundred. A good batting average in baseball. A perfect score in bowling. The number of Spartans taking on one million Persian invaders in the Battle of Thermopylae. The perfect number of onion rings to eat whilst bowling. But, most importantly that number has been the minimum weight I’ve been since high school. At my worst, back in 2004 or so, I was hovering close to 400 pounds. I’m not sure how the hell that happened (well, I have a […]
Categories: diet, Personal Stuff
A Quiet Place is perfect. There you go. End of review. Stop reading and go see it! What? You want more? Okay, if I have to convince you, read on. The movie begins ominously with a title card reading “Day 89” and we’re thrust into a very quiet scene of a family foraging for supplies. One of the first things you’ll notice is that they’re all barefoot, and they’re being VERY VERY quiet. We soon learn that aliens have killed […]
Categories: movies, Reviews • Tags: A Quiet Place
Ravenous is one of one of those rarest of rare Netflix gems — a good zombie movie. Yet the things that make it stand out are also the things that show how far it falls short of greatness. This French Canadian film that won “Best Canadian Film” at the Toronto International Film Festival starts off with a bang, wasting no time throwing you into the chaos of the world following a zombie outbreak of some sort. The movie never calls […]
Categories: movies, Reviews, television • Tags: Ravenous
Day Six of NaNoWriMo and I’ve gotten a few emails/messages asking about my word count on the NaNoWriMo site. It was registering as zero up until the other day. I know I can be slow and/or procrastinator, but I have written more than zero days! Seems I was entering my word count incorrectly somehow. That word count thing on the website is counterintuitive and/or broken. At any rate, I’ve adjusted my total word count to date which as of Monday […]
After six years of writing books for a living, I’m finally taking the plunge that is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as the cool kids call it. Basically, you write a 50,000 word (or more) novel in November and post regular word counts so other writers (and readers, if they’re so inclined) can follow along. The idea is that being part of this big public thing, along with many thousands of other writers, plus the public accountability of posting […]
Generally speaking, video streaming services are hit and miss when it comes to horror movies. If it’s a good movie, you probably already saw it when it was in theaters or when you rented it. And what you usually have left are movies you’d find at a garage sale for .25 a pop, if said garage sale was run by monsters who get off on inflicting bad B-movies unto unsuspecting viewers. Given the sheer number of horrible titles on these […]
Categories: movies, Reviews • Tags: The Devil's Candy
Do you ever find yourself up late at night thinking about creative shit you want to do if only you had more time in the day? That’s me pretty much every night. Like most creatives, I’ve got more ideas than time to execute them all. I want to write a ton more books and series than I’ve got time for I want to draw comics I want to write and illustrate children’s books I want to write a few humorous […]
Categories: Uncategorized
In a recent email to Collective Inkwell readers I talked about my favorite book of all time, The Talisman (re-posted here). At the end of the email I asked readers what their favorite books of all time were and if there was a story behind why? I got some great responses back, including several books I’d never heard of, along with some touching stories. I also heard from a few readers who named my books with Sean, Yesterday’s Gone and […]
Categories: Authors That Inspired Me, Favorite Books of All Time • Tags: David Wroblewski, Dean Koontz, Ira Levin, Jean M. Auel, John Steinbeck, Robert Heinlein, Robert R. McCammon, Stephen Donaldson, Stephen King
This week I’d like to talk to you about my favorite book of all time — a book I haven’t re-read in more than thirty years. That book is The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I’m not going to spoil the book, don’t worry. And I’m going to talk less about the book than why it is my favorite book of all time. I remember where I was when I got The Talisman (at a bookstore near my grandmother’s, where I picked […]
Categories: Authors That Inspired Me • Tags: Stephen King, The Talisman
As with any job, sometimes writing has its good days. Other times, not so good days. One of the questions I most get from non-writers, and even some writers who have a hard time coming up with ideas they want to write about, is where do you get your ideas? But a story isn’t JUST an idea. There’s a lot more to it, and I figured I’d share my process from start to finish of how a story is born. […]
Categories: The Process, writing
Let’s first address the elephant in the room: is M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Split, any good? Yes. Yes! And hell yes! The other question you might have is: is there a twist? No. There’s some cool surprises, but not the kind of killer twist audiences came to expect in Shyamalan’s breakout movies. After his early successes with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, Shyamalan faced a backlash like no other director in recent memory when he started to do […]
Categories: movies, Reviews • Tags: M. Night Shyamalan, Split
[photo credit Nate Grigg via Flickr Creative Commons] I’ve always had a weird relationship with Thank You. I say it all the time when someone gives me something or does something for me. I say it to cashiers and servers, and pretty much anyone who has to deal with customers all day long. And I say it to people who hold the door open for me or my family, because I’m not a monster, *unlike some assholes who don’t thank me or my […]
Categories: fatherhood, Personal Stuff
So, here we go again, wading into political waters. I’m bound and determined to alienate all of my readers one blog post at a time. If you didn’t read my prior post, Why Trump Won, you may want to do that before venturing further. I feel that my last post helped (maybe a tiny bit) explain to liberals why ALL conservatives who voted for Trump aren’t racist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynists, so now I want to explain to my conservative […]
[NOTE: This is a post about politics. And it’s super freaking long. I wrote this the night Trump won, and sat on it for a bit, not sure if I should post it or not. If you don’t like reading about politics, or are just sick of the election in general, feel free to skip it. Believe me, I won’t blame you. I don’t intend to make politics a regular thing here, but felt this was worth discussing, and something […]
[All images copyright Gene Page/AMC] So, tonight we got an update on Daryl in an episode titled The Cell, which continued the pace of last week’s stellar episode with another slow-build narrow focused story. Tonight’s focus was on Daryl, following his capture by Negan, who is being held in a … (wait for it) cell in The Sanctuary. ON EASY STREET Daryl is naked, dirty, and being fed dog food sandwiches as Negan’s men try to break Daryl through torturous music, isolation, […]
Categories: Reviews, television • Tags: The Walking Dead
[Photos copyright Gene Page AMC] [This post contains spoilers for Season 7 Episode 2 The Walking Dead: The Well] Well, this was a much-needed episode to follow last week’s brutal (and ultimately unsatisfying) season premiere. Why was this episode so good? First of all, three words: KING FREAKING EZEKIEL! But not just this awesome new character played phenomenally by Khary Payton. We also got one of my favorite sorts of TWD episodes, the quiet ones. The Walking Dead is never better […]
Categories: Reviews, television • Tags: The Walking Dead
(Image copyright: AMC) [SPOILERS FOR LAST NIGHT’S THE WALKING DEAD] So, The Walking Dead returned last night with its much-anticipated season premiere which promised to answer the question: Who did Negan kill? As you surely recall, Season Six ended with a cliffhanger that (to put things lightly) didn’t go over well with fans. The show spent all season teasing one of the comic’s most memorable and shocking moments, the death of Glenn at the end of issue 100, and ended with … […]
Categories: Rant, Reviews • Tags: The Walking Dead
(Non-spoiler review) It’s not often that a horror movie surprises me. It’s even rarer for a January horror movie to be good. And even rarer, a horror movie with a doll that I find even remotely tolerable. And yet, here is it — The Boy. I have to admit when I saw the first trailer for this, I had ZERO INTEREST in seeing a movie with a doll. Why? Well, I’ve always found realistic looking dolls creepy as hell! But […]
A Russian man claimed that Fallout 4 is “too addictive” and thus destroyed his job and marriage, AND the game should come with a warning label. He is suing Bethesda and a Russian company for his “emotional distress.” According to the article: He regularly skipped work, which resulted in his employers firing him. He stopped meeting up and speaking with friends, and his wife left him. His health also started to deteriorate as he was not sleeping or eating. “If I […]
Categories: gaming, Rant • Tags: Fallout 4, lawsuit, Pep Boy
Here’s another (more random) comic series I’m going to do, Versus. Pretty self-explanatory. These are things I’ve been doodling for years. I’ve always wanted to draw something super simple like The Oatmeal or Allie Brosh does, or even the hilariously awesome Boxjam’s Doodle back in the day. I’ve always been a bit envious of funny artists who draw something relatively easy (QUICK) to draw, and people love their stuff even if its very simple looking. Even back in the day when my drawing was […]
A long time ago I used to draw two comic strips. The more popular of the two was Todd and Penguin, a family-friendly all-ages comic that I did for eight years. Then there was Taking Up Space, a comic I did off and on — way more off than on. Taking Up Space had a lot fewer readers, but it was closer to my darker sense of humor, and people who know me liked it a lot more. For the past few years, […]
Categories: comics • Tags: Taking Up Space
Wow. That’s the word that I found myself saying time after time as I watched Sense8, Netflix’s 12-episode series by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix movies) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). Wow, I’ve never seen this before. Wow, how did they pull that off? Wow, what GREAT writing! Wow, what great characters! Wow. Just. Wow. This isn’t going to be a review so much as a Call to Action to those who haven’t seen the show yet. If you […]
Categories: television • Tags: Sense8
