The Office of Letters and Light Blog

What Makes a Good Female Character?

Note: This may be the first OLL game-related blog post. If you are interested in it, you also may be excited to hear that tech writer, game writer, and video host Veronica Belmont has decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year!

Double note: This blog post includes some minor spoilers.

I recently finished Campaign Mode in Gears of War 3. I play with my brother, who is a Gears of War fan boy in every sense of the word. And for good reason—there are a lot of fabulous things about this game: the Beast Mode option, old maps re-beautified, and really it’s still probably the ultimate “bro series,” even for lady-bros like me. (But I promised I would write about the writing, and so I shall!) The final installment of the franchise has gotten a lot of praise for its greater presence of female characters, namely Anya, Sam, and Queen Myrrah.

Read More

Boring Movies or Boring Critics?

I wish the title “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables” had attracted me based on some confusion or freshness, but the truth is the title was resonant in a nauseating way. It was resonant from having (way) too many conversations with film majors interested in participating in the creation of the next The Hangover 2.

Late this April, a writer named Dan Kois set-off a minor firestorm on the internet with his article about “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables.” In it, he coins the term “aspirational viewing” where the film-goer watches something he anticipates to be boring/painful/long because they consider it to be, for some inexplicable reason, good for them. 

If I heard this at a college party, I’d smile and nod, but I wasn’t alone in finding it a little hard to take from a film critic. Yes, this man is paid to watch films and write about them. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

Read More

A Random Story Challenge

I had trouble coming up with blog post for this week, so I decided to leave my topic up to fate. Do you guys know that site “Wikipedia”? Well, in addition to lots of interesting facts about otters, it has a cool “Random Article” search function. A perfect resource for the idea-starved! (Take note for November, pantsers.) Here’s a quick story based on what it popped out for me today:

Read More

With Love and Squalor

I was sending girlchild off to the copy editors in less than two days and had only two pages to go before I could put a bow on it, but I was stumped, immobilized. Which two pages could be so crucial? The dénouement? The grand finale? No: the dedication and acknowledgment pages. Some folks don’t include either of these with their novels. Their books, I guess, are solitary beasts, brought into this world alone. But not mine. I owe people. Big time.

I’m a pretty good thanker, I dig gratitude. The list of who to thank via acknowledgments wrote itself: the names of the glorious friends and loved ones who’d let me clock in so infrequently during revision times, the ones who’d never shown weariness of hearing about another round of editing, or that I was going to miss yet another event. I had the who down pat. What boggled my mind was the how.

Read More

The Bloggy Award

You are looking at an object very much prized here at the Office of Letters and Light. “But why is it so valuable?” you might say. “It just looks like a sparkling-water bottle covered with stickers and tied with a lopsided bow.”

Though I’m tempted to respond “HOW DARE YOU?!” (cue: echo and thunder sound effects), I suppose I should calmly explain. That, kind reader, is a photo of the prestigious OLL Bloggy Award.

Just like the incentive goodies you get at the end of NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy, we use it to give props to especially awesome blog posts. It’s been frequently passed around the office the last few months; whoever currently has the Bloggy gets to choose the next recipient. Lindsey is the latest, for her great “Exploring Life Through Art and Writing.” Who will get it next is anybody’s guess. (Bribery doesn’t work. Lindsey is very ethical.)

From now on, we’ll indicate winners via this tag, always accessible on the left sidebar. And if you see a new post you love, feel free to make a nomination suggestion in the comments!

– Chris A.

Evoking Life Through Art and Writing

Yesterday, I visited an exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, a fabulous local gem that happens to be located right down the street from my house and practically in the front yard of my writing partner (and OLL board member) Elizabeth.

The OMCA website describes the exhibit thusly:

Spanning the 40-year career of the internationally renowned Southern California-based mixed-media artist, the exhibition features large-scale multisensory installations, assemblages, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and films that invite viewers into a made-up world, a skill for which McMillen is best known. Part sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, and cultural anthropologist, McMillen has been creating environmental installations with architectural references that deal with themes of time, change, and illusion since the 1970s. Opening in stages, with large-scale installations Lighthouse and Pavilion of Rain (a constructed habitat featuring rain pouring down on a shack of corrugated metal surrounded by a 30-foot pool of water) currently on view, the exhibition features work from OMCA’s holdings as well as select loans from private collections.

But nothing could have prepared me for the actual experience.

Read More

Blobby Meets His Cousins

“GUMPO!” we heard Blobby say yesterday afternoon. This was an unusual occurrence, as his heavy lunch usually soothes him into a slumber that lasts well into the evening.

“GUMPO! GUMPO!” he said again, as he plopped himself down from his perch and began waddling to our front window. He pressed his face (sideways, because that’s where his eyes are) against the glass and let out one more—this time in wonderment: “GUMPO?”

We had to see what had so intrigued our normally demure dinosaur friend, so we crowded around him to look out. And there they were: two bearded lizards who live in our neighborhood, and who had come by to say hello to their office relative. Now, we’re not entirely sure how reptile family trees work, but we think these are cousin’s of Blobby’s (perhaps a few times removed). As you can see, it was a very happy reunion:

Read More

A Day in the Work Life of…. Blobby!

I’m so excited about this week’s interview with our office pet Blobby. It will be a first for Blobby, so I figure he’s excited (and nervous), too.

But before the main event, we’d like to give last week’s prize to Jordan for offering the best coffee-quitting advice to Tupelo.

Because of you, she’s made it to Day 7. A note from Tupelo, “Many thanks to Jordan, not only for the soothing advice about how to quit drinking coffee but also for the tip on what to do with all of those loose cables! What a relief!”

Okay, what I know about Blobby:

• He’s really, really huggable.
• He likes sitting on your lap while you’re working on really boring spreadsheets.
• He’s green.
• He’s super-positive most of the time, but sometimes he complains about the length of his arms.
• He usually takes his lunch with Sharkie.
• He never takes his lunch with Chris Baty Doll (we think he’s intimidated).
• He’s writing a screenplay entitled “BLURPY: THE ADVENTURES OF MY PILLOW.”
• He’s originally from Florida. Original parents: Lindsey Pittman and Madison Bell.
• His favorite season is spring.
• He is the best office pet one could ever ask for.

Now, let’s find out more about what this mysterious creature does at the office.

Read More

Words for Scary Days

In June, I started tutoring a 10-year-old in basic reading a couple of nights a week. It’s almost a year later and now he is my friend. Our bond was forged in the trenches of The Golden Compass, which we read aloud together over the course of many months (a too ambitious choice made by this first-time tutor) and spurred him to write many short stories about his own daemon, a penguin named Compass and Compass’ mortal enemy: the Apostrophe. Next on our list is The Lightning Thief and right now we’re cleansing our palate with book five of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Even though I feel like a kid when we’re reading together (we laugh and laugh, especially at Greg’s mom having no pupils), my tutoree, who is 11 now, is the kid here and he thinks of me as an adult. When we text, as friends do, I usually use that as an opportunity to encourage spelling of whole words (versus abbreviations) and proper grammar, but when he shared his fears about the tsunami this morning, I let that go. He goes to school on Alameda, the island that borders Oakland, so in light of worries about the repercussions, school was canceled—leaving him with television’s talking heads and some serious reality television, and leaving me not knowing what to say.

Read More

Playing Online Games at Work

Sometimes people ask me what happens at the Office of Letters and Light when we’re not neck-deep in our events. There are now eight of us who work year-round on Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo, and the Young Writers Program. And it’s a great question: What do we do with our days at 3354 Adeline when we’re between frantic writing adventures?

The short answer is that most of the staff works tirelessly on getting the websites and programs ready for the next event on the horizon.

Me? I spend a lot of time playing online games.

Yep. Most of my days are spent on quests in one of five different virtual worlds. I thought it might be nice to give you a tour of them to help you better understand what the heck we do here outside of April and November.

You ready? Strap on that virtual hover-pack and let’s head off!

Read More

Kindling it up

I’m usually a voracious reader, but the last year was a slow one for new books. I was in school, leaving me with limited reading time, and I was on leave from the library, making it much less convenient to grab things that caught my eye or pick up recommendations. 

Two things happened at the same time in April to push me back over to the reading side: I finished classes, and my mother lent me her Kindle for my three months in Berkeley. It was pretty much the perfect scenario for an ebook reader: three months away from my own collection and library card, limited suitcase space for bringing books with me or home again.

Once I got to California, I was spending an hour and a half a day on the bus, with no homework looming and new books only a click away. In the eight weeks I spent at OLL, I read about 17 books. This is actually my last weekend with the Kindle—as you can see in the photo, I wrote this sitting at the airport—so the flight was my last hurrah with the Kindle before it goes back to my mother. Luckily, I’m back at the library so I’m hoping I can keep up the pace even though I’m now juggling two jobs.

How do you feel about ebook readers? Do you have one? Do you want one? Do you feel they are an affront to books? I love paper books way too much to ever give them up, but I like having the choice between ebooks and the old-fashioned kind. The only time I don’t like ebooks for traveling: take-off and landing, when I inevitably find myself with nothing to do because all I brought is electronics. But that brief annoyance aside, I’ve really enjoyed my Kindle experience, and I thought I’d share some reviews with you all.

Read More