And Now for Something Completely Different: Pay Attention to the Paper (pay no attention to the AI behind the curtain)

A bit of random free verse for you . . . Pay attention to the paper,the paper is the most blank essay of all.Does the paper make you shiver?does it? I cannot help but stop and look at the aimless doodle.Down, down, down into the darkness of the doodle,Gently it goes – the undirected, the […]

How to Make it Look Like You Don’t Have Writer’s Block

This is not a list of ten tips. At least, I don’t think it is; I haven’t written it yet. Anyway, it’s not a 10-List. Also, this post really doesn’t fit as part of my In the Writers Room (with Firewater) series because it’s really not about writing. It’s about looking like you don’t have […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #8: Blake Snyder’s 10 Types of Movies

A while back, I published a post titled “The Seven Basic Plots (and how I got there with the incidental aid of Rob Lowe).” Rob Lowe was the host of a Netflix documentary, Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! He mentioned that there were only seven basic plots in an offhand way, which led me to […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #7: The Three Parts of Stories and Novels (According to Stephen King)

I do make fun of Stephen King at times. Mostly I mock his inhuman prolificacy. He’s probably published something new in the time it took me to craft this sentence and look up the noun form of the word prolific. That’s it. I’ve got nothing else bad to say about the man. He ensnared me […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #6: Teaser and Four: Using Firefly to Plot Your Story (modeling your story structure on a television episode) [Part Two of a two-part discussion]

During our last meeting, we discussed, briefly, the three-act story structure which is often credited to Aristotle from about two thousand years ago but most assuredly has been around even longer, probably since before written language. I mean, it’s intuitive, right? Beginning. Middle. Ending. I suppose you can imagine writing something that is all Middle […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #5: Aristotle Was Onto Something (acting out your story structure) [Part One of a two-part discussion]

You’re no dummy. You are already familiar with the three-act story structure that Aristotle suggested for tragedies in his Poetics. Maybe you’ve even read some of the stuff written by the late Syd Field, who also championed the three-act structure in screenwriting some two thousand years, give or take, after Aristotle. In hindsight, it seems […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #4: Main Sets and Hub Worlds (Setting in Fiction)

Matthew Perry passed away recently. At least, Perry’s death is recent as of the date I’m typing this sentence. Who knows when this will be edited and published? Perry, of course, played the role of Chandler on the Must-See TV show Friends for ten seasons. The witty, acerbic, sarcastic, self-loathing Chandler was my favorite character […]

Fanatic (Or, a brief digression about Star Wars duels, Coca-Cola, and my fanaticism)

Back around the turn of the century—from late 1999 until 2002, I believe—I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where I worked for Target stores. Not to go all Dickens on you, it was the best of times and the worst of times. I went through a separation and divorce during this period (which has elements of […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #3: Dreaming While Awake

Like most—if not all—of my writing ideas, this one is a byproduct of other things. Perhaps you’ve already read the second entry of my In the Writers Room (with Firewater) series, titled “Future History.” Some of the ideas in this post somehow asserted themselves during the writing of that post and tried to take it […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #2: Future History

We’re about to take a little trip, you and I. You’ll need to bear with me for just a short while and trust me to get us to the intended destination. This is my second entry in a series I’m calling In the Writer’s Room (with Firewater). Before you go back to check the previous […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #1: The Interview Technique (getting to know your characters)

By any objective measure, the Linkin Park song “Talking to Myself” would have made a great title for this post, because that’s what this writing exercise is really all about. Only, I was never a Linkin Park fan. I really tried at first, even stooping so low as buying their first CD. I actually started […]

And Now for Something Completely Different: “Rain”

The last time I posted something called “And Now for Something Completely Different” it was when I was going through a found art phase and was creating poetry using other writers’ words. I borrowed sentences and phrases from two great 20th century mystery writers to create something different that approximated but wasn’t quite poetry. That […]

Processing the World (Or, a brief digression about Netflix’s The Night Agent, writing to impose order upon chaos, and a gross but pointless personal anecdote)

I was watching the ninth episode of the first season of the Netflix series The Night Agent this morning. It’s the penultimate episode. But don’t worry, this isn’t a review. Or, if it is, it’s a backhanded one. I don’t normally write reviews for shows that fail to inspire me. What I’m saying, is this. […]

Firewater’s Reviews in Review (Or, a brief digression about my history of writing reviews, an annual accounting of entertainment consumed, and the benefits of prolonged navel gazing)

Writing reviews rekindled my joy of writing nearly two decades ago. I began writing reviews of the movies and television shows I watched via those silver discs I used to receive from Netflix every week. Those reviews no longer exist, at least not as an active part of the Netflix site. I suppose everything still […]

My First Novel

I wrote my first novel when I was in high school. I wrote in longhand back in those days. In pencil, and in thick spiral-bound notebooks, preferably college ruled. My pencil of choice was, of course, the Faber Castell Velvet No. 2. I don’t remember how I came around to fetishizing this particular brand of […]

The Seven Basic Plots (and how I got there with the incidental aid of Rob Lowe)

What had happened was, I woke up too early on a Saturday morning, which is depressingly normal behavior for me. I don’t work weekends these days and never set my alarm the way I do during the week. Monday through Friday, I will sleep until my cell phone alarm wakes me at 6 AM. On […]

A Grim Dystopian Future (Or, a brief digression about WordPress categories, three-act story structure, and the reasons why so many of our stories have such bleak settings)

Not long ago I created a new category on my WordPress account and included a lot of my old posts in it. The category is, of course, A Grim Dystopian Future. Full disclosure: I included the article “A” so that the category would land near the top of my list, just under the category 10 […]

Cinematic Perspective (Or, a brief digression about sensory engagement in movies, writing dialogue and narrative POV)

You like movies? I like movies. Some movies, anyway. Stories told through the medium of motion pictures tend to be memorable because they engage the senses of the person watching them. Sight and sound, certainly. These are the two obvious senses engaged. But, I think I can make a case for the other senses as […]

What’s in a Pen Name? (secret origin of Firewater)

My real name isn’t Firewater. Shocker. I know. What’s more, it’s not even close to Firewater. You’d be hard put to deduce my given name from my chosen nom de guerre. What I’m saying is my real name isn’t Fred Waterman or Sapphire Waters, or anything that could be twisted into Firewater like some funky […]

A Story is Born (or: a brief digression about fiction writing, idea generation, and Gilmore Girls)

During the last six months of 2021, I managed to get 10,000 words written of a novel-length story idea that’s been percolating in the back of my head for more than twenty years. Since I average 250 words per printed page (double-spaced, 12-point type), that’s forty pages. Not a bad start. These forty pages are […]

But, I Digress . . .: a brief digression about the massive size of the internet and why you shouldn’t feel bad for calling yourself a writer.

There’s a scene in an episode of Seinfeld in which a woman cheers on hundreds of marathon runners by shouting, “You’re all winners!” A few years ago, I wrote a rather short essay that still managed to wander off-topic in spite of its brevity entitled “Everyone is a Writer.” No exclamation point, but it might […]

Ticking Away the Moments that Make Up a Dull Day (Or: I Want to be a Writer, But I Don’t Have the Time)

I’m no stranger to rationalization. It’s easy to make excuses for not doing something. I was sidetracked by work, or by other things I need to take care of at home, family obligations, or the last half of Season 5 of Lucifer that dropped on Netflix and which I feel compelled to binge-watch. There’s only […]

The First Draft of Anything is . . . (another questionable writing quote from Hemingway)

This post is about first drafts, certainly. It’s also about the reliability of long-accepted quotes from dead people. A while back, I wrote a post titled Write Drunk, Edit Sober (good bad advice on how to tap your creativity like a keg). The “write drunk, edit sober” quote has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway for […]

Writer’s Block Party: writing your way through the Wall

I know, I’ve bragged about publishing 800 posts and over a million words on WordPress, mostly reviews and undisciplined rants about nerd-centric topics. Lots of Star Trek and Star Wars, as well as vanity projects that appeal mainly to an audience of one—the author himself. During that same time—since December 2015—I’ve written a lot of […]

Escape (Not the Piña Colada Song): musings on escapist fiction and people who don’t like the taste of chocolate

For me, science fiction—as a fiction genre—is speculative fiction about the possible. By comparison, fantasy—which is science fiction’s close cousin—is speculative fiction about the impossible. A proverbial fine line exists between the two genres, a line which often gets crossed. So often, in fact, that we see both genres lumped together under the SFF banner, […]

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