Brian Koppelman’s Epic Tweet Storm

Written Reordered by Brendan O’Meara

I’m probably not the first to do this, but I hope I’m not the last.

As many of you know, Brian Koppelman, filmmaker, television show runner, podcaster, and advocate for blocked artists everywhere (six seconds at a time), is a favorite of mine. I’m a true fan.

He went on yet another artist-serving tweet storm, and I’ve reordered—REMASTERED!—it, and put it here for you.

Enjoy.

Oh, and you can thank him on Twitter. Seriously. Use 140 characters or less (ideally less) and THANK. THIS. MAN.

Now enjoy.

#CNF Episode 26: Kevin Robbins Talks Harvey Penick and the Sacrifice of Writing a Book

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Sorry of the long delay in episodes, but the misses and I are moving to Eugene, OR very soon. I’m hustling to sell our belongings because all we’re taking is a Honda Accord over the Rockies.

We’re starting fresh.

Naturally, everything has taken a backseat to that.

That said, I finally edited this interview with Kevin Robbins (@kdrobbins on Twitter), author of Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom from the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf.

Enjoy! (Oh, and don’t be shy about subscribing to the podcast and the monthly newsletter!)

The Mental Commute

My cold-brew coffee rig. French press, Yeti mug, 100% maple syrup, cream from pasture-raised cattle.

A photo posted by Brendan O’Meara (@brendanomeara) on


Written by B. Ryan O’Meara

For some perverse reason, I’m going to try and write a little blog post every day. Sometimes long, other times short. Just for fun.

Like, for instance, I had this thought of the commute to work. Take my wife. She rides her bike 5.5 miles to the train station in the morning along unsafe roads, boards the express NJ Transit train up to Newark-Penn Station, hops on the PATH train to World Trade Center, then walks almost a mile to her building. Door to door: 2 hours (4 hours a day, 20 hours a week commuting. No wonder why she’s so tired.)

Ick.

But the commute, that distance between home and work, isn’t always physical. It can be mental.

I have the pleasure—but sometimes curse—of working at home, yet it still takes me about three hours to get to work. My commute is mental.

I ride with Mellie to the train station because it’s dark and scary and threatening in some areas. I come back home, walk the dogs for an hour, meditate for 15 minutes, write in the journal for another 15-20 minutes, make my coffee, cook my breakfast, then read, then I’m usually ready to put my ass in the chair and work on my book or a long feature or a column I have due.

Mellie has that horrible physical commute. Mine, while not horrible, is of the mental varietal. Both provide the mind with preparation for the word day.

Wisdom from a Rat

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

I came across that neat little image the other day, thought it’d be worth sharing.

Also, to quote the great Seth Godin, “This might not work.”

Once you embrace that (and I’m trying, man, am I trying!), then what’s to fear? You’re either great or invisible.

Go be great.

The Greatest Feeling in All of Publishing

Written by Brendan O’Meara

So, here’s the thing: Want to know the best feeling in all of publishing? It might not be what you think.

Granted this is entirely and purely subjective, but I think you’ll either agree with me or nod your head and think, ‘Yeah, I can see that.’

The best part of publishing isn’t the writing, isn’t the actual publishing, it is the moment you ship it or hit send.

That’s it! It’s not even that lightning strike of when the recipient says, ‘Yes, I will take it.’

The reason is two-fold:

One, between you (the sender) and them (publisher, agent, whoever), the book can be anything. It can sell 1,000,000 copies or zero. It can connect to a disenfranchised 14-year-old, or put a smile on a library patron.

Two, you finished something.

This is important because so many people, myself included, love that first 20-50 pages of a book. Even that first page, when the idea seems PERFECT in all caps. To reach 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 words, that’s special.

I don’t care what your skill is as a writer. I will shake your hand if you wrote that many words, shaped it, and shipped it.

When you hit send on the email that puts your book into some binary code out on some fiber optics cable, there is no greater accomplishment or feeling.

That charge of seeing something through to completion and then putting it out there, well, nothing beats that. No bad reviews, no Amazonian, one-star trolls, no publisher buy-backs, no seeing your book sell for a penny on a used-book store table. It can be anything.

You saw it through. You hit send.

Now go start the next one.

Episode 25—Elane Johnson on her Winning Essay, Accepting Your Work as Good, and Writers Block

Written by Brendan O’Meara

“A successful writer is someone who alters me.” —Elane Johnson

“Teaching for me is writing.”—Elane Johnson

We’ve made it to 25 episodes, can you believe it?

Elane Johnson comes by the podcast to talk about her essay “The Math of Marriage,” which won Creative Nonfiction’s marriage essay contest for Issue No. 59. You’ll have to subscribe to magazine to read it.

What will be in store for the next 25 episodes of the podcast? I have no idea. I just hope you keep hanging around and listening to these often unsung writers talk about their work.

Elane also references Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir. You can hear her episode too.

Episode 24—Brin-Jonathan Butler Takes Us to Cuba!

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“You don’t know when you’ve kicked up the hornets’ nest until they’re all on you.” Brin-Jonathan Butler.

“The decision itself was the villain.” Brin-Jonathan Butler

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Brin-Jonathan Butler returns this time to talk about his wonderful memoir The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Final Days of Castro’s Cuba.

In this latest episode, we really drill down on his book and his time in Cuba. It “closed a door on a decade,” as Brin says.

The experience was, in some ways, a gamble. But the reasoning was simple because it allows him to lead a life worth writing about, as he says.

So I hope you enjoy this episode. Also, be sure to listen to our Round 1.

I ask that you subscribe to the podcast (working on getting it in the Android store. For now it’s on iTunes), subscribe to my monthly newsletter, and to share the podcast with folks you think may enjoy it.

How to Handle Dejection, a lesson from Parks and Rec creator Mike Schur

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Amy Poehler wrote in her book Yes Please, a book with great insight into what it takes to be an artist, that after shooting an episode during Season 5, Parks and Recreation earned an Emmy nomination for best comedy.

They lost.

Poehler wrote:

We were upset because as we know, no matter how much you think you don’t want the pudding, once people start telling you that you might get the pudding it makes you want that pudding bad.

Awards, by and large are B.S. Then again, sometimes you win. In fact, Ron Swanson, the famed P&R character perfectly played by Nick Offerman said as much in an episode I cannot remember.

What did show runner and show creator Mike Schur do in response to the disappointment of his craft’s highest honor? Poehler writes:

Instead of being upset, Mike said, ‘I’m going to go write the scene where Ben proposes to Leslie.’

And if you’re a fan of the show, you know it’s one of the most beautiful scenes in the show’s run. Makes me weep every time I see it…and I’ve seen it probably five times.

So you didn’t win an award. What did you do? Did you mope? Or did you fight back by writing the best damn scene you’ve ever written?

I thought so. Now get to work.

Ernest Hemingway on Why Hunger Made for Good Discipline

By Brendan O’Meara

I hate being hungry. I can’t focus. I get angry. Irritable. Get that man a slice of pizza. Anything!

So years ago when I first read A Moveable Feast, one of my favorite books, by Ernest Hemingway, his sketch “Hunger was Good Discipline” struck me as total BS.

Hemingway wrote,

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the baker shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in American would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.

In a few words this sounds like a nightmare, skipping meals, but I’ve lived it. To this day. Because money is tight and nobody is buying what I sell and the government must take 50 percent of anything I do make. I eat a vegetarian diet because for $70 a week, it feeds me and my wife.

There’s the gnawing at the gut that Hemingway says,

There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.

This was where my infantile reader mind flew off the handles. If I were looking at paintings on an empty stomach, the growling would far distract my senses from anything other than the most primal need to eat.

But upon re-reading this section, I realized this wasn’t food-hunger at all. It was the hunger of the hustler, that when you deeply want something, when you can’t think of anything else other than whatever-that-is, that hunger creates the discipline to hit the page with rigor.

Hemingway says,

You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord. You have credit and Sylvia [Beech] would have loaned you money. She has plenty of times. Sure. And then the next thing you would be compromising on something else. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now?

Of course he visits a cafe to eat and get “tight” as Jacob Barnes or Lady Brett may say. And of course he refers to his lecherous ways by “compromising on something else,” but if we look past that we see the discipline all artists must have to succeed.

Here again we see hunger for food as a conduit for the deeper hunger of literary stardom and artistic integrity. His deep pursuit for telling stories created the discipline. He had a ritualized morning schedule that only the truly hungry ever adhere to (more on this soon).

A Moveable Feast is such fine read, of the famous writer looking back to a time when nothing was certain, when the belly was empty, and hunger was, in fact, good discipline.

Episode 22—Jeff Krulik on “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” “Led Zeppelin Played Here,” and His Kinship with Oddities

Written by Brendan O’Meara

This is a special episode of #CNF, the podcast where I speak with writers, authors, reporters and now filmmakers, in the genre of creative nonfiction.

Yes, Episode 22 features Jeff Krulik, a documentary filmmaker [link for those who can’t see the embed player below] who has the parking-lot genre nailed. He made Heavy Metal Parking Lot (see above) among other wonderful documentaries.

I worked with Jeff on an exciting project called Kentucky Confidential, headed up by John Scheinman (Episode 9 of the #CNF Podcast, go listen). You’ll find Jeff’s videos as well as my Bourbon Underworld stories.

In this episode, Jeff talks about the origins of HMPL as well as his latest movie Led Zeppelin Played here. We talk about freelancing and the financial realities of the biz, as well as his kinship with Maryland and oddities, those people on the fringe.

Here are some selected links from the episode to further educate yourself on all things Krulik. Follow him on Twitter @jeffkrulik and visit his website jeffkrulik.com.

Here’s the Deadspin article that has become the definitive history of HMPL.

One last call to action: Please subscribe to my newsletter. I try and send out a monthly dispatch of five cool things I’ve read, heard, or consumed.

And subscribe to the podcast. It’s a wing of my “brand,” and getting people on board will only help me churn out bigger and better work.

Thanks!

Love,

Brendan