This week: Banned Books Week, R.L. Stine, literary recommendations, and some witchcraft, after the jump. Read more »

Lawrence Tarpey's "Pinocchio"

An old boyfriend once told me that I was the worst liar he ever knew.  He told me he could hear that distinct quiver in my voice and see the slight shift in my eyes every time I told a lie.  What he sadly never learned in our short-lived relationship was that these were calculated moments concocted to conceal my true dishonest self.  I had lulled him into believing I was a terrible liar in order to conceal the fact that I was actually great at it.

Before you go analyzing the verity of every past conversation you have ever had with me, please know that I’m given more crap for being too honest than lying too often.  I am that person in your life that tells you your latest script bored me to death and that your new girlfriend’s voice is the source of my migraines.  Though I choose not to engage it in often, lying is a necessary part of life.  Imagine if I had been completely honest with my old boyfriend? Or if he had been completely honest with me? The upside is that we probably would have wasted less time together but we also would have left the relationship with less of our dignity intact.  But forget all that – Lit Drift isn’t a dating column (at least not until Cosmo starts linking our articles) – I’m here today to hopefully find the correlation between great liars and great writers.  Read more »

One of the cool things about the arts is that they all complement each other. Dance and music are each arts unto themselves, but the results are transcendent when they are paired together. Music is also an integral component in film and television, which in turn makes use of screenwriting and visual arts. Everything overlaps.

But with the exception of the rare book soundtrack, the printed word tends to stand alone from the rest of the arts. Maybe that will change as new technology gives us interactive books with synchronized soundtracks and accompanying video. And while we’re at it: maybe new technology will give us books with holographic characters jumping out of every page.

Until then, there’s STFUAJPGM, a miniature micro-music mixtape magazine that marries literature with its long-lost friends: music, visual arts, and video. Each “episode” is centered around a central theme inspired by video game culture (think heroes, love stories, and travel) and involves a smorgasbord of multimedia to illustrate the theme: pixel art, video, short stories, and an overarching soundtrack that neatly weaves all the components together. STFUAJPGM is focused on freely distributed music within the chiptune community, so each episode is also available for download.

They’re only up to episode #5 so far, with new episodes coming out every month or so. An uncommon thing in today’s daily updated culture, but very much worth the wait. To get a better idea of what STFUAJPGM is and what they have to offer, hit the jump for Episode 0 (Pilot): A Love Story. Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Janine for picking up a copy of Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Crust by Lawrence Shainberg. Dubbed a “Vonnegut-worthy satire” by the Boston Globe, Crust is the story of prolific writer and author of the Complete Series (The Complete Book of Aids, 9/11, Terrorism), Walker Linchuk, who is suffering from a seven month plague of writer’s block. One morning Linchuk wakes to find a crust in his nose – the “definitive crust of his life” – that awakens him to a new world of desire and enlightenment. Equal parts George Orwell and Christopher Guest, Crust is an insightful and hilarious journey through our hyper-technological age.”

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Two Dollar Radio. Two Dollar Radio is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. They aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book individually and collectively providing a sonic progression that they believe to be too loud to ignore.

You can read the first chapter of Crust for free on Two Dollar Radio’s website.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment with your e-mail address in the space below, or send an email directly to contact@litdrift.com. We also recommend doing any or all of the following:  Read more »

I should've known what I was in for with this poster...

I’ve just returned from an incredibly enjoyable breakfast at The Smith with a good friend that I haven’t seen in some time.  We caught up a bit and discussed our lives in the city a couple years post-film school.  In our catching up, I told her about a screening I went to yesterday for the much anticipated film New York, I Love You. I felt that after a solid 15 hours after my viewing of this film, I’d be calm enough to discuss it rationally and gently encourage her to wait until it comes out on DVD before seeing it.  Instead, a certain rage and fury came flying out of my mouth along with flecks of my ham, Gruyère and egg brioche (okay, that last part was a lie – I just really wanted to relive my breakfast in any way possible). Riding on the success of Paris, Je T’aime, this collection of somewhat cohesive short films was expected to be vignettes of people’s lives accented by the essence and nuances of the city.  In some cases, it turned out to be a complete mockery of what Hollywood thinks this city is and in others, it may as well have been Random City in Middle America, I Love You.

May I also point out that there was no storyline featuring a black character? Or a gay character? Asian characters were only the most overused stereotypes – cab driver, hooker, laundromat owner.  The movie was shameless in its portrayal of New York.  Did a tourist make this film? At one point someone actually says, “This is why I love New York – moments like these.”  Unlike most feature length situations, this project has multiple directors and multiple writers to blame.  Brett Ratner (who was at the screening for a Q&A afterwards) was one of them.  His short was probably one of the most enjoyable – based on his real life high school prom night.  Though Ratner is an alumnus of NYU, he did his growing up in Miami so the original story is Floridian… other than the story taking place in New York and a rather unnecessary voiceover discussing how many drug stores there are in New York, there was nothing very New York about it.

Well, then what was I looking for, you might ask? If I’m going to complain so much, how would I have fixed it? Read more »

True or False: New York City has a full-time paid storyteller.

Answer: True!  So exciting and unbelievable.  Apparently there’s this woman, Diane Wolkstein who was a teacher and a pantomime in the U.S. and France in the 60s.  She dreamed of being a storyteller when she got out of school, but didn’t think this wasn’t a real or viable career. Later she was hired by NYC’s Parks Department to run a summer program for kids and became renowned in the neighborhood for her stories. Her first public storytelling session got a ton of press and led to her getting hired by the Department as the city’s first and only official storyteller.

She’s been telling stories now for 42 years.  Here’s Wolkstein herself from a recent article:

“I read a lot,” Wolkstein said. “I have to read 100 stories to find one I can use. You have to find a story that moves you, because if it doesn’t move you it won’t move anyone else. That’s what stories are about, sharing your heart,” she added. “You cloak it with words, but what you’re really doing is exchanging love.”

You can check out Diane’s personal website here for more information on her upcoming appearances.

The Expressive Intelligence Studio blog has a new post up about the roleplaying card game Magic: The Gathering, which made me feel nostalgic in an odd sort of way. Because while I did enjoy the game in its heyday, I had a very different experience with it because I never actually bothered to learn the rules of the game. I was inspired by the art on the cards and bored by the scoring system, and so instead came up with a new set of rules entirely (which I don’t remember at all now). I taught them to my friends and we played informal tournaments with each other at home, at school, wherever.

Like pretty much everyone ever, I have a certain fascination with my childhood, largely in part because I had no qualms whatsoever about turning up my nose at the so-called rules and inventing my own. No matter how silly or irrational they may have seemed. And because of this fearlessness (or, if you like, naiveté), the artifacts of my childhood consist of horribly-drawn comics, short stories plagiarized from my favorite novels, and scripts for movies I planned to make, camera be damned. I even convinced some of my friends to participate in an original musical about gang warfare, which wasn’t a fraction as hilarious to me then as it is to me now. Sure, I might not have had the necessary knowledge to write about such a subject, being a preteen girl from the suburbs of New Jersey. Sure, I might not have been the best candidate to compose the original score, not being able to actually play any musical instruments. But who cared? I was going to write as much of the musical as I could, and rehearse with my friends as much as I could, and have a blast doing it.

While I am thrilled beyond compare that I can (fairly) confidently say that I’m a better writer now than I was at 10 or 12, and that my ideas now actually come to fruition, I feel like there’s something I’ve lost. Read more »

This week: more Dan Brown, writers groups in Second Life, former presidential candidates turning to fiction, plus your pick-me-up, after the jump.

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I apologize if the combination of this picture and the post title brings to mind disturbing images. It was unintentional

I took a walk this morning because the weather was simply too beautiful and I realized it’s been a couple days since I bought a lottery ticket.  Near my apartment is a New York Lotto vending machine, tucked away in the corner of a deli next to a stand of stale looking powdered donuts.  Last night, during one of my now common bouts of insomnia, I did a little research.  According to NYLottery.org, the “White Ice 8’s” scratch-off ticket has the highest probability of winning you some cash.  Just imagine: your investment of just $2.00 can come right back at you as $20,000.00.  For those of you whose minds haven’t been blown by the possibility, let me repeat: that’s 10,000 times the amount of money you originally put in! Can you imagine??? Two bucks! I have two bucks! Do I have two bucks? Wait, now.  C’mon.  I know I had two dollars tucked in between that receipt for my Starbucks Vivanno and that other receipt for a pack of Moleskines.  Whoa, did I really order three extra shots of espresso in my Vivanno at 55 cents per extra shot? What the hell is wrong with me? I’m definitely in no position to be spending money on overpriced “designer” drinks and notebooks, let alone throwing away a single penny of it on scratch off tickets.  It’s a sad realization – considering just a year ago, successful self-employment had me feeling pretty great about my financial status.  Great enough to buy multiple drinks from Starbucks in a day.  Great enough to be okay with a twenty dollar lunch.  Great enough to drop five hundred dollars on a pair of Jimmy Choos.  Great enough to sign a two year lease with my 750 square foot apartment in the East Village.  Of course, just a year later I make the decision of taking a break from “the greatness” of being a 23-year-old entrepreneur and find myself unemployed in this fun little recession of ours, wallowing in the disgust I harbor for the poor financial decisions I made the year before.  

A friend of mine recently referred to this second year out of college as a “sophomore slump.”  Considering myself a sophomore when I’m no longer a student is rather unnerving.  This friend and I had both experienced very successful first years out of school, so how did we suddenly end up back at square one? And why doesn’t square one have padded walls and provide sedatives? 

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Pretty much everyone I know loves and has a crush on Ira Glass.  Yeah, you know him, the host of This American Life, the radio series (and now TV series) broadcast every Sunday on NPR affiliates around the country.

The show, a favorite since childhood, picks a theme each week and presents a story or many stories expounding on that theme.  Many celebrity writers have built a name by producing shorts for TAL, including David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, but many other voices add to the mix.

People are obsessed with this guy — he’s probably the most well-loved indie guy of all time.  Somehow he’s made it trendy to be awkward. But more importantly, the show has brought back the shared experience of radio — millions of people tune in each week to hear stories.

So I was thrilled to discover Glass’s video series on storytelling tips.  Check out the four-part series below: Read more »