Paul Ryan O'Connor

I keep going back to what remains of the Czech New Wave collection on Criterion Channel. Next month they're doing Romanian New Wave. Twice the chance to appear a psychopath.

Promotional graphic for the Criterion Channel titled "MARCH ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL." The top half features a large image of Sarah Michelle Gellar from 'Cruel Intentions' holding a finger to her lips in a "shushing" gesture.

✨ Announcing our MARCH 2026 Criterion Channel lineup! ✨ bit.ly/4aJwic3

The Wisdom of Wally Wood — Paul O'Connor Embrace formula.

"Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up."

The Wisdom of Wally Wood

#comics

CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND AFRICAN AMERICAN MYSTERY WRITERS: Gary Phillips, prolific writer of fiction, comic books and an activist, took a writing class from Robert Crais and created p.i. Ivan Monk, who features in his first novel, VIOLENT SPRING (1994), considered a noir classic.

Yeah I think the key is keep going forward, as you describe. You can't revise a blank page. Get the words down.

"Write the islands." Afterwards you sometimes find you don't need the connecting stuff in any case.

Wide enough for a beach towel!

Patience and steady effort ... that's all we can control. I aim for 1500 words/session in first draft, and 2K/session in the second. I can keep up a marathon pace at that rate (usually), but I find taking breaks between acts & drafts is critical. Those gaps are a good time for a short story.

Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, c1934.

Congrats! I got to 20K last night -- the end of my first act -- and I'm convinced it's utter crap. Taking a week away from the thing, will do other work. That always helps. Keep going!

You throw out the record book when those two face off!

man sat in a time machine. Not a real one though, I mean the man is real, but the machine isn't, well it is but it doesn't travel through time, although thinking about it we all travel through time don't we. My head hurts

Ray Bradbury in the ‘Time Machine’ movie prop, circa 1960

Whitey By The Numbers — Paul O'Connor Story autopsy of a mob meeting gone wrong.

"... if it (a story) isn't ready, it isn't ready. If you can't tell yourself that, the market will."

Whitey By The Numbers

#RandomMovieGIF
Brief Encounter (1945)

Transformational. Showed me you have to grow old, but you don't have to grow up.

Christopher Lee in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

I've got that one on digital ... someplace ... might have bit the dust when Comixology exploded.

I had a subscription as a kid. In 1974 I visited the Ackermansion!

Kept trying to onboard myself with Legion but it never quite took.

DC really won me over in that era, and it opened up fresh worlds to me because I'd never much read DC books before. This was also the age of Watchmen, Byrne's Superman reboot, Crisis, an expanding Green Lantern universe, that irreverent Justice League run -- good books every month.

Likewise. Didn't care for DC in the 1970s. Went hard for DC in the 80's, though, with Dark Knight, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Titans -- great era over there and Marvel really fell behind.

Never fails.

I had a bunch of those WCAs but can't remember much about them ... I was no longer a kid and my mind was less fragile to being bent. Further proof that the "golden age" of everything is twelve!

That there were alt futures at all blew my mind. I expected bank robberies. That same summer of '74 brought me Deathlok, too.

Time for you to start an alternate account!

Yes! That same summer I bought Marvel Two-In-One #5, and discovered the Guardians and learned there were alternate futures, alternate earths in the Marvel Universe. Hooked for life.

Thor was a book that expanded my consciousness as a young Marvel reader. It wasn't just superheroes. It was mythology and science fiction and cosmic drama, too.

Thomas Gomez back there wearing the look of a man who knows his tie would get the gold in any other room ... but this one.

You see a tie like that, you start looking to see if someone's cut a tie-shaped hole in the kitchen drapes.

Easier to drag a damn steamboat over a mountain than understand Amazon’s author page process.