The Day the Music Died was 55 years ago today.  This is the only video I could find of Buddy Holly performing, though— as there’s no guitar lead visible— I imagine he’s just miming to his own record. But then he was far from the last person to mime a Buddy Holly song, now was […]

Back in September, friend of the blog Marcus Geduld posted a long, thoughtful essay in response to an essay I wrote about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go.  That essay was my response to a literary writer turning to a science fiction trope, and necessarily involved theorizing about the differences between literary fiction and genre. […]

Writers are made, not born.  The talent itself may be innate, but it must be conditioned and developed, and developed in such a way to maximize the writer’s potential. At Taos Toolbox, we don’t tell you what to write, we help you make what you write better. If you want to write better, you need […]

I was surprised that Saving Mr. Banks received only one Oscar nomination (for Original Music), since it’s such a well-written, well-acted film with a powerhouse cast of past and future Oscar contenders: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell, Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman.   Thompson is terrific, and Hanks is very good, even if he’s somewhat […]