Quips Notes - 17.02.05

Recently, the funniest thing about writing these movie reviews each week is the number of different directions that it can inspire me. Sure, there's always previewing and writing them, and then submitting and uploading them. Until it's time to do it all over again, of course. That's pretty well a given, that I'm actually still quite thankful for as I enter my fourth year of many several more to come - if all goes well. What I mean regarding the number of different directions has more to do with the peripheral things that can easily be born from what I already do.

For instance, my recent stint continuing to find and contact newspaper editors, to see if they'd be interested in adding my movie reviews to their fine print dailies or weeklies. Nothing's come of it so far. The local community newspapers seem to be the worst for not really knowing what to make of my offer, but the search is enjoyable enough to offset any resulting rejection. Same goes for my attempting to find a literary agent or publishing company.

I got the idea that my reviews - which can still be found at my web site, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips (www.geocities.com/iamstephenbourne/moviequips.html) - would make an interesting read if bound as a compilation book. The idea actually struck me while I was rewriting my bio for the site. Including some of the self publishing stuff that I'd done, and remembering a lot of the same books that I ended up reviewing back then, it dawned on me that a large enough portion of my movie reviews were entertaining and enjoyable enough to cobble together and sell through book stores for movie fans looking for something different and far less encapsulated than what's found in many reviews-type critics books these days. Well, I thought it was an interesting idea. None of the literary agents or publishing houses who've heard from me to date agree, though. I'd still like to keep trying to make that happen, and actually do want to avoid publishing the book - or series of books - myself. So, we'll see where that goes.

The last thing that I've been working on is trying to figure out if it's really worthwhile changing my movie reviews web site. There are days where I find it needs some freshening up, but that could simply be due to the fact that I've never been a particularly big fan of 'black sites'. It could use some lightening up. Simplification. However, funnily enough, after cobbling together a new logo and a proper navigational bar for it, it still ended up having a black background. Too funny. So, obviously, more work is required, if I eventually do get tired enough with the current layout (which does work quite well over-all, in my opinion) to actually do anything drastic to it. If the image link below works, here's what I'm talking about:



Thanks for checking in.