Author Archive: Eric San Juan
Eric San Juan
April 14, 2014
There is a segment of music fandom that say Nirvana is overrated. They’re probably not wrong. The band got catapulted into sainthood on the strength of a small catalog, albeit a pretty great one, and a metric ton of media hype. Their status as deities is perhaps overblown, even if they were briefly great. Still, some among the naysayers also say they don’t get why people connected with Cobain. They say his lyrics were mostly strung together nonsense (true) and his songs were simple rips on Pixies and Beatles melodies (also true). So why the hell did anyone connect with this junkie? For me, I can point to two small music moments that exemplify what it was that bored under my skin. The first was…
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Eric San Juan
March 28, 2014
The trick to writing great conversations is dear god how the hell am I supposed to know? Who COULD know? Seriously, do you understand how hard it is to pen dialogue that sounds real and natural but that also gets across the information you need to get across? ‘Cause that’s the thing, really. In a book or a short story or comic or whatever, dialogue isn’t merely people talking. It has to get across information. That information may be characterization or character history or plot details or exposition or mood or a million other things, but the point is that dialogue should be there for a reason. Yet at the same time, it should feel perfectly natural. Perfectly real. Perfectly alive. Otherwise readers will cry…
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Eric San Juan
November 18, 2013
So hey, check it out. Breaking Down Breaking Bad: Unpeeling the Layers of Television’s Greatest Drama is available for purchase and stuff. It’s from me, so that’s kind of cool. It’s available for Kindle and Kindle-friendly devices such as iPads and iPhones, as well as in a print edition. It’s totally affordable, too. Impulse buy! This book began as a germ of an idea about a year or so ago, but it wasn’t an idea I took very seriously at first. Too much on my plate at the time, dealing with too many other things, juggling too many other projects. But in the run up to the show’s final eight episodes, my fever for all things Breaking Bad reached ridiculous proportions. I spent an absurd…
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Eric San Juan
October 14, 2013
For 15 years, I have recorded noisy, droning music under the name m2. Okay, it’s actually been longer than that. Recording music of this sort long pre-dated the m2 project. It even pre-dated owning a four-track recorder. I used to own one of those old twin-deck cassette stereos with a turntable on top. One day I discovered that if you plugged headphones into the mic jack and dubbed a tape from one deck to the other, you could kinda sorta play with the tape and have it record layers on top of one another. It was messy and ugly, but it worked. You could layer music. So I promptly took a cassette I had — I remember what it was, too; a dub of R.E.M….
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Eric San Juan
July 18, 2013
Hey, not fer nuthin’, but my favorite little Pine Barrens town happens to have a Facebook page, and it happens to have been started by yours truly, and it happens to have all sorts of awesome pictures and facts from this great book about Lakehurst. In fact, the page has been going for some time now, and it’s full of AWESOME memories and pictures and general stuff from in and around Lakehurst, like airships, the Hindenburg disaster, life in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, places to drink great New Jersey beer, and loads more. So hey, be cool and click on over and give the page a “like.” I’d be awful appreciative. I might even smile about it or something. And hey, it’d be spiffy…
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