Writing
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
July 15, 2013
… so that’s kind of cool. The follow-up to A Year of Hitchcock is due out in, damn, just a few weeks! Called Hitchcock’s Villains: Murders, Maniacs and Mother Issues, this collaboration with Jim McDevitt is a full exploration of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest villains, what makes them tick, the themes that drive the darkness in his movies, and of Hitchcock’s own psyche. I think it’s pretty great. This will be my fifth book, collaborative or otherwise, with a sixth hopefully coming out next year in ebook form via the Philadelphia Weekly. (That project is still up in the air.) The project has actually been in gestation for some time now, practically since A Year of Hitchcock was finished. Basking in the glow of finishing such…
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Alfred Hitchcock, Films, Works by Eric, Writing
A Year of Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock, book, books, film, films, hitchcock, Jim McDevitt, Writing
Eric San Juan
July 5, 2013
Way back when I first wrote Stuff Every Husband Should Know and contributed to Geek Wisdom, I pitched the idea of doing a beer book to my editor at Quirk Books. I can kinda write, and I like beer, so why not bring the two together for a beer book? I was given a dose of reality. You have no history of beer writing, he said, so pitching a beer book would be difficult. Made sense. I may write, but that doesn’t mean I could suddenly do a great book on growing great tulips. (I could.) I needed experience. So I started blogging about beer. It was a way to get my feet wet and start building cred in the beer world. To be honest,…
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Eric San Juan
June 28, 2013
Blogs are like great weights affixed to your neck, or rather, like a 200-pound sets of car keys. You don’t want to carry the damn things around, but the car won’t start without them. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. Probably should have stayed current. Should have been updating all along. Could have talked about this project or that, or merely talked about James Gandolfini passing away and why Bruce Springsteen is probably better than I give him credit for and why the Akira manga is crazy good. Yet the truth is, I’d rather be working on new projects than talking about them. The other truth is, even though it’s seen as your authorial duty to plug your upcoming books or whatever else…
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