Month: April 2013

Writing Etude #1: Having Pieces Left Over In Your Hand

gordsellar5 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series For Writers

Since coming back to the saxophone, I’ve discovered what an amazing resource the internet is for a musician who is looking into techniques, looking for ways to improve his or her playing. Within ten minutes of looking around, one finds all kinds of homegrown etudes, studies, all kinds of things one can download, print out, and try in one’s next practice session. The same isn’t really true for writers. There are a lot of blogs that discuss writing, and even writing techniques. But one hardly finds the net overflowing with etudes of the sort young musicians can grab onto and …

Continue Reading

Phil Barone’s Tone Production Exercises

gordsellar0 Comments

Note: I wrote this about ten days ago. I thought I’d posted it, but I hadn’t. So I’m posting it now, backdated. It’s probably not of such pressing interest to most people reading this blog, so I don’t mind doing that even if it means some people will miss it. It’s basically all about my current practice regimen, my interaction with Phil Barone online, and my return to the saxophone.

Continue Reading

Interview by Tate

gordsellar0 Comments

I only vaguely remember answering  these questions, for good reason: Tate’s ESL Travel Chronicle interviewed me last year but I must have missed when the interview was posted. Here it is, for the  curious. (Funny reading this, now that I’m no longer in Korea.) Since it’s mainly about my life in Korea, and not about my writing, I’m just posting it to the blog, and not to the interviews section of this… wait, that’s gone missing. Er… well, anyway.

Continue Reading

In With the New

gordsellar2 Comments

In with the new project, that is. I had a little choreography to work out, since I’m planning to co-write a story with a friend soon, but just got a great idea for a screenplay that pretty much appeared in my mind, not quite fully-formed, but almost. The screenplay sort of brings together a lot of things I’ve wished I could see in a Korean SF movie, and following Justin Howe’s advice, I figure now is a good time to try write it… especially since there’s enough time to get a draft done and submit it to the PIFAN-hosted NAFF …

Continue Reading

Back to Sax

gordsellar0 Comments

Those who visit my webpage (as opposed to reading it via RSS) will notice that over the last few months I changed my gravatar (to a friend’s caricature from 1995 of me with a saxophone, which you can see to the right), and then I changed the template and the layout of the pages in the top menu, and added a lot of headers, including a few with me playing saxophone, like these below: The template change had been necessary for a while, but the selection of images of me playing music in the headers has not been incidental. Ever …

Continue Reading

Charles on the Cthulhu Festival of Film, and What We’re Working On

gordsellar6 Comments

I’m in the home stretch of the screenplay I’m trying to wrap up today–a project that anyway I’m not really supposed to be talking about for now, though hopefully at some point I can because it’s interesting, and relevant, and Lovecraftian, and set in Korea–but in any case, since I am busy and can’t discuss it anyway, here’s something else: My friend Charles attended the recent Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul a couple of months ago (at the end of February), and soon after posted his thoughts about the films and the event in general. I haven’t been able to …

Continue Reading

Immigration Officer Second, Zombie Fan First.

gordsellar7 Comments

So Mrs. Jiwaku and I have been in Saigon a little more than a week now. A million things have been happening, but the funniest and most blog-worthy at the moment was what happened at the Immigration desk, after I got my visa stamp and just before we exited out into the airport proper to be greeted by our friends Nick and Chris. Mrs. Jiwaku went first, and the immigration officer had nothing much to say to her–he just looked at her for a moment, fiddled with her passport, and stamped it. But then I stepped forward. I happened to …

Continue Reading

In Sydney? Watch Our Movie!

gordsellar0 Comments

For those readers in Sydney, the Australian premiere of “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is at Syndney’s genre film festival, Fantastic Planet. It screens at 3pm on the 14th of April, as part of the H.P. Lovecraft vs. Stephen King shorts program. They even used a still shot from “Jo Hyeja” for the webpage for that session of the festival! (Get your tickets here.) Wish we could be there… but we’re working on other projects down here in Saigon!

Continue Reading

Korea in English-Language SF

gordsellar1 Comment
This entry is part 60 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Over at Gusts of Popular Feeling, everyone’s favorite archives-trawler Matt has a post about about “the first SF story involving Korea” and a few other such tales from the Galaxy/Amazing Stories era. I’ve left a comment clarifying that “the first SF story” should be qualified as “the first English-language SF story” and also noting that depending on how you define “SF,” one might consider Jack London’s Star Rover the first in the English language. As for the first Korean-language SF story, I don’t know what it was, though I’d argue that the amount of remixing that seems to have gone …

Continue Reading

Patience Please…

gordsellar0 Comments

UPDATE (later the same day): In addition to the below, may also see old posts being accidentally republished as new ones. I’m clearing out a few old plugins and that means removing some stuff from a few posts, and republishing them. I’ll try make sure things are in the right time settings, but it may get borked a little here and there, temporarily. ORIGINAL POST: Despite no change in the number of visitors coming to my site, and despite having a cache enabled and stuff like that, I am experiencing a much higher server load at the moment. I’ve been …

Continue Reading