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More Random Thoughts (said with seriousness, and reverb)

By Arjun Basu | Published: June 20, 2012

1. I’m tired of people telling others what to do. Professionally. There are so many how-to experts. And then you achieve some kind of fame doing something (and that fame is usually completely deserved) and so you translate that success into telling others how to do what you just did. Because it was so easy? […]

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Random Thoughts About Clouds, Dancing Writers, TV, Boomers, Beer and Serena’s Butt

By Arjun Basu | Published: June 10, 2012

Thoughts generally are random. That’s what makes them magical. Or at least interesting. The random nature of thought, or what some of us might call stream of consciousness, leads to the difficult brilliance of the likes of Joyce and Borges, or the hilarious (but studied) non-sequiturs of Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin. Wait. I think watching […]

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Happy Birthday To Me

By Arjun Basu | Published: May 16, 2012

I started this website a year ago because I read somewhere that there were upwards of 400 million English blogs in the world and I wondered why I wasn’t one of them. (Actually, that’s not true – it had nothing to do with the number of blogs and I’m sure there are something like 450 […]

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A Vision of the New World

By Arjun Basu | Published: April 30, 2012

For those who couldn’t make last week’s Shindig, here are two screenshots from the event. The first one shows me and some extremely bored looking people waiting around for the reading to start. (My kid is in the screenshot along the bottom.) The second one shows a screenshot from the Q&A session, really toward the […]

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The Virtual Fan

By Arjun Basu | Published: April 27, 2012

Last night, after much promotion, I held a virtual reading at a site called Shindig. Kind of like a mix between a group Skype or a G+ hangout, Shindig allows writers (or anyone for that matter) to talk to a lot of people from different places at the same time. It also allows them to […]

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Two Very Different Books, One Recommendation

By Arjun Basu | Published: April 9, 2012

Two books by two friends. I met Steve way, way back – he was in my first creative writing class. Steve, myself, and Dave McGimpsey were kind of like the three outliers in a class that was populated by the kind of earnest students dipping their pens into the philosophy de jour. I won’t say […]

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Except Not Sold at Hallmark

By Arjun Basu | Published: April 1, 2012

Two years ago, or even three, when I first started out on Twitter, my first agent saw a book of Tweets. I wasn’t sure but he was – and he was a real old school agent, specializing in business, tech and pop culture. His client list was phenomenal – and he was a good friend’s […]

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Premature Sense of Redemption

By Arjun Basu | Published: March 26, 2012

My agent passed along a rejection note this morning, his only comment being “argh.” I read the email. By page 50 the editor admitted the novel was getting hard to read. That’s fine. You don’t have to like it. So why was it getting hard to read? Because it was getting “darker” and because he […]

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Kissing Sisters

By Arjun Basu | Published: March 21, 2012

I would rather not win than be a finalist and not win. Those shots of actors as they lose their Oscars are priceless because sometimes they don’t act. You can see the disappointment on their faces. Only the winners act like themselves. When you win something, it’s like having an orgasm – you are yourself […]

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This is What Busy Looks Like

By Arjun Basu | Published: March 14, 2012

Nothing. It looks like nothing because you don’t get anything done. It’s an empty box, sunshine without light, warmth without heat. Plans get demolished, not by anything sinister, but by life, by the forward progress of time, by the inevitable bullshit of living, the accretion of layers of stuff, things we have to climb over […]

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