dmarley: Fingerpainting (Default)
I just got finished reading (most of) Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by Jim Miller and Tom Shales. Yes, I bought it because of my not-so-secret crush on Dan Patrick and his voice (he's actually not in the book very much, but I suppose it says a lot about the book that I didn't care), but also because I used to watch a ton of ESPN, especially in the 90s. (I will never forget, Dan and Keith, the footage of the avalanche substituted for every one of the avalanche of goals scored by the Avalanche that one night. Thank you.)

It's a book about a business! And sports! And a sports business! Told in first person by 500 people! Try to contain your excitement. )

This can't really be an unqualified recommendation, because I'm not going to say "Oh, you will all obviously love to read 700 pages of interviews about sports and business and people who run a sports business!" but I did want to praise Jim Miller and Tom Shales for their work. This book is the culmination of years of effort, and I was truly impressed both with the skill that they showed in putting all the pieces of interviews together, and in their philosophy of what to put in and what to leave out. I'm also impressed with their skills as interviewers. I know that Dan, for one, didn't really want to talk to them (Miller said, possibly joking, that Dan was one of the hardest people to get an interview with). They also managed to get access to ESPN, and for that alone they deserve a ton of credit for sheer perseverance. Good job, Mr. Miller, Mr. Shales.
dmarley: Fingerpainting (Default)
I am actually caught up listening to Dan Patrick. For a while there I was so far behind that I was listening to them fill out their brackets after North Carolina had already won the championship. Now I can get back to the three weeks of Science Friday I'm behind.

Speaking of catching up, I am now *back* up to 37 stories under my "totag" tag on Delicious. I'd knocked the list down to nearly twenty last week, then I did some story finding and committed my usual shortcut of throwing up the tag that fit with the search with a "totag" slapped on. I think I'll make it my goal this week to finish the tagging, because it's not very useful if all my new links just say "totag."

I've also been reading some of my old fanfic, as I prepare to post it on Dreamwidth. It doesn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would (or perhaps as much as I thought I should think it should). Granted, I have fifteen glorious years of suck-filled fanfic lurking unposted and (thankfully) unseen behind the first stories I post ten years ago, but on the whole, it's not so horrible that I feel the need to purge it from the internet. I itch to do some revising, mind you, and there are a couple of early stories that really do need to sort of be re-done top to bottom, but more in a "let's scrub everything and re-paint the walls and get new furniture" kind of way rather than "my god we're going to have to raze the site and start over."

The experience, though, kind of led me to thinking about certain truths I think about myself as a writer, which I may elaborate on later. Or not, depending on how the re-tagging goes.

September 2012

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