You must go or send a substitute.
Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.
If you focus on the risks, they'll multiply in your mind and eventually paralyze you. You want to focus on the task, instead, on doing what needs to be done.
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.
It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, theres something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.
I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as forbidden knowledge: methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.
You know what it was like? It was like thinking I was heading to a surprise party and instead it was a surprise pap smear.
Grind the faces of the poor.
On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa.
You'd be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you'd do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.