C.P. James's Blog

I’ve had the cold a lot in my life. More than most, I’d say. I hate being sick, which is why I’ve spent a fair bit of effort to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I also hate most cold remedies because of how they make me feel.

If you care to know how the cold starts and progresses, commoncold.org has some good info. But basically the virus enters your nasal membranes and reproduces, and everything that comes after that relates to how your body reacts. Generally, though, it starts with...

I used to work at this little liberal-arts college in Wisconsin called Ripon College. Great little school with awesome people. One of their most-used phrases when talking about the value of a liberal education was that it supposedly engendered “lifelong learning” as a value. I’d really drank the Kool-Aid there so that sounded really nifty to me. You’re never too old to learn new things. Cool.

To be honest though, I had a pretty narrow view of that. When I pondered the phrase, I mostly pictur...

Many years ago, I wrote screenplays. This was while there was an actual spec script market in Hollywood, and at the time I had a mentor of sorts who reinforced that prospect. So I wrote. A lot. And as you might expect, it was sort of bad.

The last script I finished was about a guy in his early 20s who dies, then wakes up a few months later to find that his grave has been excavated and lovingly prepared for his awakening. He has to piece together what happened to him and why he came back. Anyw...

Today marks the official launch of The Perfect Generation. But it’s not just the launch of a book—it’s what I hope to be the launch of a long and successful career as an author.

The process of writing this book was both similar to, and different from, the experience of preparing to launch it. Let me explain.

There are plenty of opinions in the author community about traditional vs. indie publishing vs. hybrid. What it mostly boils down to is control. The more control you want, the more potent...

Many moons ago, I worked for a Fortune 50 company. One of the two most odious managers I’ve ever worked with decided on day one that he didn’t like me, and the feeling was quite mutual. Let’s call him Barney.

One day, during a performance review, Barney’s brow furrowed disapprovingly. He said, “Now, Cody, I’ve gotta say, it seems like you put in a lot more effort and do better work on projects you personally like compared to the things you don’t.”

I took several moments to determine if he wa...

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“He just mobilized the English language and sent it to war.”

So says a rueful Viscount Halifax moments before the credits roll in Darkest Hour, an account of Winston Churchill’s installation as prime minister and the fraught initial weeks of his administration leading up to the events depicted in Dunkirk.

Halifax meant that, at that moment, Churchill had convinced Parliament to fight Hitler to the end, though Great Britain lacked almost every resource necessary to win except resolve. Halifax...

On December 9, 2017, I uploaded The Perfect Generation to Kindle Scout, basically a popularity contest to try and get a legit publishing contract through Amazon’s Kindle Press publishing arm.

I read enough blog posts from authors who had gone through Scout to know that it was more good than bad. Plus, it would give me a little breathing room to finish and edit my reader magnet, which I’d want whether Amazon published me or I did it myself.

The first few days blew me away. The book was very po...

To this point, how writing has worked for me is that I get an idea stuck in my head. Like songs, they’re sticky. Many times, they start very insistently and eventually ebb away, apparently to find someone else’s brain to inhabit. But sometimes they don’t go away, and the only way to get them out of my head is onto the page. So it was with The Perfect Generation, technically my second book but the first that will sneak out into the world.

Unfortunately, I started writing TPG after I succumbed...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into his job and spends half the day reading or replying to the all-comers to-do list that is email, a quarter of the day in meetings, and the other quarter doing the same shit he’s been doing for years because no one wants to do anything different. Ring any bells?

It’s not that I didn’t learn a lot from every job I’ve had. To say otherwise would be a slap in the face to all the wonderful and competent people who taught me what (and who) they know...

The big box o’ screenplays that will never be movies

I’ve written a lot of stuff. I’ve been a pantser (seat of my pants, vs. a plotter) to this point, though, so most of it is junk. This is where I’m at:

8 screenplays, multiple complete revisions each (unproduced, natch) 2 completed novels 2 novels in progress a few short stories tons of ideas

It’s very unlikely I’ll resurrect any of the screenplays. They were experiments built on delusional ideas about the spec screenplay market, and they’...