New year's links

Welcome to The One Year Switch. I've temporarily abandoned my usual format of writing about new and old films, and will spend 2015 writing (almost) exclusively about old ones, drawing primarily from the silent era through the mid-60s, and possibly a little bit from the 70s and 80s as well. As I said when I first announced this change, I'm doing it not just to explore the old-school material, but as a writing challenge. It's my hope that this will inspire different kinds of posts, not simply critiques of classic films.

Everything else is going okay. My novel's coming along well - closing in on 30,000 words as of this writing. I haven't shown it to my writing group yet, but I think I probably will sometime within the next few weeks. I know that my draft is far from perfect - sections crossed out, notes to myself, etc. - but from what I've learned, at this stage it's okay to write badly because one can always correct it later. 

The important thing is to get the words down, and it's proving to be a bigger commitment than I realized, partly because I'm going back and forth between the book and this blog. A bit of a juggling act, but the upside is that between the two, I'm writing every day. And I hope I'm learning something.

A few links to kick off the new year:

Becky compares the recent live TV performance of Peter Pan with the 1960 version and finds the former lacking.

Danny's anthology e-book about The Thin Man is now available.

Fritzi saw a lot of classic movies for the first time in 2014.

One of Jacqueline's final posts in her year of Ann Blyth regards the actress/singer's last film, the flawed but noteworthy The Helen Morgan Story.

Jennifer went to the Florida Keys and visited the home of an author well associated with classic Hollywood - Ernest Hemingway.

Here's a funny story about attempting to turn a sibling on to classic movies.