Michael Little - A Little Romance
I write novels and short stories that take a comic look at romance and modern life. I'm a native Texan who landed in Hawaii and discovered that living on an island has many advantages. For example, you can put Jimmy Buffet on the car stereo, keep making left turns, and end up where you started, only happier.
Recent novel: Chasing Cowboys (2009), a contemporary romantic comedy set in Reno. Short stories appear in Bamboo Ridge's collections, including "Mango Lessons," "Walter! Walter!," "Walter and the Dream Girls," "Seven Ways to Tell If You Married a Cosmo Girl," and, most recently, "Pickles and Shawnilynn and Me at the Mall."
It's a moo point ...
August 30th, 2010
Like love and other things, writing lessons are where you find them. For example, want to read some good dialogue, and learn from it? Look no further than my favorite coffee mug.
The mug, which was my favorite Christmas present last year, features text from UrbanDictionary.com. To illustrate the phrase "moo point," there's this dialogue from an episode of Friends:
Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, "does he like you?" All right? Because if he doesn't like you, this is all a moo point. Rachel: Huh. A moo point?Read the rest of this entry »
Fred and Ginger ...
August 24th, 2010
Fred Astaire. Ginger Rogers. 1935. The movie is Top Hat. Early in the film Fred and Ginger dance in a pavilion during a rain storm. I was about to say that the scene is just about perfect, but that's silly, it is absolutely perfect.Speaking of silly, before you watch the scene, take a look at how it fits into the light romantic comedy plot, as described in imdb.com:
While staying in a London hotel with his English theatrical backer, Horace Hardwick, American musical revue star Jerry [...]
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Miss Potter returns ...
August 10th, 2010
Perhaps you missed the 2006 film Miss Potter, as I did the first time around, but it's still here, of course, on DVD, waiting to delight and inspire us. Where do I begin? Take a look at my notes: "Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit, Renee Zellweger, Victorian England, conserving the Lake District, publishing, small book with millions of readers, creative fire, romance."Let's start with what we know. Renee Zellweger, that amazing actress who went from high school cheerleader and drama club member in little Katy, Texas, to big old Hollywood, [...]
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Dog days, anyone?
August 3rd, 2010
What do the following have in common? Not to put any pressure on you to answer this question, gentle reader, because after all it is summer, and the dog days are here, and our bodies and minds have been in vacation mode for weeks now (including the three major parts of summer -- pre-vacation, actual vacation, and post-vacation-"tell-me-again-what-we-do-here"), and I'm the kind of writer who tends to fall down the long rabbit hole of an seemingly endless run-on sentence on any given day of any season, and when I crash at the bott [...]
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Summer in Hawaii ... Spam on the grill
July 28th, 2010
My friend Richie from up the street stopped by last weekend with two cans of Spam (not Spam Lite but Spam Classic, what Darrell calls Spam Heavy) and six adult beverages (already chilled).I had no choice but to fire up the grill, and the rice cooker. Richie, who knows where the sharpest knife is in the kitchen, attacked the romaine lettuce he found in the fridge, and pulled out the Costco jumbo size Ranch dressing, while I popped open the Spam and began slicing. Could lunch be far behind?
It was while we're standing at the [...]
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Lost and found in Newfoundland ...
July 25th, 2010
The exotic calls to us. And second chances. If you live in Hawaii and pick up a novel set in Newfoundland, you might as well be visiting a distant planet. If you live in Newfoundland, that exotic, distant planet is Hawaii. Or, as for some characters in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, the exotic might just be Florida.All is not new, however. Folks who move to Hawaii from Seattle or Texas or wherever, bring their past with them. Take that first step onto the cold remote rock of Newfoundland, as does Quoyle in the novel, and y [...]
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The dream machine, part 2 ...
July 18th, 2010
In part 1 of this rant, or musing, I began to explore the idea of the creative mind as a dream machine.If the mind of a fiction writer or poet is a blender that receives sensory images, images that will be the key ingredients in the next story of poem, the mind blends these ingredients into something designed to delight and nourish, feeding first the writer and later the readers.
I also wrote about this dream machine as the rational mind, methodical and efficient, loud and self-important and in co [...]
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The dream machine, part 1 ...
July 12th, 2010
When you see the words "dream machine," what image pops into your head? Maybe you think of the London space rock band with that name. Or perhaps a psychedelic poster from the '60s and '70s. Or maybe even the stroboscopic flicker device from the Sixties that one stares at with eyes closed.Not me. I hear "dream machine" and I see orange. I hear the sweet loud sounds of an industrial blender at work. In a few moments my name will be called and I will walk to the counter to collect my power size, one's-a-meal "O [...]
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Learning from the lauhala weavers ...
July 3rd, 2010
In the superb June/July issue of Hana Hou!, the magazine of Hawaiian Airlines, Catharine Lo writes about the art of lauhala weaving on the Big Island. I love hearing the voices of Auntie Elizabeth Malu'ihi Lee (seen here in Monte Costa's photo) and the other weavers in the article, and I am struck by these words from Michelle Zane-Faridi: "All your life—that's what it takes to be a master."Michelle has been weaving for 12 years, and I imagine that she is on the path to becoming a master weaver. Auntie Elizabeth, wh [...]
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More praise for Juliet Kono's Anshū
June 28th, 2010
As promised, here is more advance praise for Juliet Kono's novel Anshū, which Bamboo Ridge Press will publish in September.
For more about Anshū, see "Anshū: powerful novel coming in September." I am moved by the strong personal impact of the book on these early readers.
Read the rest of this entry »Juliet S. Kono has crafted a remarkable novel, weaving together experiences of darkness and flames and turning it into a story of luminous strength and determination. Himiko is a very young child who is consumed with fire—burns them everywhere even at the risk of turning her own body into fuel for the flames. Pregnant in pre-World War II Hilo, Hawai‘i, she is sent to Japan where she encounters harsh treatment from relatives who have little to spare.
Anshū: powerful novel coming in September
June 21st, 2010
I consider myself extremely lucky to be one of those with an early look at Juliet S. Kono's new novel, Anshū, from Bamboo Ridge Press. The book will be out in the second half of September, so you have all summer to savor the often overlooked delights of anticipation.Anshū tells the story of Himiko Aoki, a teenage girl in Hilo who is sent to live with an uncle and aunt and cousins in Tokyo in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Himiko becomes an eyewitness to suffering and survival in the war years as the story mo [...]
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Shakespeare and the World Cup ...
June 14th, 2010
Why did England goalie Robert Green let that easy ball roll in for the only USA goal in the 1-1 tie at the World Cup? I believe I may have the answer.Was Green distracted? And if so, by what? How could he allow an easy roller, one that any schoolboy would have stopped, to bounce off his gloves and into the net? I've concluded that he must have been distracted by something. He simply put his goalkeeping on automatic pilot because the shot was not a dangerous one. He had stopped balls like that th [...]
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Sweet love remembered ...
June 12th, 2010
Summer, a time for summer reading, discovering a new book, a new writer ... but also a time to visit old friends. Speaking of old friends, my William Shakespeare bobblehead has migrated recently from the writing room to the piano in the living room.This particular bobblehead is also called a "nodder," and Shakespeare does nod if you touch his head. Is he approving the music? He stands at attention, quill in his left hand, a stack of books at his feet. He's not writing. Is he simply observing? Is he wait [...]
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Having a drink with Larry McMurtry ...
June 5th, 2010
My friend Richie from up the street asks me, "When do you find time to write?"
"Late at night is the second best time," I tell him, "for me anyway." He waits for the rest of my answer. "But my favorite time is before sunrise. Five a.m. While you're still sleeping."
Richie cringes just at the sound of "five a.m." "You set your alarm?" he asks.
"No, I just wake up some mornings and know it's time to write. I awake the hound (Simone, our Italian greyhound) and we go downstairs together. She goes back to sleep on the sofa and I pour a large mug of Kona coffee and head for the keyboard.
Cross-training for writers ... heart and craft
May 31st, 2010
It's been a long Memorial Day weekend, and I should have been writing, but instead I settled in one evening with a DVD of John Ford's 1952 film The Quiet Man. Ford, who is best known for his Westerns filmed in Monument Valley in northern Arizona, directed John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in this beautifully filmed hymn to Ireland.
The Quiet Man was a film Ford had been trying to make for years, until finally Republic Pictures agreed, on the condition that Ford first make the studio a black-and-white Western, to make up for the losses they expected for The Quiet Man.
