What's going on here?

I’m a writer — screenwriter and novelist — and I publish under Lia Matthew Brown. My friends call me Matthew, or L.

The name, the coming-out-bigender, are all relatively recent developments; you can read about them here. I look exactly like the little girl in the photo above, surrounded by the weirdos of Oz; or at least I think I do, in my mind’s eye, which is the only eye that matters, anyway.

This blog-that-is-now-also-a-newsletter has been on the air in one form or another since 1997. Which means if you’ve just gotten here, you’ve joined in season 28. Oddly, the cast is largely the same.

Now that the blog is also a newsletter, I’m realizing that it’s a newsletter without a terribly specific “hook,” which is probably a problem. So, if you were interested in subscribing, I’d say the newsletter is, variably, about these things:

• My writing career and my writing process, interchangeably;
• “Pop culture” as a very broad category, though my writing drills down most frequently on big brand nerd properties (Star Wars and Marvel) and on how the industry is working (my particular bugaboos right now are the life and death of theatrical and the aftermath of the Streaming Wars);
• Personal reflections, from the very political to the absolutely ephemeral.

Oh: and I tend to finish with links and recommendations, re: whatever I’ve had my eyes on in the past couple weeks.

Whoever you are, however and whenever you got here, welcome!