Something new

Now that it’s firmly 2025, perhaps it’s time to reintroduce myself. 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!

Shameless writing hacks from a 20-year-old

One of the weird/neat things about rewatching E.R., as I’ve mentioned I’ve been doing, is running into incidental things that happen in the show, which became a big deal in my own mind back when I was watching the show the first time, during film school.

For example, I just hit the episode — it’s the fourth-season finale, “A Hole in the Heart” — which directly inspired my (proposed, rejected) thesis film project for my BFA. A walk-in patient, suicidal and dangerous, leaves this rain-swept episode and walks across worlds to play a key supporting role in the horror movie script that I wrote that year. I’d forgotten all about him/that till today, even though I still think about that unused script every now and again (the recent Bodies Bodies Bodies does a nice job, with a similar premise).

The tale of why that thesis project didn’t get made (and I ended up directing a teen drama instead!) is a story for another time. But I always thought that was a pretty good trick for a twenty-year-old: steal an entire backstory, not something you ever need to refer to directly in the script you’re writing, but something that clearly sets the mood and emotional tone in your mind as a writer, so that you have something to build from.

So much of learning to write is simulation anyway, and it’s bloody near impossible to get good at all the pieces of creating a cohesive final work all at the same time; give me an hour, and I could break down everything I think is wrong with the pedagogy of a film school.

But in simpler terms, learning how to write anything — a script; whatever — always starts by feeling like you’re trying to replicate something you’ve seen somewhere else, even if it’s only in the most general terms. Stealing the Mr. Nable backstory from E.R., for my horror movie, felt like a cleaner, unashamedly mercenary way to get there.

The script for “A Hole in the Heart,” by the way, is a really great piece of writing. Lydia Woodward, who wrote it, was E.R.‘s showrunner at that point. The episode has none of the hallmarks of a “grand finale”-style season finale; it feels a lot like a first-season episode, covering a miscellaneous one-day shift, starting with the attendings (Greene and Weaver) being woken up from their midnight naps, and continuing from there as the team variously succeeds and fails to work through the crises of their shift.

Over the course of the episode, though, every single principal character is moved into, and then left in, a place of significant uncertainty about themselves and/or their role in the hospital. It really only becomes clear on rewatch, but: Elizabeth loses her fellowship. Kerri’s interim chief kowtowing won’t get her the full-time role. Doug and Mark are at loggerheads about Doug’s rogue handling of a case, versus Mark’s painful, near pathological, unwillingness to be honest with anyone (including himself). And so on, and so on.

And then instead of resolving any of it — or even directly calling attention to it — the murder/suicide plot plays out in the fourth act instead, and we end the episode in an elaborate quadruple-trauma involving the entire principal cast, who demonstrate (through action, not dialogue) that they work together brilliantly, even when everything outside the trauma room is burning their lives down. The camera drifts away down the hallway at the end of the episode, looking back; a janitor is mopping the floor. The work in the trauma rooms keeps going.

Anyway — I hope you’re all enjoying to The Pitt! Man, I loved those first couple episodes. Big dumb grin on my face the whole way through. Kathryn VanArendonk — who has gone far deeper into the season — describes the sensation quite well here.

New year

I don’t do resolutions; but, I do tend to come out of the annual A.G.M. with a lot of ideas about what I want to do in the months that follow. One of the wickets I annually attempt to un-stickify is the moribund lethargy of January, which is (I’m sure you’ve heard) a shitty month, leading directly into two more shitty months, although at least March has the illusory whiff of something being about to change.

January, though, is the Tuesday of months: whatever steam you’ve gained from the weekend / your holidays has dissipated; and the end of the week / springtime is still unimaginably far away.

There’s never an abundance of energy in January, but I like to try to give myself something mid-sized to focus my free time on over the course of the month, especially because I’m not drinking and don’t want to watch TV all the time.

This January, I’m aiming to (re-)learn all the Japanese I picked up five years ago, which the pandemic (plus having no exposure to the language whatsoever) successfully blew clean out of my mind.

I’ve also decided, on the longer term, to try “the Bradbury thing,” i.e. writing a short story once a week. I’m going to try to do this till the end of the year. I wrote one — one! — short story on a whim last September and came out of the experience really jazzed up about the sheer fun of purposeless creation. I aim to recapture a bit of that.

And while we’re on the subject of January creative projects: which Dungeon Master has two thumbs and had all three of his player characters doing death-saving rolls at various points of the climactic combat sequence of his recent campaign? This one. This past weekend, I finished up DMing a three-part short story for a party I inherited from a previous campaign; now I’ve got an aim to maybe come up with something longer to run for those characters.

The biggest hurdle to overcome on all three of these, as I’m sure many of my fellow writers are aware, is the sheer approach-avoidance that builds up whenever I’m not doing it. The way the premise of, say, sitting down to write a 1,200-word story about a neighbour who won’t take down their Christmas lights, seems like a much bigger commitment in my head (and feels that way for much longer) than the actual hour-or-so of doing it, which turns out to be fun, and easy, and blissfully low-stakes.

Breaking the seal is, I guess, the toughest part, and at this point (48 years old and counting), I’m going to go ahead and accept that it always will be. That’s fine. If I have to intellectualize my way out of a persistent feeling forever, given an abundance of proof that the feeling is wrong, I can do that.

These aren’t links

But they are recommendations.

• The first two issues of Kelly Sue DeConnick and David López’s FML were so, so wonderful. I can’t say I can say why I’m surprised, since I’m generally a big Kelly Sue stan. I guess comics, in general, have been feeling pretty hit-and-miss for me lately. But this is definitely one of my favourite things I’m anxiously-awaiting-every-month right now.
• I decided to soften myself up by reading Nicole Maines’ memoir, It Gets Better (Except When It Gets Worse). It can be thought of as a companion piece / apologia for the Amy Eliss Nutt account of the legal fight that circled around Maines when she was an adolescent trans girl just trying to use the bathroom. That book was a big deal for me when I read it; this book is, like a lot of genderqueer coming-out narratives, really deep in my feels right now. It’s rambly and all over the place and feels like a run-on sentence from a close friend born in high summer, but there’s stuff in there about the unflinching uniqueness of finding one’s own gender experience that I found simultaneously encouraging and melancholy.
• Thus softened, I went and watched Trevor Anderson’s film Before I Change My Mind, and had what felt like paralyzing bursts of neural shocks as I kept flashing-sideways to an alternate version of reality (or possibly the afterlife) where I’d had a different set of tools in my own adolescence. Sounds terrible, I know; but I think the goal is probably to peer more into that world, not less. Just a theory, but I’ll let you know how it goes.