Category Archives: writing

.musecast Episode 11: Reboot

books, musecast, writing Leave a comment

After a hiatus of more than six months, I’ve decided to reboot the .musecast. I have some small(ish) news on The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon in this episode, but I also talk about what caused the hiatus and my thoughts about the future of the .musecast. Any feedback from all of you would be appreciated. [Season 1 of the .musecast is currently offline due to blip.tv shutting down. Episodes will be reposted when circumstances permit me to do so. – Sean] Link list for Episode 11:…

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It All Begins Again

books, writing Leave a comment

About a month ago I got word that my unpublished novel The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon had made the second round of this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in the General Fiction category. This was certainly nice, but given how many steps there are in the Amazon contest, I didn’t make too big of a deal out of it at the time. I posted about it on my Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to see if I got through to the quarterfinals before I made a…

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An Open Letter to Lauren Faust

arts, business, internet, politics, television, writing Leave a comment

Dear Ms. Faust: My name is Sean Shannon. I’m an English teacher and aspiring author from Toledo, Ohio. More importantly, I’m a longtime fan of your work; I still carry around the same Powerpuff Girls purse I bought more than a decade ago during the height of the show’s popularity. and last year I finally found the time to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and quickly became hooked. Few television shows have had as profound an effect on my life, and I have made…

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Bound to the System

books, kink, music, personal, sex, teaching, writing Leave a comment

“Fifty Shades of Grey” sparks marketing mania (Reuters) Thanks to its inclusion in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic online video anthology, I’ve had the Lonely Island’s song “Threw It on the Ground” stuck in my head on and off for about a week. (Let me add here, as an aside, that I’m majorly bummed that I couldn’t make the pony con that’s going on in Ohio this weekend.) As I teach and encourage my students to question their assumptions, and not to let those…

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The Left Needs Better Stories

politics, rhetoric, writing Leave a comment

I write here a lot about rhetoric when it comes to politics, which partly stems from my training as a teacher of rhetoric and composition. As a fiction writer, though, I’m also intrigued by how the power of narrative plays a role in our politics. The ability of the human brain to communicate through story, both real and fictional, is one of the most marvellous abilities we possess. Particularly in an election year, we get inundated with stories from “average Americans” in campaign commercials and…

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