fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I've mentioned before how certain songs or moments can burrow into my brain so that I want to hear them over and over and over again. There is a reason that the term 'earworm' exists, after all. And Narco Debut's 'In Frustrate', from their self-title EP, has definitely wormed me. There is a fine line between inspiration and [...]
We've come to the part of the year where candy and sweets are everywhere, all the time. You pretty much won't be able to escape cookies and pies and chocolate flavored toothpaste until after New Year's Day at this point. Wait. Chocolate flavored toothpaste? Seriously? That's really a thing? God, we are truly a disgusting [...]
First some disclaimers: I like to think that I once offered one of the finer defenses of Panic! At the Disco's A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. (An album released back when they still rocked the exclamation point.) I really enjoy Brendon Urie's voice. Aside from A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, his performance on Forgive Durden's [...]
Here's the thing about NaNo. Well, not the thing, since I already talked about that, but another thing. Oh, I did that already, too? How about another another thing? Alright, then. Another another thing it is. See, as that last paragraph indicates, NaNo makes you kind of crazy. Which I think is counterintuitive. Most people would, [...]
Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible is a book about superheroes that is neither a comic book nor a graphic novel. Drop the comic, drop the graphic. It's simply a book, a novel. About superheroes. And it is awesome. The story is told through the alternating viewpoints of a literal evil genius, Dr. Impossible, who suffers [...]
A long time ago my musician father taught me that there are two kinds of great bands: great live bands and great studio bands. Being one doesn't necessarily imply or prohibit the other. But when a band is both, it's worth celebrating. Sometimes it's that easy. So when BQDC's spirit-animal-turned-band Gates came through Detroit on Friday, [...]
In my experience, the hardest part of NaNoWriMo - and all writing in general, really - is getting past the endless mental hurdles and simply starting to write, every day. That's it. It's very, very easy to get caught up in all the reasons not to sit down and create new sentences on any given day. And [...]
If you've read a science fiction book or seen a sci-fi movie, odds are you have some familiarity with Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars even if you don't know it. Published almost one hundred years ago (1917), A Princess of Mars is a classic pulp adventure story and its DNA flows through the veins of [...]
It was once suggested to me that we will spend the rest of our lives loving the music we listened to in our youths more than anything else that we will ever hear. And that may be true. But I disagree with the presented rationale. The presenter of this argument, let's call him Tim, claimed [...]
Well, not literally. But the end of the year? Yes. Very near, indeed. Which means that it's time to start putting together year-end lists of favorite books and albums, a task that I always intend to fly quickly through only to then spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over. My intent this year is to [...]
Songs & Stories 