I really enjoyed this article about Roger Ebert and the very positive effect he had on a lot of filmmakers.

And all that support certainly didn’t mean he was soft on the films if they sucked. But, as he said once, “If you give one [a negative review] to the work of a friend, and they’re not your friend any more, they weren’t ever your friend. As Robert Altman once told me, ‘If you never gave me a bad review, what would a good review mean?'”

But Altman understood the point in the article about dealing with things, even very bad things, by making another movie. There was a period when many of Altman’s movies were not available on home video, and he was asked how he dealt with that. “How can I deal with it?” he asked. “I make another movie.”

You move forward, not backward and not stopping. And Roger Ebert would have understood that, too. After all, he always identified himself as a newspaperman, and it’s pretty basic in the newspaper world that no matter how well, or how badly, you write one day, you start again the next morning.

Which is pretty much how it works in serial fiction, too. As I said last time, there are a few continuity glitches in my stories. Some people are bothered by that sort of thing, but I think the best way of dealing with it is to write another story.