πAnd I'm Still in the Murda Bizness... Content Note: suicide Full Disclosure: a member of my immediate family worked at Boeing for over a decade and has not been consulted on this in any way. I have no inside knowledge of the individual or company in question. About a week ago there was a BBC News article making the rounds about a 62-year-old named John Barnett who was found dead in his car of an apparent self-inflicted wound. Barnett was a former employee of Boeing who had filed a whistleblower complaint in 2019 over lax safety standards. At the time of his death he'd given one deposition on the matter and was scheduled for another. The internet promptly jumped down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and assumed that Boeing must have had the man murdered. And my hackles got raised . This is me going on the record that I find the idea ridiculous, for reasons I'm going to detail below. I was very irritated with friends and coworkers for hopping on this stupid bandwagon. Of
π€· Question: Tell Me What You Think About Me?... A lot of what's coming up in this series is home-grown and developed by me over the years. But there's a good amount that is adapted from other sources as well, and today's in one of the adaptational posts. Specifically, this comes from a Lessons From the Screenplay video about act structure in films . Using a five-act model, the video goes through The Avengers as an example of how each act starts with a dramatic question and ends with a character choice. I like it, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about how movies and books are fundamentally different, and while this model works pretty well for film acts, I like it even better for shaping chapters. Start With a Question, End With a Choice Something that comes up fairly frequently with new writers is that their chapters cover the ground they need to, but they don't really flow. It feels like it has too much preamble, or maybe it takes too long to wind down. It