10 Months

Even he looks incredulous about it.

12

It’s that time of year….

2nd Wave

Tonight I read the first of several introductions to my recently-purchased copy of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. As part of a project I’m working on, I’ll be reading several classic works of feminism (The Beauty Myth is next on the list).

I grew up in a post-suffrage society; first-wave feminism had made its mark and become normalized. But even though second-wave feminism had also largely arrived by my first years of intellectual cognizance, in the sub-culture of conservative evangelicalism it had yet to take root. The third wave was still just a gleam in the eye of sexually-independent women everywhere, but somehow I missed that, too.

My upbringing may have protected me from outside ideas more effectively than I originally thought. Or possibly I was too busy with other pursuits during my young adulthood to give much thought to the tangle of competing post-modern ideas reshaping feminism at the time.

Whatever the reason, I now find myself with a need to absorb and synthesize the history of feminism as it has developed since the 1920s. Betty Friedan’s seminal Civil-Rights Era work seems like the right place to start.

A few bad apples spoil the barrel.

Stop letting people get away with saying “It’s just a few bad apples.” Challenge them. Or, at the very least, finish the saying in your head so you remain clear about what’s really happening.

A Plot to Take Over the World

Man, I suck at this.

But not as much as Blair, who hasn’t posted in I don’t know how long.

We love you, Blair.

Here is how bad I am at blogging: I posted an entry when I was at 110 pages on the most recent script, but I failed miserably to say anything at all when I finished the damn thing a few days later.

At 147 pages, it was a notable achievement, but did I get out the blogging tools and carve my triumph in netstone?

Nope. But I did give it to my mom to read. Take that, Other, More Consistent Bloggers!

So it’s been a couple weeks (and more) since that time, and I have a choice in front of me.

I could start work on draft 2 of The Other Woman (as it is currently labeled). Or I could continue fixing the plot of How to Date Your Cousin, on which I have been spending much thought.

I had some talk with Greg on the subject of said plot, and I feel as though I fixed a fundamental character issue that sparks further possibility for the script.

Here is the problem with this, however. While some people can spit out plot points and setpieces as if chewing raw story tobacco, I am not some people.

I have problems with plot.

I especially have problems with funny plot. Stupid romantic comedy.

You would think that with some great character types and a really quality situational premise, it would be easy to come up with some hella-funny scenes, but this is actually quite difficult for me.

So I could spend all my time thinking about this desperately ailing plot,

OR

I could bump it back into the subconscious to work on the thing for which I actually have ideas.

What to do, what to do.

Ah, Truisms.

I’m really starting to realize the validity of the idea that you should only write what you’re passionate about.

Plunk me down in the middle of a draft, two months into writing (since I have the discipline of a kitten), and I won’t have the faintest idea what the career implications of this project are.

I won’t remember why I started this stupid script. I won’t be able to think straight about whether I could use it to whip up any interest from an agent. Or a producer. Or anyone who matters.

The only thing I’ll be able to tell you is whether I’m enjoying what I’m doing. So it better be something I enjoy, or most of the motivation goes straight out the window.

There is the odd exception. Like that rom-com that I kept working on (and will continue to work on later) simply because it was such a beautiful, golden, commercial idea (with a correspondingly golden title) that I couldn’t justify not finishing it. But ordinarily, I’m going to have to be really stoked about what I’m doing, or despair quickly sets it.

Which is why this book adaptation is so great. In addition to being easy to write, as I’ve mentioned over and over and over, it’s just the kind of story I really like. It’s a movie I would race to the theater to see: dark, compelling, and full of veiled metaphysical ponderings.

My only regret about writing it is that I won’t be able to take any credit if it turns out to be great. All that credit will have to go straight to the author. *Sigh*

But if by some wild chance it got made, I would be so excited to see it. And that’s the kind of thing to write.

Ambient Privacy

Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

That is not consent.

Maciej Cegłowski

permalink

amymebberson:

Wonder Tink!

Highlight of the morning.

And Just a Few Weeks Later …

So I still exist, and I still write things down, and I still blog with the diligence of a baby goldfish, but the main difference, the really essential thing that separates the me who last posted from the current me is that one of us is wearing a ring to match the one pictured below.

In short: got married.

If I’m feeling really nice about it and if my attention doesn’t wander, sometime later you might see an image or so from the happy event and subsequent vacation, but right now, I have more important things to talk about.

I don’t blog to talk about my personal life. It’s not how I roll.

No, the real news here, my friends, is that bare days before being linked up to the beautiful blonde of recent mention, I posted a feature script on Inktip.com.

That’s right, with complete disregard for whatever my fellow scribes may eventually say about this script whenever they have a chance to read it, I surged ahead and sent it out into the world all on its own.

It was only the free Inktip 10-day trial, which since expired. But it seemed to be garnering at least a little attention, so I just now this night shelled out the cash to put it back on for the full term of six months.

We’ll see what happens.

If I can get some feedback on it, and make what will hopefully be relatively small corresponding adjustments, I will later start querying it out. That’s a hint to some of you. *Insert Winning Smile Here*

But until that happens, we are moving on.

If you will look to the right, Ladies and Gentlemen, you will see that the “Polygamy Rewrite” has been pushed down in favor of a new spec adaptation, which I am going to refer to for the moment as “The Nightmare.”

Feel thrilled.

I’m excited about this adaptation. I’ve never done one of those, and I really love this source material. And I’m excited about starting my first new script in (I think) eight months.

So scamper off and let me work.

Note for my Xanga-using friends: surprising as it may seem, I am one of the last Blogger bloggers to allow non-Bloggers to comment. So you can keep commenting at my Xanga blog, but you don’t have to.

And this website now has a working copy button! 💃🏻🕺🏻 

Announcing “Beneath the Trees”

Hot on the heels of the Her True Name collection, I’m excited to announce the publication of my first novel, Beneath the Trees.

I finished the stories in Her True Name over a year ago, and while they were coming out in serial form on my website, I started working on Beneath the Trees. It’s about an indie musician whose wife is dying, and who one day after a bad thunderstorm finds a wood nymph sheltering in the wreckage of an old barn.

Beneath the Trees deals with death, self-sacrifice, and the fear of loss, but it’s not as dark a story as that description makes it sound. In fact, it’s hopeful—and deeply personal to me. You can find it for sale in the bookstore.

Book Signing

Accompanying the release of Beneath the Trees, I’ve been invited to do a book signing at Books, Wine and Dogs in Downtown Warsaw. This is my first book signing ever! I’m excited, and a little nervous. If you’re free and in the area on February 18 from 11:00am to 1:00pm, come out and get a copy of the book, or just enjoy some wine and play with dogs!

Books, Wine and Dogs is located at:

101 E. Center Street Warsaw, IN 46580

See you there!

Army of Dolls stole your reflection\ Army of Dolls stole all your perfect imperfections. — Delain, “Army of Dolls”

avasdemon:

AVA’S DEMON || MARCH 7th || 2013

Current readers, click * here * for the update!

* || READ || FOLLOW || SUBSCRIBE || PRINT SHOP || FORUMS || *

As always, re-blogs really help people discover the comic!

This comic is really pretty and inventive, and it only recently started, so you can easily catch up on the whole thing.

Bad news for Greg over at the Web of Lies and Deceit. Wail and gnash your teeth, aspiring screenwriters. Soon this will be you.

But first, we’ve got to break story, yes? At least, that’s where I am. As previously mentioned, my current concept is deep and expansive, offering multiple compelling possibilities for exploration. How to find the right ones?

On Thursday, Greg and I hashed through it for a second time, providing much more satisfactory results. At least now I have merely a lame version of a story I actually like as opposed to a perfectly watertight version of a story I was not really interested in telling.

Okay, “perfectly watertight” might be a bit of a stretch.

Now comes something I think all of us can appreciate: research.

Ah, Research, that blessed time when the writer may spend hours, if not days or weeks, reading books and magazines and short stories and wasting away time on the internet all in the name of acquiring a few facts or ideas for a project on which he is actually not doing any work at all. Truly, it is a joyous season in the story’s life.

On Friday I went to the library and got three books full of mythology. I shall read them with great pleasure, all the while consoling myself that I am doing research. And that’s only part one of research. That’s just background and depth, baby. After that comes the actually Looking of Things Up and Making of Notes to produce the data one actually needs.

But at long last, one must actually sit down and pound out a draft, sad as it may seem. And I’m hoping I can at least get a start on that before leaving the country in two weeks. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to not interrupt the flow once started. We’ll see how it goes.

Next Episode: why mythology is important.

Becoming more and more convinced that one of the most important questions an application developer can ask themselves is: “But what about later?“*

*also a helpful question for everyone else

Being My Own Hack

So after AGENT decided to send out SCREWBALL SCRIPT, he told me I should write another comedy. Here’s the catch about that: all my other, most-beloved ideas were action-thrillers.

I don’t think of myself as a funny person. I didn’t have any ideas for comedies.

But it’s stupid to ignore your agent’s advice.

So I came up with a bunch of comedy ideas and ran them all by AGENT. He said, “Write COLLEGE IDEA.”

Now the thing about COLLEGE IDEA is that it’s a dumb, schlocky, slapsticky idea. Sure, I can give it my own overtones of gender-conflict and try to avoid stereotypes, but it’s ultimately never going to be a smart-people movie. It’s to laugh at and enjoy but not to stay in your brain for the next two days like some other movies that never cease to amaze you.

But I’ll whore myself out artistically even if I won’t do it morally, so I wrote my outline and entire first act.

And then I spent two weeks pounding out the rough cut of that SURPRISE FEATURE I mentioned awhile back. I finished that earlier today, by the way; thanks for asking.

So now it’s time to go back to writing and FINISH THE DAMN SCRIPT so AGENT won’t forget I exist.

And now I sort of hate the idea.

Not the idea. The idea still makes me giggle like a toddler holding her mother’s car keys. It’s more that I hate myself for writing it. Even more accurately, my friends have made me hate myself for writing it.

So what am I going to do?

Do it anyway.

Alex Epstein has a post up comparing screenwriting to founding a startup, and he says the following:

On a micro level, every script sucks at some point. Syd Field has his Turning Points. I have the Sucky Point. Most scripts suck when you’re about 40% into them. This is also true of outlines and pitch ideas. You’ve lost your initial enthusiasm, but you’re not over the hump yet.

I make a point of finishing everything I start, whether I like it or not. I don’t take every idea to script, of course. But if I start writing an outline, I finish the outline. If I start writing a first draft, I finish the first draft. I only let myself stop when I’ve finished that particular step, and I can evaluate whether it’s worth going on to the next step.

Exactly.

I’ll see you all in 75 pages.

Best. Vacation. Ever.

My vacation is hours from ending, but I have actually accomplished what I set out to do.

Firstly, I finished rewrites on the rom-com and sent it to an agent, as noted below.

Secondly, I banged out the last 86 pages of the book adaptation I started some time ago.

Finally, and most recently, I chopped a fairly ruthless 15 pages out of that script to get it under the 120-page marker.

Now it goes out to my trusted readers (and some new readers, hurray!). If they have major quarrels with it, there may be rewrites. Otherwise, or whenever the rewrites are done, I will have three quite solid feature scripts to toss at the semi-curious or, failing that, the merely unwary, once I move to LA.

Or whenever I might happen to meet them.

I can now focus my energies on getting my stupid house into shape to rent and trying to land a job in the movie business, however menial.

If only I had more vacation ….

Blocks of Time Come in the Wrong Sizes

Because I only had about 65 minutes to spare at work tonight once I was done with my actual jobs, I didn’t do any editing on the movie. Instead, I caught up on browsing some artist galleries stuck in my Instapaper backlog. I’ll tell you what, people: there is some amazing digital art going on out there. But you probably knew that.

Anyway, here is a piece by one of them, Sakimichan, on deviantART (I can’t find a real name for this person). She/he does amazing things with hair:

That is all; my clients are getting up soon.

Book Giveaway!

I’m currently running a giveaway for a signed proof copy of Beneath the Trees. It runs until this Friday on Goodreads, no strings attached.

If you already have a copy of Beneath the Trees, you can still spread the word to your friends. Who doesn’t want a free book? Pass this link around to anyone you think might be interested:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/229981-beneath-the-trees

Books, Wine, and Dogs

In February, I had my first book signing at Books, Wine, and Dogs in Downtown Warsaw. It went well, from my perspective: enough people showed up that I didn’t feel like a loser, but not so many that I felt overwhelmed. Michelle Stavrou, the owner of the shop, was a gracious and effusive host. She took the picture of me above—the only one from the event, because sometimes I forget that I should take pictures of things.

Next month, on April 11 from 7:00-8:30pm, Michelle is opening up the shop again to host a Book Club for Beneath the Trees! (Did I tell you she was great?) If you’ve read the book and want to come out and discuss it (and also enjoy some great wine), we’d love to see you there. If you haven’t read it, well… it’s short! You could probably read it by then. And if you don’t have your copy yet, the store is open.

Soon I’ll start more of a for-real marketing push for Beneath the Trees, but for now, I’d be eternally grateful to anyone who feels like they can recommend it to their friends. Word-of-mouth helps authors more than any marketing tactic ever can.

I’ll have more updates about my work soon. In the mean time, feel free to jet on over to Facebook if you want to RSVP to the Book Club event. Happy Spring!

Breaking Down

I had a phone call today with the Director of Special Events at Grace College, my alma mater, which owns a hotel I’m hoping to use to shoot my first feature this year.

He wants to meet with me next week to go over my proposed schedule with a view to seeing whether he can accommodate me. He wants to see it in detail, by room, because he frequently rents the space piecemeal, so he needs to know exactly which days I need which rooms.

Thing is … I don’t have a schedule.

See, the whole movie takes place in this location. I figured I would lock the location first, then make the schedule for how I use the location. Silly me; that’s not how things work.

So I have to do a script breakdown this week. For any non-entertainment-biz visitors, this is a document that tells you all the different resources you need to produce a particular script—props, locations, talent, costumes, etc.—and which days you need those things.

I’ve never done one of these. So that’s fun.

They have software to do this for you. And I love software. So I downloaded Celtx, which is a free scriptwriting/pre-production software application. I’ve never used it to write because I was lucky enough to start screenwriting when I could still use a student discount to purchase Final Draft, but Final Draft doesn’t do all the same things.

So here goes. I hope I don’t butcher it horribly.

P.S. I feel like I’ve finally come up with a good title for this script, so I’m going to share it here, and it is: Murder! A Love Story. I hope you like it.

Breaking Story

On Saturday I had a meeting with Myles Miner and Ryan Hill to start some more focused development on the Safe House web series (see the Projects page).

We had already shot most of episode 01, and production went well, but we needed to come up with a cohesive story for the six episodes we plan to shoot this fall. Here are some reasons this is important:

1. Shot lists are good. Since I’m also the AD for this project, I need to know how much we have to shoot every day so I can actually get everything done on schedule. This doesn’t work when you just waltz into each shoot day without a clear idea how many shots you have to get and how difficult they are.
2. Pre-production is better when you only do it once. The script for episode 01 changed several times right before we shot it, so that much of the pre-production work had to be done multiple times. When you’re shooting on a tight schedule with no budget and limited access to talent, you can only get away with this for so long.
3. The best stories are ones you don’t make up as you go along. After we shot episode 01 it turned out that it was really episode 02. This is fine, as we were able to outline the other episodes to fit around it, but you can imagine the kind of wreck the story would be if we did this sort of thing every time.

The meeting went very well, and I really like the story outline we have now. Myles is going to go off and write it, and I’m sure it will evolve and grow as he does, but it was a great start that gives some structure to our planning.

We also talked through some issues of tone, style and character, which helped Ryan get a feel for exactly what he was getting himself into. Since he’s relatively new to acting, I think starting to take ownership in this meeting will build some confidence in his own ability to pull this off.

On a more “meta”, career-oriented note, I continue to learn about all the different ways making movies (or web series) is awesome.

Building the Jet Engine

I know my two faithful readers have been wondering what happened to me, and here’s my explanation, but I warn you: you won’t like it.

Here it comes …

Ready?

You know you want it …

Okay then, fine! The explanation is:

I’ve been working my ass off.

That’s right, I’ve now become the thing that all blogging writers hate: someone who, when offered extra time to blog, chooses to actually write instead. You know it, baby.

I would love to follow up on The Explanation by saying that all that dedication has paid off with a finely-crafted and ready-for-querying script, but the fact is that it’s only gotten me a very, very rough and not-even-quite-finished rough draft.

I did finish the ending to my own current satisfaction, but I went right back to work on the beginning I’d never quite gotten to work how I wanted, so it doesn’t count.

But hopefully this week is the week. Or tonight the night, who knows?

Anyway, there’s this Alex Epstein quote that I’m too lazy to look up, but I can remember it enough to make the point. It goes: “You don’t want to be left polishing an old steam engine when you could have a brand new, dirty, smelly jet engine instead.”

And that’s how I feel right now. I’m almost done building my jet engine. Sending it to the detailing crew for cleanup and paint is a mere anticlimax away.

So stretch ye the metaphors as you will—I’m going to be over here, working away.

Can You Believe They’re Going to Pay Me to Write?!

I got the new job about which I posted several days ago. As of this afternoon, I officially am employed by Lifeline Youth and Family Services as a Youth Treatment Specialist. I start work tonight.

It’s true that Lifeline pays mostly in thanks, so I’m taking quite the substantial pay cut, but this is a third-shift job where I will do practically nothing. Thus I will be able to spend almost eight hours every night writing. For the first time in my life, I won’t have to use spare time on career-building. Gnash your teeth in envy, jealous fellow scribes!!

Now we have to see if this new freedom results in actual scripts, not to mention improvement in my skills and advancement of my career.

’Cause you can make your life look good\ You can do what Jesus would\ But you’d be surprised what you can do with a hard heart\ — Derek Webb, “Ballad in Plain Red”

Clueless Characters

Had a mostly-swell weekend with the folks, who came on Wednesday. The part before the weekend would have been swell, but I was still pretty sick. Today I learned that I can actually put eyedrops in by myself.

Feeling good about myself because I bought the new Ben Folds that I’d been procrastinating about at the same time I bought this old classic Fleming and John. Great stuff—you should really check it out.

Have now not written in over two weeks. I better get on it, or I might start to lose the drive.

Watched Clueless tonight with the Small-ers. First time seeing this 1995 classic. Fun stuff. Brittany Murphy with a New York accent.

Clueless is a great movie for people like me, who struggle with character. It’s based on a Jane Austen book, so it’s rife with characters, and Amy Heckerling had to help the audience keep all those kids straight. So in addition to the typical teen-movie stereotypes, she came up with some pretty sparkling ways to make her characters stand out.

Making the misleading love interest a 50s crooner-type was completely genius. And then he’s gay. You can’t make this stuff up.

One kid’s a skater-stoner. Oh sure, I know what you’re thinking: “That is sooo 90s.” Well, to be fair, this was the 90s. But in addition to the stereotype, Heckerling also made the guy an overenthusiastic stupid-human-trickster with a gift for spills. The fact that he later turns out to be a stunningly cool skater is just icing.

Brittany Murphy plays the pretty ugly girl. You know the one I mean. But she also has a super-thick New York accent. For no reason. And she swears more than everyone else put together.

Alicia Silverstone’s Emma (actually Cher in this movie: go figure) is fairly true to form. But for purposes of the plot, she’s unfashionably a virgin. So is her best friend. I mean, come on, this is the mid-90s! Sexually-inexperienced teens are supposed to be a thing of the past in movies by this time. But not here. Genius.

Comments for Now You

There’s a programming joke about comments I heard a few years ago, kind of forgot, and can’t find now. It goes something like this:

Newbie Dev: Lol comments r dumb
Junior Dev: Comments explain what you did for other devs later
Mid-Level Dev: Comments explain why you did it for other devs later
Senior Dev: Comments explain why you did it for you later

I’ve always mentally added my own¹:

Galaxy² Dev: Comments explain what I’m doing right now

Not all that often, but sometimes, I’ll be banging my head against some intricate problem (it almost always seems to involve multiple JS Array.prototype.reduces for some reason), and eventually start to suspect that I’m mentally glossing over some aspect of the solution that isn’t making it into the code, or is poorly implemented, because I haven’t explicitly understood it to even be a problem. So I write a comment explaining to, ostensibly, a future me or future dev, but really to present me, explaining exactly what the program is intended to do. Then I write the implementation of the comment. This invariably gets me at least one step closer to the solution.

Crawling Along

I’m finally starting to become productive again after the holidays. I won’t even go into all the various demands on my time that have kept me from making progress recently, but I’m starting to gain ground once more.

For one thing, my buddy Shawn is back in town after a month-long absence, so we’re getting together this weekend to work on our web series. Not sure where he is with the writing of his half of the episodes, but let’s hope … done.

On the other side of the page (as it were), the date of the Saint Regis Indiana Film Celebration (or whatever we end up calling it) is fast approaching, and I’ve finally managed to solicit more than one film to be in it. Even as I write this (hopefully), screener DVDs are making their way through the mail system to me. I’m hoping to have watched several more Indiana-based films by the end of next week and be very close to locking the program for the event.

This will mean it’s time to start publicity for the event, and not a second too early. I haven’t quite figured out how we’re going to advertise, but I’m going to start by calling the local paper to see if they want to do a story. This may involve writing a press release, which I haven’t done in a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bite on the concept of an interview with me and Dave Gustafson.

I really want this event to go well, as I think that would give us more confidence in planning our much more extensive (and frightening) film festival in September.

And for other reasons upon which I will not elaborate at present.

More as it happens.

Cut, Cut, Cut

So when last heard from, I was trying to cut 148 pages down to 100ish pages. Special thanks to Emily Blake for the progress bar info, which adds some snazziness (oh yeah, it’s a word).

I thought at first that I was going to have to cut huge chunks out of some of my favorite scenes, which kind of run a little long. However, I discovered that I can probably just go through and tighten them all up and still come out significantly shorter. The real cutting is in my connecting scenes between the set-pieces, which tend to be horribly extended by pleasant but irrelevant dialogue.

So I had all kinds of fun last night writing an eight-page replacement for a 20-page sequence. In the process I got to take it out of the realm of People Talking In Rooms and make it fun, with snappier dialogue and physical abuse. Great stuff.

So that’s all. Nothing else too exciting, just working away. I hope to be done with all of this rewrite by February 28, when I go see this girl

Discipline

One summer when I was in college, I wanted to lose 25 pounds, so I decided I would go running every day. I mapped out a mile in my neighborhood and forced myself to go running as soon as I got home from work, at which time, by the way, it would be, like, 90 degrees outside.

I hate running.

But I kept doing it every day, and I lost a bunch of weight, and I even kept doing it when I went back to school. I was in the mandatory health class by that time, so that worked out. I eventually quit because I got super-busy, but I had kept it up for about six months by that time.

And I liked it.

Sometimes, on a much smaller scale, writing is like this for me. Not the actual process, because I like that part. I like writing. But sometimes it’s the last thing I’ll actually do. I can find a million things to do before I get to writing, even though I actually like it quite a lot.

When I was doing the first and second drafts of this script, I didn’t have this problem. I’d gotten disciplined enough that I was now ignoring other things (including my health) so I could write more. But I got sick, and I didn’t write for two weeks, and now all my discipline is gone.

So even though I have barely anything to do on what I hesitate to even call a third draft, I’m crawling along. Last night I trolled along through MySpace looking for other people who graduated from my college. I wrote to people from high school. Then I went to bed.

I need someone to kick me. Thank goodness I’m meeting with my writing “group” tomorrow.

Do You Admire the View?

We’re staying in South Bend for a couple nights to attend a family wedding. This view that looks like an artist’s rendering is from our room.

This might very well be all he does while we’re here.

Don’t Ask Dakota

Once a month my church has a movie night. Since it’s a big church with lots of Hollywood insiders, they frequently invite people connected with the movie to appear as part of a post-screening panel discussion.

I recently attended their screening of The Secret Life of Bees. Good movie; not what I thought it was going to be.

Their panel this time consisted of some USC scholar no one cared about, the writer-director of the film, and Dakota Fanning (the star).

This is not a name-dropping post. I am not going to gush about Dakota. I did not meet Dakota. I did not get Dakota’s autograph.

During this panel, I noticed something stupid about the way people interview actors regarding their roles. All questions seem to be some variation of:

“Your character was such a deep, complex person with so many issues and such a fascinating history. How do you inhabit a character like that, make it your own, and reveal it on-screen?”*

So poor Dakota had to spend the entire evening MAKING STUFF UP—because how do you tell a non-actor about your craft? Acting is a completely mysterious profession if you aren’t an actor. I mean, if you asked a writer something like:

“How did you craft such a complex, haunted character with such a fascinating history?”

she would probably say something like:

“There’s this girl I knew, who went through something just like this, and there’s this other guy I know who has this character trait, and I sort of smashed them together into one uber-interesting amalgamation for your entertainment.”

An actor can’t say that. She can’t explain how it is that she can convincingly portray someone she isn’t. So she has to say things like:

“You know, I really thought she was sooo fascinating, and I really respected her character despite the choices she made, and I came to this place of understanding, so I really felt like I connected with her, flaws and all.”

Which is a sentence crafted to sound incredibly artistic and sensitive while being, in fact, COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MEANING.

Just shows you how smart actors really are, that they can come up with this kind of bullshit on the fly.

*The correct answer to this question is: “Hell if I know. I’M AN ACTOR. If I could explain it to you, that would mean acting was EASY, wouldn’t it?”

Don’t Be Precious

No, not the depressing movie about the pregnant girl. The character quality (definition #3 is the one I mean).

Today I had coffee with a producer-friend so he could ruthlessly slash the proposed budget for Murder! and tear apart the synopsis I’d written for the one-sheet.

And I let him.

Back when I was but a young wart hog I probably would have bridled and argued and resisted change. Thankfully, subsequent years of critiques from my good friends and fellow writers have softened me.

So I took his notes (where by “take his notes” I mean that I typed out verbatim what he suggested). And you know what? The synopsis was better for it.

So don’t be precious with your words. Or art. Or whatever it is you do as your creative outlet. Do you want to be better and more successful as an artist, or do you just want praise?

Don’t Conflate Policies and Values

Content Warnings: poverty, worker abuse, human trafficking

The idea of raising the minimum wage from its current value of $7.25 per hour to between $10 and \$15 per hour has received a lot of coverage in the political and economic news lately. Some argue that such a raise is long overdue, as the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, and that those currently making at or around the minimum wage are being needlessly kept in poverty. Others believe that raising the minimum wage will shortly produce higher prices that lower the buying power of both the poor and the middle class. Some even oppose the very concept of a minimum wage, while people at the other end of the spectrum think we should institute a Basic Guaranteed Income. Proponents of every viewpoint make what they feel to be very reasonable and compelling arguments, and many outspoken pundits attribute to their opponents either ignorance, ill will, or both.

Let’s say (because it’s true) that I believe a dramatic increase in the federal minimum wage will actually result in workers being worse off in the mid- to long-term future. Even though I agree that it doesn’t make much sense to let inflation grossly outpace the minimum wage, I’m also not too sure a federal minimum wage is such a great idea in the first place. I worry that if we increase the minimum wage, workers like me who make only a little more than \$15/hour will demand a similar increase in wages from our employers, which will ratchet up the whole system, once again pushing the lowest-paid workers far to the bottom of the heap in quality of life, while leaving unaddressed the other systemic problems in our economy that perpetuate the income disparity.

A strong proponent of increasing the minimum wage would disagree with my position and all, or nearly all, of my reasoning. We could agree, though, on the value that I hope I’ve done a good job of positioning as the basis for my opinion: the desire for an increase in buying power and quality of life for lower-income workers.

Unfortunately, very few people (at least the kinds speaking loudly on the internet and cable news) appear capable of making such a distinction. Most of us have so tangled our values with the policies by which we think those values could best be achieved that we assume anyone who doesn’t agree with our policies must not adhere to our values. Why doesn’t Ryan think we should raise the minimum wage? He must hate poor people; that’s why he wants them to continue suffering such injustice. At best, we can assume that Ryan has little concern for poor people. Maybe he doesn’t wish them harm, but he doesn’t wish them well, either.

Of course, phrased so baldly such reasoning sounds a little silly. I don’t hate poor people, and I certainly do wish them well. I suspect that most people would like to see poverty mitigated or erased, so the second I realize that my repudiation of someone’s stated opinion on the subject boils down to “this jerk hates poor people”, I know I need to take a step back and consider whether I’m confusing a disagreement about policy with a mismatch of values.

To take another issue as an example: Even though for religious reasons I believe that prostitution is immoral, I think legalized prostitution is probably the best way to decrease trafficking and abuse of sex workers and help keep women and men safe when they sell or purchase sexual services. At the very least, I believe we need to decriminalize sex workers so they feel safe seeking help from authorities when they suffer abuse. Plenty of people disagree on both counts. Do those people hate sex workers and want them to suffer? Maybe a few do, but I’ll bet that most just don’t think my policies would result in a net gain for society as a whole or sex workers in particular. Some would probably even argue that my policies would cause greater harm to sex workers in the long run. Still other people would tell me that even my religious objection to the act of prostitution itself taints my opinion with toxic sentiment, making me, on the whole, a harmful force in the battle for sex workers’ rights. Do such people hate religion or religious people? Again: maybe. Or maybe they just care more about the welfare and rights of sex workers than about coddling the opinions of well-meaning but moralistic Christians. It would be a massive mistake on my part to assume raw anti-religious sentiment on their part, just as they would be unfair to depict me as nothing but a hypocritical and judgmental religious bigot. Someone’s policies or opinions can be wrong or harmful even if that person means well and espouses worthy values.

I believe that most people do have worthy values, even if they don’t always express or embody them well or even understand their own opinions in such terms. I’ll go one step further and assert that most people hold values that match or at the very least align well with everyone else’s. Most of us want the same sorts of things: for as many people as possible—especially those closest to us—to have food, clothing, shelter, education, freedom from oppression, and the opportunity to do work that gives meaning to their lives. Some people add values of spirituality or religious devotion and attribute some or all of our values to a divine source, but we do not therefore jettison the aforementioned values shared by the rest of the world. The more consistently I recognize this fact about the people with whom I disagree, the less cynical and hostile I make myself, and the more optimism and comradeship I can feel toward my fellow humans.

Don’t Work for Thanks

In my last episode (at the dawn of time), I related my misadventures working for $50 a day. Feeling now much better about everything after earning a real rate for a while, I’ll relate why it is (on the whole) preferable to avoid working these cheap-to-free jobs, no matter how starving you may be.

An illustration is in order. When I first moved to LA, optimism flowing buoyantly across my synapses, I worked an unpaid weekend short film. I blithely thought that this would net me some connections that would prove valuable in the future, possibly even extending to a real job for the same producers

This is an example of the first snare laid for you by the offerers of unpaid work: their gratitude. Witness the conversation I had on set with the producer:

ME: I’m super-psyched to be working this free gig for you! PRODUCER: You’re welcome. And we’ll totally hire you next time for real money, too. ME: Really?! PRODUCER: Oh, totally. DIRECTOR and I are line producers for music videos. We’ll hire you for the next one we do. ME: Awesome!

This three-day shoot included some of the longest hours I have ever worked on any job before or since. First day: 12 hours. Fine. Second day: 18 hours. Third day: 20 hours.

No doubt this was related to the fact that these people worked in the music video world, which is notorious for its abusively long hours. Regardless, this illustrates the second snare of unpaid work: mistreatment.

See, although you’d think people would be so grateful that you’re working for them for free that they would treat you as your enthusiasm deserves, in reality, your willingness to accept their thanks as payment instead of money just signals to them that you are WORTHLESS.

When someone pays $200 a day for PAs, they know they need good PAs, which means they damn well better treat you right, or you won’t work for them again. And while PAs are a dime a dozen, GOOD PAs are much more like brilliant TV executives*

But the final snare, the third reason not to keep working for free, is that it DOESN’T WORK.

Recall PRODUCER’S promise to hire me on her next shoot. Then CUT TO: Three months later. I get a phone call on a Saturday night:

PRODUCER: Hey Ryan, it’s me, PRODUCER. ME: Oh yeah … wonderful to hear your voice. PRODUCER: You know it. Anyway, I was hoping you could do me a favor. I need another PA on a job tomorrow. It’d pay a little more than last time. ME: Yeah? PRODUCER: Yeah … how does $50 sound to you? ME: Well, it sounds terrible. But the wife and I are pretty hungry right about now … so okay!

In other words, people are never going to give you real money if they know you’ll work for thanks. Don’t let them keep taking advantage of you. And you’re unlikely to get any real connections out of it, so only do it if it’s good experience (when you’re starting out, any experience is good experience).

To sum up: it may be okay to work an unpaid gig for someone one time, but if that person calls you back for another shitty-paying gig … RUN AWAY.

*Just my bitterness talking. TV executives have to be brilliant, otherwise how could TV keep making all that money?

Draft Delayed

So here’s why I haven’t done a thing to my script since last posting.

I finished my draft last Tuesday and gave myself the rest of the week off from writing. I’d been sick, and I was planning to go away for a weekend to a wedding. Besides, I wanted to get some distance from the script so my next take would be a little fresher.

On Sunday, illness #2 came along.

Four days later, I have finally found a doctor and gotten checked. I have pharyngitis and conjunctivitis, so I’ll be down for another couple days, probably.

Grrrr.

I’m really looking forward to getting back to my characters—maybe this will make me appreciate writing more (if possible).

In the meantime, I read a couple things people tossed my way. One was an old TV script by Charlie Kaufman, courtesy of Jane Espenson (Good), and the other was a short written by I don’t know who, which a friend of a friend is thinking about producing this summer (Not Good). I haven’t been doing the screenwriting thing for long, but I’ve already noticed a tendency on many people’s part to shop things around for inspection by anyone who shows interest. Maybe I’ll develop this habit soon.

Draft Time, Baby!

So after not a few weeks of sitting around and thinking (see previous post), I finally thought I had a plot for the “Polygamy” script. I proudly packed my little notecards together and went off to a meeting with Greg, ready to pitch the hell out of the thing.

I pitched. For twenty-five long minutes I pitched.

Greg interjected. He made suggestions. He had thoughts.

I got to the end. He didn’t like it. I didn’t like it.

I saw it coming. I really did. I knew when I wrote the beat card for the climax that it just didn’t feel climactic.

Greg and I both blanked on how to deal with it. One meeting and a whole weekend later, neither of us had any solutions.

Then, early Wednesday morning, I’m at work. More sitting and thinking. And it hits me.

I solved it. I called Greg, mere hours before he was to fly out to LA (this is how I steal time from people). He agreed. The ending works.

And how did I solve it?

The main characters of the story meet two people at the third act break. First a wife, then her husband.

I switched the order. They meet the husband, then the wife.

And now it works.

Stories are weird.

Anyway, it’s draft time now, and this is where the crazy third-shift job really works for me. Wednesday night isn’t the best. There’s lots of work to do around the house. But I still managed to squeeze in two hours of productivity, and I got eight pages out of that. Tomorrow, should get at least six hours of writing, and we’ll see where that takes me.

I’m back, baby!

Dresden Codak #19 Preview

Yay!

dresdencodak:

A very quick speed painting of The Necromancer of Dol Guldur!

dresdencodak:

Dark Science #23 - Interpretive Dance

Just a reminder, if you want to get any merchandise from the Dresden Codak store (like thenew B9 Kingdom books or Department of Awareness posters), Christmas delivery deadlines are fast approaching!

I get so excited for every new page of Dark Science.

Entrepreneurial Trials

One of the drawbacks (or perks, depending on what kind of person you are and how much time you have on your hands) of trying to work for yourself or be an independent artist is having to do many things yourself that most people would probably just pay someone else to do.

I designed this website myself. It runs on the well-regarded Movable Type platform, which is basically the same kind of thing as the much-more-popular WordPress. Movable Type is written in Perl, which I know almost nothing about except that its syntax is difficult to follow and that it used to be referred to as “the duct tape of the internet”.

I’ve already lost 80% of you by this point.

This week I decided that I wanted my blog to auto-post to Twitter, like some other popular blogging platforms. I figured (correctly) that this would probably just involve some googling and the subsequent download and installation of a Movable Type plugin.

Boy, that word “just” does a lot of heavy lifting, doesn’t it?

I did find the plugin, Twitter Tools, by MT-Hacks, a well-known Movable Type plugin developer. His installation instructions were pretty clear, so I whipped through them, navigated to the Movable Type Content Management System interface, and instead of seeing the login screen, received a mangled error message something like this:

can't use string ("TwitterShortEntryURL") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use

Fantastic.

Lest I lose the remaining 2% of you still reading by this point, I will not chronicle all the steps I went through to solve this issue. I’m only pretty sure what ultimately ended up working, anyway. I’ll just mention two things:

1. Installing a Movable Type plugin is not like installing desktop software; it’s basically just copying a bunch of text files to various locations in your web host. While doing this, I took a couple of shortcuts by replacing entire folders instead of replacing the individual files in them one by one. I ended up having to manually revert to previous versions of all those folders before redoing it the way I should have done it in the first place. Lesson learned: when doing things you only barely understand, follow the instructions slavishly; do not interpret.

2) The thing that I think fixed the issue was updating to the newest version of the LWP Perl module (oh my goodness, seriously… no one’s reading this now). I decided to do this because the plugin author said, right there on the Twitter Tools web page, that this was something you might have to do. I feel like this is the same lesson as Lesson One, above.

Anyway, good web-dev times. When you have more time than money, you end up doing things like this (or whatever the equivalent is for you)–chores that you would almost certainly be better off paying a professional person to do, were it not for that pesking time-money imbalance.

This is the first post I’ve made since installing Twitter Tools; now to see if it works!

Update: It does.

… Even the Small Victories

I make my return with the preceding image. This is the copy of my rom-com that I just finished sending to a talent agency, one of three that requested it.

Celebrate even the small victories.

I took vacation this week to spend every day working on writerly things. Broadly, this means writing, although I did spend the last three hours proofreading, making copies, hole punching, and visiting the post office.

The rest of the week I’ll be working on my book adaptation. This is a change of plans, as I had been planning on writing the script for a movie to be shot on a nonexistent budget here in my own town.

But (here follows the other Big News) the wife and I are moving to LA, so now the plan is to finish this adaptation quickly so I have three truly solid scripts to flog around town.

Wish me luck.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded\ Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed\ Everybody knows the war is over\ Everybody knows the good guys lost\ Everybody knows the fight was fixed\ The poor stay poor, the rich get rich\ That’s how it goes\ Everybody knows — Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”

February. Writing.

Fixing Houses and Scripts

So, kids: dilemma of the moment.

No, wait: setup.

Last week, when I was meeting with my writing group (and by group I mean myself and this guy), Greg told me he’d pitched my current(!) script to a friend of his who might be making a super-low-budget feature this summer. Since my script is super-low-budget, Greg passed me this guy’s phone number, and I gave him a buzz.

I warned him that the script was in the middle of quite the intensive rewrite, such that if I gave it to him in its current form, it would make no sense. He said, “That’s okay; I won’t have time to read it until next week, anyway. But if you could send me a one-page synopsis, that’d be great. And then you can just send the whole thing when you finish it.”

Well, okay then.

I sent him the synopsis (which, by the way, is more like journalism than screenwriting ever should be), and went back to the rewrite.

Now here’s the thing about the rewrite. Originally, I had no intention of finishing it by Monday. No intention at all. So there was this instant mild-panic mode that came over me. But to complicate matters, today is the day when I must fix my stupid broken water softener and water heater. It’s going to be quite the plumbing-fest hereabouts.

Anyway, this weekend I have both a house and a script to fix. I want to have this rewrite into at least an intelligible form by Tuesday at the latest. Wish me luck.

From a philosophical perspective, libertarians generally believe the appropriate role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. The question is, is forbidding abortion a way of protecting life, or should it be viewed as a restriction of liberty? There’s a plausible libertarian case on both sides. People who are consciously libertarian are more respectful of the other position on abortion, in my experience, than most pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I do not think there is an official position. — David Boaz, interviewed in the The Atlantic by Molly Ball

geekdonnatroy:

plotdesigner:

avelera:

dimbosama:

avelera:

hoflords:

nerdyfacts:

(Source.)

We have to understand that no matter what we do with our lives we will never be as awesome as Christopher Lee is.

I will never get over how he corrected Peter Jackson on the proper sound a man makes when he’s been stabbed in the back because he actually worked in the British clandestine services.

Or how he volunteered to fight in one of the most brutal fronts of WWII (the Finnish-Russian Winter War).

Or how he was fucking NAZI HUNTER.

Basically, Christopher Lee is the real Most Interesting Man in the world and I honestly don’t know why we tell Chuck Norris jokes when this badass is walking around.

And then I see him rambling on about how Saruman and Gandalf are actually Istari, which are one of the Maia in the LotR commentaries and I realize he literally cannot become more awesome.

Oh can’t he?

#Christopher Lee wrote a Metal Opera about Charlemagne #all opinions are irrelevant

I just read up on that and now I regret I didn’t include it! The man is 90 years old and he’s releasing a metal album next year. ACTUAL MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD CHRISTOPHER LEE.

[swoons]

he is also related to Ian Flaming, they are cousins 

he’s way too amazing XD

Holy crap.

Glorious Rewrite

Rewrite time is a fun time. I forgot how much fun it is.

Draft time is a fun time. In fact, it’s probably the most fun time. But it comes with all these pressures. Namely, the pressure to create something new, and the pressure to create at lightning-quick speed.

I subscribe (at least up until recently) to the idea that a first draft should be pounded out as quickly as possible, with as little thinking as posssible.

Outline, outline, outline. Then first draft. Fast first draft. No tweaking, no going back, no second guessing.

This means that I can knock out a draft in a couple weeks or less, to the envy of all my other writer friend(s). But it also means that sometimes those drafts are less than I hoped. I suppose this to be a fairly common problem among screenwriters, but I wish to eradicate it.

When I was in elementary school, junior high, senior high and college, I wrote things at a nice, deliberate pace. My first drafts were like third drafts. It was wonderful.

When I became a screenwriter everyone said that I should write first drafts like first drafts. And certainly this helps them to come out fast.

But while draft time is definitely better than the maddening limbo of outline time, rewrite time is probably my favorite time. Granted, this is only my second time there, but the last time (almost a year ago) was all kinds of fun, and so far this time is too.

Rewrite gives you that chance to really make the script the way you wanted it to be. I can obsess and finesse and tweak and adjust and do over to my perfectionistic heart’s content.

In the current case, the rewrite really is almost a complete rewrite, so it has all that magical aura of a first draft with the freedom and reward of a rewrite. It’s beautiful.

I have 17 pages of rewrite so far. Because I can, I will probably remove a couple of those pages, but even so, I’m pretty proud.

I’d be making a lot more progress, but things have been absolutely insane at work, with violence, non-compliance and anger on every side. I’m not even exaggerating.

So my actual “work” work takes me much longer every night, decreasing the writing time available. And my days tend to last longer, which means I get less sleep and then can’t stay awake enough to produce anything good.

I’m not really into the “suffering writer” thing. It doesn’t really help my creativity as much as you’d think. So let’s hope this is over soon.

In only slightly related news, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s tonight while doing paperwork. I’m trying to dredge my memory to a certain extent, but I think this may be the original “falls in love with his best friend” movie. Anyone?

Goodbye, Adobe

I finally caved and upgraded to MacOS Catalina today. This means that my old, old, old copy of the Adobe CS4 Production Premium Suite no longer works. I had prepared for this over a year ago by purchasing Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer, which seemed like the best options given my requirements. I also ended up buying a license of Sketch a few months later because I needed it for a client’s app, and then Acorn when it was 50% off earlier this year.

None of them are the same. I don’t mind losing Photoshop so much, because Acorn in particular does seem like a great replacement for my typical workflow, and I can always figure out how to do the more powerful stuff in Pixelmator if it ever comes to that. But I’m going to miss Illustrator so much. Affinity Designer and Sketch both make me kind of furious in different ways, and I very, very much hate that there’s no way to just open, edit, and save an SVG in Designer—it’s always an “Export” function.

But also I realized that this will be the first time in twenty years that I won’t have Adobe apps running on my machine. They’ve been a huge part of my professional and amateur life. They just killed me with this $21/month pricing. I don’t need Illustrator that much. But I’m going to miss it something terrible. Hopefully being pushed into the arms of Affinity will help me embrace their UI paradigms and eventually become comfortable. But it still sucks to say goodbye to an old friend like Illustrator.

haniemohd:

To that brilliant, snarkiest and sharpest of mind - Goodbye Sir Terry Prachett. Words cannot convey how much joy his writings has brought me all these years.

hannakdraws:

teenage catwoman doodles. her hoodie is actually cerise but the camera turned it pastel

I accept.

Happy Christmas! from Senna Diaz

Happy Father’s Day

My exceptionally thoughtful and creative wife and adorable son made this for me. 💕

He postures and poses, he listens to Keane/He rants and he raves like a man in a dream

Remember when I wrote some time back about how I love rewrites and think they’re the greatest time in the worldest?

I take it back.

Since then I’ve written a great grand seven pages. That’s right. Seven. In two weeks.

Now, as usual, I’m going to go ahead and blame work conditions. I also have a new excuse for your enjoyment: Winter.

That’s right, as an unforeseen byproduct of the third shift schedule, the longer times of darkness (not to be confused with Dark Times) are causing my body to send me sleep signals at an alarming rate, even when I’ve already had plenty of sleep.

But even with these excuses, seven pages in 14 days is pretty lame. I’m disappointed in me.

Despite Emily’s exhortation to go ahead and write standing on my head, smoking a cigar if that’s how I really crank it up, I’ve had some trouble making dents in the almost-page-one rewrite of my neo-screwball comedy.

And now The Fear is back in the form of Greg, freshly home from China. Jerk wants to meet again, so I better come up with something to validate my own existence.

Fortunately, I have at least produced a reasonable one-fifth-of-the-movie long sequence, and tonight I may well do even more. If I can kick-start my imagination hard enough to cough and sputter it’s steam-powered way along the story development superhighway like the Model-A clunker that it is.

I keep looking forward to the time when writing this comedy will be over and I can go back to drama, but damned if I didn’t just have another great idea for a comedy that will now nag at me with the persistence of a four-years-engaged woman tired of her fiancé’s feet-dragging and his over-used hyphenation.

Maybe I’ll just keep it back for a rainy-day pitch. Because we all know I meet with producers next to nonstop.

I’ll see you cats in another two weeks.

Her True Name - the Collection

Her True Name is a book!

If you’ve followed along with the Her True Name series of stories that I published throughout 2016, I’m thrilled to announce that you can now get the complete text of all seven stories in one volume—together with an eighth story that I never published on the blog.

If you haven’t been following along—well, I’m still thrilled to announce it!

I started writing the adventures of the Unnamed Heroine way back in 2013, but I had been thinking about the character for several years before that. I’ve been living with her in my head, one way or another, for about a decade now. I haven’t nearly finished telling her stories, but I’m so glad I can finally share this first collection of her adventures with everyone. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

Get your digital copy of Her True Name at ryanelainska.com/bookzero, and let me know what you think!

How the New Deal Actually Worked

The government can spend taxpayer money on the Green New Deal (and it should), but direct spending is not the only option, and if the New Deal is a good guide, not even the most important option.

Some really interesting economic history in here that I didn’t know.

permalink

How to Write While Sleeping

I’m through my first week at the new job. Haven’t gotten so much writing done, but actually more than I expected, so thus far my plan is working. Mwaahahahaha!!!

I haven’t done much because in addition to having to adapt my body to sleeping during the day, I am trying to finish up projects and tie off loose ends at the church where I work. This means I’ve been sleeping six hours or less each day and working non-stop. I slept for 1.5 hours today. No lie.

But once I was through with my two days of training and had the nights to myself, I tried to get a second start on plotting out my next script, which for the moment I am referring to as “The Hero Script.”

I plotted this out once already and went over it with Greg, but I didn’t really like it, Greg didn’t really like it, and I just felt it wasn’t doing justice to the concept. It’s a big concept with multiple thematic possibilities, and Wednesday night I started exploring those possibilities to find the one that would actually become the movie.

Thursday morning I staved off sleep for a few hours more to meet with Greg, and I told him what I’m about to tell the rest of you.

Let me note in advance that I’m aware of the pathetic pretentiousness that is the following sentence:

This movie wants to be a trilogy.

Now I’m aware that this puts me in bad standing on the Fantasy Novelist’s Exam, and I can’t think of anything sadder than being so incapable of coming up with a plot for a movie that you switch to plotting three movies, but I stand by what I said.

This movie wants to be a trilogy.

So having endured Greg’s attempts to talk me out of such foolishness, last night I began making notes about the three different movies. But let me just say, in mitigation, that I took one scrap of Greg’s comments to heart, viz., that I should figure out which one of the three was the one I most wanted to do, and do that one first.

Fortunately, it’s Part One of the trilogy.

So I wrote down as many notes as I could currently think of for Parts Two and Three (in nice columns in my spiral), and then started to dwell on Part One.

Unfortunately, this was c. 4:30 in the a.m., right about the time I hit the only-four-hours-of-sleep wall. It’s kind of completely against the point of the job to fall asleep, so I had to stop pretending to think about the Hero movie (while actually repeatedly nodding off) and switch to reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I gleefully discovered among the scant library at the House. So far, it’s everything I expected. But that’s beside the point.

After a full night of work, followed by an almost-full day of work punctuated with the aformentioned 1.5 hours of nap on the couch in my office at the church, I went to help my small group work on one of our houses (floor sanding makes much dust). When I couldn’t really remain upright anymore, I drove home and watched Suspect Zero. Rather an interesting movie for the kind of script I’m starting at the moment. Worth a viewing, although don’t get too excited about the Ben Kingsley. If he had done any acting in this movie, I’m sure it would have been wonderful, as usual. But he wasn’t allowed to, so he had to stick to looking mysterious and threatening. Which he does well.

I’ve held off going to sleep because I want to get out of the habit of sleeping at night, but it’s getting about time to let my body have it’s way, so I’m not going to stick around here talking to you people.

I Blame My Wife

Marriage kills your discipline. Well, that’s not true. It just gives you a million additional things to think about, so you never think about writing ever again. At least, not enough to do any.

So I blame my wife. :) ¹

But actually, I do have 23 pages of the Nightmare book adaptation done. It’s going quite well, when it’s going. I loves me my adaptation. It’s like Michaelangelo and sculpting: I just cut away anything that isn’t the movie.

In other news, David gave me some notes on my rom-com, so once I’m done with the adaptation, I have somewhere else to go. I’m not going there yet, because I’m still a little sick of that script, but eventually I will have to give it some final attention.

And finally, I have made my first dollar as a screenwriter. Really. $1.00.

I’ve had a short script on inktip.com for almost a year now, and after many other dead-end inquiries, these guys finally liked it enough to at least plan to produce it. There’s no money in shorts, so they were only willing to part with a dollar for it.

But I don’t care. It’s a production credit (hopefully). And it’s at least a tiny bit of validation. Writers need validation.

I’ve also noticed that adding an option (albeit a free one) to my profile on Inktip actually results in more hits for my other scripts. Thus, a “halo effect,” if you will.

That’s right: Shorts are the iPod of screenwriting, baby.

I’m such a geek.

Anyway, things are moving, if a little slowly. And also, despite my above complaint, marriage is great.

And yes, Greg, I know I’m supposed to do that 10-item list for which you tagged me. But you can’t jump back into blogging after a two-month-long absence with something like that. You just can’t.

‘I can think TWO things!’ - Monica Gellar

Found this artist through The Art of Animation. Can I like his style and think these warrior women are strong and beautiful and also think it’s silly and unnecessary that they all have Triple-D breasts and wear impractically-revealing clothing/armor?

[ broken link replaced ]

Yes. Yes, I can.

I can’t go out and play, but the view isn’t half bad

I got my next script plotted!! Aaahhhahahahahahahaha!!!

Well sure, it blows right now. But tomorrow I’m going to talk to Greg about it, and he’s a genius. So soon it will be amazing, you’ll see!

Of course, I’ll have to actually write it then, but let’s not discuss that right now.

I Hate Other Writers

I would just like to say, after reading a fine new feature screenplay by this guy, that I hate other writers.

Stupid, talented people. Why must they exist to feed my self-loathing?

I know there’s a certain faddishness to functional programming, but if you work with React a lot it’s a good idea to remember that it’s moving more and more in the fp direction. Being at least comfortable with some of functional programming’s basics will help align your mindset with that of the creators of the library you’re using to create your app.

I like Mailgun’s “Invite New User” placeholder text

I Made a Movie.

(Along with about 25 other people)

If you’re someone who follows this blog (what’s up, Jeff?) but doesn’t follow The Murder! A Love Story site (nearly everyone), you might not be aware of it, but in the time since I last posted the film went from being “in pre-production” to being “in post-production”, and it brought along its own set of arguably unnecessary quotation marks.

Either way, I’m now editing the feature film I wrote and directed.

OK, actually I’m syncing audio for the film. Which isn’t quite editing.

And I’m not really doing that right now. I’m organizing a film festival. Which starts tomorrow.

So NEXT WEEK I’ll be working away like mad on turning video clips into an actual movie, but right now I’m finalizing film festival programming, planning Q&A questions to ask filmmakers, going to the venue to set up equipment, and hoping really hard that people actually come to this thing so we can do it again next year, only better. And with more money.

But enough about me. Look at this preview of the new Dark Science by Dresden Codak!

I think that about says it.

If Only I Practiced

My girlfriend is going to be a fashion designer.

Hold on … I said that wrong. Do over.

My girlfriend is a fashion designer.

How do I know she is a fashion designer? Well gee, apart from the fact that she talks about fashion all the time, sighs every time we pass a shop with a badly-laid-out window, checks out scads of books on fashion from the library, comments on the clothes first with regard to everything she sees on TV, and—hell— the fact that she told me she was a fashion designer, the main reason I know it is that that’s what she actually does.

She shames me, really. Last night I asked her why she stayed up until two instead of going to sleep, and she admitted, in a surprisingly shamefaced manner, that she had been drawing.

So instead of sleeping or catching up on all the coursework she has been procrastinating on for her entire semester, she just couldn’t resist practicing her craft.

Isn’t that sick?

It was sad for me to have to admit to her that I will do almost anything but write. And I love writing. It makes me giddy, at least when it’s going well. When it’s going badly, I tear my hair out.

But I don’t seize every spare moment, and then some extra moments to do it.

I clean my house.

I pay bills.

I look up things on wikipedia.

Now, in some mitigation, this may be partly because I have a job that allows me to write at work, and I try to do most of my writing there.

But still.

On a brighter note, I did in fact work on my script last night, and I’m two scenes away from a whole plot. Maybe tonight I’ll finish, and then next week I can start the rewrite.

So my girl isn’t showing me up.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

I’m All Talk

Some writers are all talk. They say they’re writers. They say they’re working on something. But when it comes right down to it, you start to notice after a while that they haven’t actually produced any work in quite some time.

There are times when I’m one of these writers. But now is not one of those times.

Right now is draft time, baby!

Ah, draft time. Truly ‘tis a wonderful season in the writer’s life, when the desert of planning and research and note-taking is finally crossed and the thirsty writer arrives at the oasis of putting pen to paper, or as times have it, fingers to keyboard.

But, to get back to what I was saying, the way in which I am “all talk” is not the way I have just described.

No, what I’m referring to is the nature of my current writing.

I felt pretty proud of myself this time around because I spent many hours planning and doing character development, so that by the time I actually got to the plot, I felt pretty grounded in my characters.

So when I did my outline, I put in several scenes in which I knew that the characters would talk at length to each other. I even knew (sometimes) how their conversations would end. But I didn’t plan the actual content of those conversations.

Robert Rodriguez once asked Quentin Tarantino how he got such good dialogue, and Quentin said, “I just start two characters talking, and even I’m surprised by what they say.”

This is the method I am attempting for the current project.

I just finished writing the conversation right before the break into act two, and it was pretty fun. There will be many more like it, where I just sit some characters down and see what comes out of their mouths.

Then I’ll read it later and find out that all the dialogue needs to be rewritten.

Well, we’ll see.

As a final, semi-related note, I’ve been working on this script for 6.5 hours.

And I have 27 pages. What is that? A little over four pages an hour, average. Not too great, but not too shabby.

I’m Back, Baby!

Over a month since I last posted. Eek.

I have excuses. I do. Travel. Hectic work schedule. Girlfriend. Sleep deprivation.

But I won’t use them. Because the truth is: I just haven’t felt like blogging.

This happens to me every few months. And you shouldn’t feel slighted, Blogger. My other blog hasn’t seen an update in an equally long time.

But things are calming, and I’m working on scripts again, and so I feel better about myself in general, which brings a return of the blogging urge.

Have continued work on The Other Woman, which has now reached 110. I’m still disappointed that this draft did not progress as quickly as the last six-day miracle. But I have an excuse that helps me sleep at night (not that I need the help).

You see, this script is all about conversations. Sure, there’s action. And plot. Things happen, macro and micro. But the story is about characters processing together an event common to all.

And I didn’t plan this processing. I planned the outcome of the processing. But the actual words that would be said … I left them to be determined in the moment. I put my effort into creating the characters that would say the words.

And I’m finding that, sometimes, those words come slowly. Of course, being sleep deprived contributes to that.

But now I am at 110 pages, and most of the long, difficult conversations are behind me. It’s a teensy bit more downhill from here. Still, I expect this script will go long, so I probably still have 30-45 more pages in front of me. Several nights work at least.

After that, it will be rewrite time for How to Date Your Cousin. I’m very excited about that, because I think the rewrites will go just as quickly as the draft. Since I’m an optimist, I hope to reach shipping date on that script by the end of the year. That’d be a great way to end 2006, yes?

Again, I love my job.

I’m Doing This Backwards

I’ve been working for several weeks on an idea for a novella. It started with an idea that wasn’t very “high-concept”, which I usually try to avoid. Before long I realized that all my favorite parts of the idea were the character bits—the parts that got me choked up just thinking about them.

This is not how I operate. I do hook first—always the hook first, so I know why anyone would even think about reading the story. I do not do character bits first.

Now I’m trying to retrofit this character arc onto an actual concept that can hold together a fantasy storyline people actually want to read. It’s brutal. I keep sitting down with my spiral and my 3x5s and cranking on mind maps and outlines every weekend until I think, “Yeah, that’s it, right?” But some tiny part of my brain always knows that’s not it. So I spend the work week mulling over the story, then sit down on Saturday determined to nail the outline for good this time.

And by the end of the weekend I think, “Yeah, that’s it, right?”

Nope.

Building a plot around character beats. Not the way I do things.

I’m the Juggernaut of Page Counts, Bitch.

I was going to continue my argument with this post by Greg, but I went away before I could get there, and I don’t care enough anymore. So we’re done with that.

More exciting (to me) is what’s currently going on in the English-speaking world of screenwriting, the 14 Day Screenwriting Contest. This is a contest against one’s self, so don’t get excited that you might win something. In any case, it’s too late to start unless you’re even more of a speed demon writer than I am right now.

I got back to the states a little late for the contest (June 6 as opposed to June 3), but I went for it anyway, because while I was away I came up with my most kick-ass idea ever for a story. When I got home, I spent one night at work (I love my job) outlining, and the next night commenced to pound out the first draft. I’ve now spent three nights of work time writing this script, and the page count is (ya ready?) 90 frickin’ pages.

Now, 90 pages is actually pretty close to what I thought the final page count would be. However, I am not terribly far past the midpoint at the moment, and still going strong, so one of the flaws that will be fixed in subsequent drafts is definitely going to be long-winded-ness. But I still feel quite confident that in the remaining three nights of work I have left before the 14 days end I can finish this rough. I’m not saying it will be good. But fixing a sucky thing is about a million times easier than creating a new thing.

One of the other things I have a feeling will be wrong with this script, although I won’t be able to verify this until others read it, is that it just won’t be that funny. This is my first time trying to write a rom-com, so I’ve got that working against me. But beyond that, I just keep forgetting that it’s supposed to be funny. I get focused on the story, banging out scenes, and every couple hours think to myself, “Am I being funny?” We’ll find out.

The other thing holding me back from the funny is that since I didn’t have tons of planning time, I didn’t so much map out characters beforehand. I think a lot of the essence of comedy is based on good characters, and I don’t have ‘em. Much of the comedy in this script can be situational, but much of it should still be character-driven. So there’s already plenty of work to do in the second draft.

I’ll let you guys know how it goes, and I’ll probably ask a couple of you to read, if you promise not to do that thing you did with my last script, you bunch of slackers.

I need Greg to come back so I can brag on myself. My writer’s ego needs some stroking.

In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques… The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges. — Conor Friedersdorf, Obama’s ‘Insider Threat Program’: A Parody of Liberal Faith in Bureaucrats

In Which I Return to Blogging But Don’t Talk Much About Screenwiting

If you’re ever trying to use the OS X Terminal to delete invisible files from a hidden folder that pretends the files aren’t even there, and you become convinced that it would be a good idea to type the following command:

rm -rv *

DON’T DO IT. You will spend the next 10 hours sitting at that computer running Data Recovery Software and hoping you don’t have to tell the guy who hired you to edit his documentary that you lost most of the footage through sheer stupidity.

This is a perfect segue into mentioning that I moved to LA six months ago and am scraping by a living in the film business through a combination of Production Assistant and Editing work.

I could go on about it, but that would be BO-RING.

I’m editing two feature movies right now—the one where I just lost all the footage (and that is now supplying me with the free time to write this post), and another one.

The Other One is a film shot by this Art Director I know. She said to me one day (truncated version of hybrid email/face-to-face conversation follows):

ART DIRECTOR: Hey, I made this short film. Wanna edit it for free? * RYAN: Sure! What’s up with it? ART DIRECTOR: It’s a half-hour drama about a woman who yells at a homeless lady and then feels bad about it, so she goes on a journey to find homeless lady and give her back something she dropped. RYAN: Sounds EXCITING! I’m in. ART DIRECTOR: OK.** Here’s the script. Don’t mind that it’s 45 pages long; that’s just because I’m not good at formatting a script. RYAN: Cool. I’ll get right to it.

Almost needless to say at this point, her movie is not going to be 45 minutes long. It’s going to be more like 60 minutes long. Because while she was correct about her lack of formatting expertise, she was wrong in her assumption that this would make her movie SHORTER than the page count of the script.

So I called her back a couple days later and said: “Uhmmm … I’ve done eight pages worth of script and have 25 minutes worth of movie. I think this is going to be a feature.”

The awesome part of this story (to me), is that this lady actually shot a feature film, BUT DIDN’T REALIZE IT. She thought it was going to be 25-30 minutes. ACTUALLY AN HOUR. Awesome.

So now I’m editing a feature. And another feature.

If I can recover all this footage I deleted.

*Syntactical challenge: This sentence contains two word pairings that are difficult to pronounce. See if you can figure out which ones! **Spelling note: I hate it when people spell the word: “OK.” But I recently learned that this is actually correct. The people who spell it “okay” are wrong. So now I’m trying to force myself to do it right, however painful.

Infanticide

There are two preferred methods of killing unwanted children. The first, of course, is to just kill them when they pop out. But this really doesn’t involve enough tempting of fate for my taste. I prefer the old tried-and-true Roman adventure of taking them outside the city and leaving them to die, risking the off chance that someone else will come and pick them up, thus giving them the opportunity to grow up and later kill me at unawares.

That last bit may not quite fit the metaphor I’m creating here, but certainly I am killing one of my babies at the moment, scriptographically.

My regular readers (hey Greg!) will remember that I finished one draft and finished a plot outline for the next. I think I even made some remark about how guilty I felt that it was another romantic comedy.

Well, I sat down the next night at work to start writing a synopsis so I could get on to developing characters and banging out another draft, thus giving myself reason to gloat over my other screenwriting friends (hey Greg!). This is obviously the only reason to engage in such an unrewarding process as screenwriting, apart from the great salary.

But I got about three paragraphs into the synopsis and started to hate myself, and even more, to hate my newborn child. All of a sudden it was just too cliché, too by-the-numbers, too … Save the Cat! to keep in my family of works-in-progress. I got disgusted with myself and spent the next four nights falling asleep while pretending to write and finally abandoning pretense in favor of watching movies.

Then I read this year-old script by Greg and instantly loathed myself even more. I’m beginning to think that bastard churns out better work the less he plans for it. Meanwhile I plan and plan and plan and plan and then don’t even like my plans enough to carry them out.

Wow, I look at that last paragraph, and any doubt I had that I am a writer just disappears. The sheer, undisguised artistic jealousy and self-loathing is the tell.

Anyhow, while I was complaining to Greg about this over the phone, he recommended leaving the story out to dry (or as I prefer to think of it, dying alone on a hillside) for a while and working on something else.

So I have this road-trip girly-movie idea (that’s right, girly movies are all I have) that Greg and I both agreed was marketable, and I’ll be working on that for a while now. It should be out-of-the-box enough to not make me angry. I watched Thelma and Louise last night as preparation for this endeavor.

I’m realizing I don’t owe it to an idea to develop it first just because I had it first. I have a strange, relational tendency to be loyal to my ideas. If I was a paterfamilias in ancient Rome, I’d have no respect from the other landed citizens (hey Greg!). So I’m practicing leaving the unwanted ones on the hill to die, at least until I run out of better children to whom I can give my attention.

Or until they grow up in someone else’s care to be sold for \$2 million and ruin my life.

***UNRELATED NOTE I WANTED TO INCLUDE IN THE POST BUT COULDN’T FIT IN THEMATICALLY***

Also, I posted a logline for one of my shorts on Inktip.com, because it’s free to do that. One day later, I have an email from a cinematographer asking to read it because he’s looking for a short to produce. So tonight is also about getting the script into shape for him to read. I like attention, however trivial.

John Siracusa’s Inner Troubled Teen

I used to work in a group home for troubled boys, many of whom were survivors of unhealthy families or environments, or sometimes of the corrections system. As part of my initial training, I learned a set of concepts and techniques developed at Cornell University and collectively known as Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI). TCI training emphasized the importance of understanding the “Conflict Cycle”, which goes like this:

A Stressful Incident -> The Young Person’s Feelings -> The Young Person’s Actions -> An Adult’s Response

In plainer terms, a young person in crisis (and all residents of a group home can broadly be understood to be in crisis at nearly all times) will experience a stressful incident or situation. If they cannot successfully manage their feelings in response to that trigger, they will act out in unacceptable ways. The adult(s) responsible for the young person will then respond to the unacceptable behavior.

If the Adult Response is successful, the unacceptable behavior will end, and the young person will learn better skills for coping with stress or painful feelings. If the Adult Response is not successful (that is, not therapeutic), it will constitute a new Stressful Incident that will retrigger painful or unmanageable feelings in the young person, beginning the cycle anew.

I thought about the Conflict Cycle as I listened to the most recent episode of Reconcilable Differences, a podcast by John Siracusa and Merlin Mann in which they discuss the development and expression of their two disparate personalities. I highly recommend it, and if you want to skip straight to the content I discuss, the 1:06:25 marker is a good place to start.

As the main topic of the episode, Merlin interrogates John about the processes by which he maintains the primacy of his critical faculty, for which he is renowned. In a particular corner of the nerdosphere, invoking John Siracusa is a well-recognized shorthand for the ability to identify and analyze a shortcoming or flaw in reasoning or execution. Merlin references this reputation in asking how John developed the skill of detaching his own ego and personal feelings from his analysis of even highly-charged issues. In response, John detours into discussing what he refers to as his “Mental Model”.

My brain has two parts. It has the rational part, and it has the other part. And the rational part of the brain—everyone can relate to this, I think—something happens that is significant, or upsetting, or traumatic, or exciting, or whatever it is: a significant event. 25 years pass, and you look back on that event; you have a better perspective on it, because so much time has passed that, hopefully, a lot of the trauma or the excitement or whatever has drained out of it, and you can look back on it, and you can engage with that event in a way that you could not when you were sort of in the heat of the moment, right? That is my attempt to explain what the rational part of the brain is… So that’s one part of the brain is the rational part, and the other part is all the parts with the feelings and the reactions and so on and so forth. And I use this mental model because I’ve always felt that the rational part of my brain—probably since mid-to-late adulthood—massively dominates the other part of the brain. That I’m able to engage it very close to the heat of the moment, like within hours or days, or sometimes immediately, and sometimes pre-emptively: engage the rational part of my brain to win over the other part… This is the tool I use to manage myself. Something is super-upsetting, or whatever; I engage the rational part of my brain to try to bring myself down, to try to say, “Look, I know you’re upset, or whatever, but let’s try to think about this, and not do something stupid.” Or, “Think about what we did: what really happened there? I know you’re angry at this person, but were you actually the one who was at fault there?” It is super-important to me that the rational part of my brain is the part of my brain that has control.

Note: my transcription is edited for brevity and clarity, but I feel I’ve represented John’s thoughts accurately.

In his description of his Mental Model, John almost perfectly adapts the Conflict Cycle, except that instead of an Adult and a Young Person, he substitutes what I’ll call “Rational John” and “Everything Else John”:

A Stressful Incident -> Everything Else John’s Feelings -> Everything Else John’s Actions -> Rational John’s Response

Rational John’s response sometimes results in a de-escalation of Everything Else John and an opportunity for Everything Else John to learn better coping skills. Or, more frequently—as John clarifies later in the podcast—Rational John fails to successfully de-escalate Everything Else John, who proceeds to wreak some harm upon a relationship that Rational John values

To aid group home workers in responding therapeutically, TCI instructs them to ask themselves Four Questions when confronting a young person in crisis:

1. What am I feeling now?
2. What does the young person feel, need, or want?
3. How is the environment affecting the situation?
4. How do I best respond?

Based on John’s description of himself, Rational John seems to have about the same success rate I had when I worked with troubled teens. I never performed particularly well at responding to young people in crisis, because I could get through Questions 1-3 fairly well but would usually fall apart at Question 4 and end up responding only neutrally, not therapeutically, to the client. Often I completely forgot to stop and ask myself the Four Questions before responding, and this usually accounts for my frequent failure to successfully respond to my own non-rational self as well. Much like Rational John, Rational Ryan often doesn’t even get a word in until Everything Else Ryan has already steamrolled forward into relational disaster. In that case, Rational Ryan just comes in to do the “mop-up”, as John refers to what I would call a “post-crisis interview” with Everything Else Ryan.

In the remaining hour of the podcast, John and Merlin discuss how this Mental Model can apply not only to preventing or mitigating harmful personal behavior but also to the pursuit of greater clarity of thought and belief. Merlin briefly refers to another set of techniques I practiced with similarly mediocre success in the group home: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. John—consciously or unconsciously—adapts those concepts to his own goal of constantly self-correcting his own erroneous beliefs to achieve a better grasp on reality. It’s a jam-packed hour of wrestling with the flawed mental processes that guide our ideas and relationships, and well worth your time and consideration.

Just finished my first JavaScript programming job

The client payed me more than we agreed. Guess he was pleased:

Just found a fantastic new web comic through Aaron Diaz.

(via Ava’s Demon)

Lady Armor- Exposed!

womenfighters:

Finally somebody admits it. When you’re a warrior, showing skin gets you nowhere. Unless your goal was a swift, embarrassing death.

I was surprised it wasn’t on dA. I scoured the internet for the original source and only found more submissions to funny sites, so I’ll keep looking and let you know when I find it.

FOUND: http://luckyfk.deviantart.com/art/Fantasy-Armor-355029113

loish:

latest post to deviantart! me and my sisters, drawn as an x-mas gift for my mom. left one is Suey, my big sister who is a biologist and lives in canada at the moment. the middle one is me, and the right one is Kaitlin, my little sister who is studying anthropology in belgium.

I love this artist.

My wife is away for the week, so this mope has to put up with me as a substitute for her favorite person.

Make it Better

When I grow up, I’m going to be in development.

Okay, I’m not. I’m going to be a screenwriter. We all know this is the goal.

But for the past couple days, I’ve felt kind of like I’m in development. For those unacquianted, development people are the ones who seek out scripts and develop them to the point where they can be good movies. That’s a super-simplified definition, but it’s not the point right now, so bite me.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a script by David. I gave him lots of mean notes, all the things I could think of that were wrong with his story. Today I spent all day thinking about his script and his characters and their various intertwining plotlines, and I just finished a ginormous long email full of more notes, but positive ones this time.

This is starting to become a trend.

Because a couple weeks ago, I did the exact same thing with a script by Blair. I read his stuff, told him lots of mean things, and then sat on it for half a week before straightening out his story in my head and emailing him a bunch of what I hope were helpful suggestions, thereby causing him to remove the pins from his little Ryan voodoo doll.

I quite enjoy this process. Probably too much, as it leads me to spend two hours writing an email to someone and another 20 minutes blogging about it. I should be writing instead, slacker that I am. But it’s not only a fun process; it’s an incredibly constructive habit for a screenwriter.

Reading scripts that aren’t done, that you know need input and therefore could be seriously impacted if you come through with something intelligent, is a great challenge. It exercises the story muscles in your brain to be able to look at a story objectively (something next to impossible with one’s own work) and figure out what it needs to really make it shine.

I do this with movies as well as with unproduced scripts. Let’s face it: most movies aren’t that great. I can enjoy them, but there will be nagging little thoughts in the back of my head, telling me why I shouldn’t. In some cases, such as the movie I watched on Friday, the nagging is so great that I find myself actually rewriting the movie as I watch it.

I know only a few of the people reading this are screenwriters, but I’ll bet this applies to almost anything you might be passionate about doing. Watch other people doing it, or examine the finished work, and figure out what you would do instead. How could it be better? Do this whenever you have the opportunity. Just don’t be like me, and let it keep you from actually practicing your passion.

Making a Plot to Slay the Agents

I’m not a plot guy.

Some people can take an idea and go nuts with it. Tell them something you came up with, and they’ll tell you ten other things that could go along with it and are probably better ideas anyway.

Greg is one of these people. I hate that jerk.

My friend Shawn is even more one of those people. Of course, I hate him less because he’s not a writer, and therefore does not make me feel quite as bad about myself.

I am not one of those people. Show me an idea, and I’ll say to you, “That’s an idea, right there.”

I mean, I’d dress it up more and so forth, but at the time, I’ll have nothing to add.

I will then spend six weeks thinking about it, and if I’m lucky, I’ll have a storyline for you to tear apart and tell me to rethink.

But it’s a hella-long process, making a plot.

Now, fortunately for me, there are other things about writing that I am good at. This tends to redeem me in my own eyes.

But plot is hard.

And that is why I was overjoyed today when both Greg and myself deemed my current storyline good enough to at least start rewriting.

Because, while I get a kick out of making progress on a plot, and I do get that giddy writer feeling, too often the outlining process is full of very frustrating roadblocks.

Whereas draft time goes by so fast. It’s the most fun, and I fly pretty well at it. It makes me happy.

This is only the second time I’ve tried to rewrite a script. So I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out when I rewrite a concept that actually has high saleability.

If I’m lucky and work hard, I hope to have a ready-to-pitch script in a couple months’ time.

And that’s a very frightening idea, indeed.

Meet Me at the Edge of the World

Just got Over the Rhine’s latest double album, and I’m playing it on a loop while I read. With the autumnal northern-Indiana weather and gathering dusk, it makes me feel like curling up on the couch and losing myself inside a good fantasy novel, but instead I’m catching up on the news and my magazine backlog.

Halfway is good enough for now.

Mistakes Are For the Making

As I opened up the most recent scene of Murder! A Love Story for editing and started watching the stringout, I cursed myself for perhaps the thousandth time in post-production.

We didn’t have much time to shoot our scenes, so we shot two cameras at once as often as we could and tended to cover dialogue-based scenes in the “master-over-over” style. Besides being fast, it fit with the overall style and tone of the film.

I must have been tired on this particular day. We were shooting in a very small space, the office of Westminster Hall at Grace College. Our master was already a little weird because it was being shot from the end of a desk, which filled the foreground with furniture and desk accessories instead of the actors. I’m not a huge fan of masters anyway; when I cut I tend to use them very little.

So you’d think this would be an ideal situation to make the over-the-shoulder shots really good so I could rely heavily on them in the editing room. What I decided to do, though (and for the life of me, I can’t remember how this conversation went), was put a 50mm lens on the OTS camera and shoot everything handheld.

If you’re not familiar with these sorts of concepts, a 50mm is not a very wide angle lens, and on the APS-sensor cameras we were using, it was realistically more like a 75mm lens. When shooting with lenses like this, the kind of shake you get from shooting handheld is exaggerated. I don’t know what possessed me to let the camera operator go handheld instead of putting the camera on sticks, but this is what happened. Consequently, all the OTS takes are shaky, and the focus comes and goes sometimes because the depth of field was relatively shallow, so every time the operator moves the camera even a little bit closer to or farther away from the subject the shot goes soft.

Grrrr.

This is only the most recent in a long list of things I’d do differently if I shot this movie now instead of last year. Of course, I wouldn’t know to do those things differently if I hadn’t already made the mistakes that taught me those lessons. So there’s no use whimpering over it. As Edward Burns recently tweeted:

“Best advise i got when i was trying to make Brothers McMullen. ‘there are two types of pain. The pain of regret and the pain of hard work’ [sic]”

So I guess I’m experiencing a little of both right now, but I’d definitely rather be regretting my mistakes in production than not making the movie at all.

mrgregfrancis:

Day 15 #pokernightmovie

Who is taking the time to write such pretty numbers?

Murder! Kickstarter

Ten minutes ago I launched a Kickstarter project for Murder! A Love Story.

For those who’ve never checked out Kickstarter, here’s how it works: You decide to back a project by pledging money to it. If the project reaches its pledging goal, hurray! The project receives your money and moves forward. The project also gives you a pre-decided reward, based on the amount you pledged. If the project doesn’t reach its goal, it gets no money at all. That’s right: you’re out a whopping \$0.

So please consider supporting Murder! A Love Story on Kickstarter. All of our budget is going to hard costs like food and equipment and travel; we promise we won’t spend your money frivolously.

And if you want to go the extra mile for us, spread the word! We need all the help we can get.

Thanks! Hopefully you’ll hear soon about our success in raising the funds to complete the film.

Must Find Hook

Last night at work I treated myself to a night of watching movies on the couch (I love my job). Why did I do this? Well, I’m glad you asked that, O jealous fellow writers.

Because I finished a script.

Okay, fine! I didn’t finish the script. I finished the first draft. But it sounds so much cooler to say you finished a script.

The 14-day Screenwriting Contest worked out well for me. I banged that thing out at an average of almost 6 pages an hour, baby. That’s pretty good for me—I don’t know about the rest of you.

I think that’s the glorious thing about having an idea that you can really see as a movie: you keep seeing it the whole time you’re writing; you just have to keep letting the fingers translate so everyone else can also see.

The 14-day script was good for me in another way, besides just getting a draft knocked over. It reminded me how much I love writing a script.

I was pumped when I got the Lifeline job, because it meant I would be able to write for several hours every night while getting paid. True, I wasn’t getting paid much, but it was enough to stay alive and not have to stress out trying to find other hours during the day in which to pursue the craft. So I entered the job excited, ready to go.

Then I didn’t write for a month.

This is the problem with ideas that you can’t “see.” You can’t see them. I had this “Hero” idea. The most famous heroes of the great stories and myths are actually all the same person. What a great idea, right?

That’s not a hook. It’s too broad to be a hook. So I went off in search of the hook. Night after night at work I would labor to find the plot for the movie this idea wanted to be. I did one. It sucked. I did another one. It sucked. But it had elements of not sucking. I took another pass at it. It still sucked.

I kept falling asleep at the desk. Outlining a hookless movie has to be the worst thing in the world for someone awake at 4 a.m.

So, worn out from all this story-breaking and not having written in longer than I wanted to admit to anyone, I went off to Sicily. And danged if my second-to-last day there, I didn’t get myself a hook. And I don’t mean a hook in the “what a great concept to explore” sense, but in the “This is so good I need to check to make sure it hasn’t already been done” sense. (Note: this is my big, biased ego talking).

Come home, back to work. First night: outlining.

Check.

I kicked that outline’s ass.

Second night: writing. Third night: writing. Fourth night: lack of sleep, but still some writing. Fifth night: hella writing (40 pages, baby) Sixth night: insane work problems and distractions galore. No writing. Seventh night: Fade to Black. Draft complete.

I think I calculated around 27 hours of writing to produce 129 pages. Not once in all those hours or pages did I get bored. Not once did I wish I was doing something else (okay, maybe sleeping). It was a thrill from start to finish.

Because I had a hook.

New screenwriting lesson: Don’t write a hookless movie. Not just because you won’t sell it. Because it’s not nearly as much fun.

Next week: a new hook, a new outline, a new script. Rewrites on the most recent draft await the perusal of my fellow scribes. Get on that, y’all. Don’t leave me hanging.

My first ever pull request

I’m so proud of myself.

My nights, more often than not

Yes, that is a charging cable running from my computer to my phone because last night I worked until 6am and forgot to charge it.

My Rant Today on Egalitarian Marriage — Storify

NOTE: Dead link, as Storify no longer exists. Left here for archival purposes

If you don’t want to read an extensive Twitter sermon on the true hardship of egalitarian marriage, let me literally BEG* you not to read this.

*My thanks to Merlin Mann.

Mysterious Behavior of a Literary Agent

In November, my newly-acquired agent (henceforth known in this blog as AGENT) sent out a script of mine (SCREWBALL SCRIPT) to several production companies. He sent me a list of the companies, along with the names of the executives at those companies who were in receipt of the script.

A couple weeks later, I called him up about something else, and we had the following conversation:

AGENT: And you know that DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE at PROMINENT PRODUCTION COMPANY wants to meet with you, right? ME: ….. No. AGENT: I sent you an email about it, didn’t I? ME: (Checks email) ….. No.

He then told me that DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE wanted to meet with me in January, after the holidays had passed us by. So when I got back in town after New Year’s, I gave his office a call.

Machine. Message. THREE WEEKS OF WAITING.

This always happens when I call his office phone instead of his cell phone, which in my naive midwestern way, I think is more polite and should be done whenever possible.

But this time, I thought I had a good reason why he would respond, i.e., the possibility (however slim) of me getting paying work.

I think to myself: “Even though I’m not making this guy lots of money (translation: no money at all), wouldn’t it still be in his best interest to CALL THIS WOMAN AND GET ME INTO HER OFFICE? What’s his deal?”

But I don’t like to be a pain, so I didn’t call him back again right away. Three weeks later, I try again, this time on his cell phone. AND HE PICKS UP.

ME: Hey, AGENT—remember how EXECUTIVE wanted to meet with me? AGENT: Oh, that’s right. Thanks for reminding me.

See how easy that was?

And the moral of that is (said the Duchess) twofold:

1. Sometimes you have to politely bother your agent if you want him to remember everything you need him to do.

2. If you have his cell number, CALL IT, YOU IDIOT.

Nerve Ranks the Disney Princesses in Order of Feminism

And it’s so cute, although I do not agree about Belle, who voluntarily imprisons herself to save another human being. (Via Jezebel)

New Furniture = New Toys

Sally’s mom got us these storage benches… I think Björn approves.

New Setup

I’ve always wanted to own an Apple Display. This one is used, from eBay, and it’s the same resolution at 24” as my laptop screen at 17”, so the clarity isn’t amazing—particularly by comparison with the 4K display right next to it. But it still feels nice and looks nice on my desk.

This setup also fulfills another long-term wish: To have my monitor mounted on an arm, off the surface of my desk. I had to do a little extra rigging with a block of wood to make the clamp for this dual-arm mount attach to my weird metal-frame desk (see below), but it looks great and gives me a lot of maneuverability.

Now to get to work.

No, It’s Not Equal

Great post by Kelly Thompson on objectification and over-sexualization of female comic book characters. This is only one of several reasons I can’t get excited about Marvel and DC superhero comics.

Numbering My Days

Sometimes, at the end of the weekend, when the advent of Monday morning begins to steal the last few hours of Sunday evening, I feel the weight of my accumulated days dragging at me. I lie down to sleep fighting the urge to count the remaining weeks in the calendar year, as if the fear of another December come and gone will lend some urgency to my choices.

I can stave off this dread by making some sort of vaguely-defined meaningful “progress” on one of the creative projects by which I have come to measure my own self-worth. Even writing this post indicates a final desperate attempt to end the weekend on a higher note—to brand the fading memory of Sunday with a sense of accomplishment rather than futility.

“Teach me to number my days.” The more I internalize this, the better I get at choosing to spend my time in ways that will make me feel hopeful, empowered, and alive.

On to the Next!

So I went to London to see my girlfriend. Man, that girl is haahhhhht:

Anyway, I’m back and ready to go on to my next rewrite, which I call the Polygamy script. Note the new progress bar to the right.

This should kill some time while I wait for notes on the Rom-Com from Greg and Blair and David.

One of the unsung benefits of reading glasses is that they render the world beyond your book (I assume for the purposes of this thought that you are reading a book) a little out of focus. Taking them off makes putting down your novel seem even more like coming out of a dream.

Openly

The expression “openly bisexual”¹ bugs me.

I know we’re still living in a world where coming out is difficult and fraught, and if LGBTQ people want to use that expression, it’s not my busines to stop them. But it sort of annoys me when it’s used in print or by straight people. Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but it always seems to backhandedly presume that some amount of shame is associated with being bisexual, and that this “openly” bi person is therefore being bold or transgressive.

Just because some parts of society will shame bi people doesn’t mean they have anything to be ashamed of. Maybe it’s time to retire “openly” as a modifier for people’s sexual orientation.

Other Eyes

All the cutting is done on my rom-com. I think. It’s six pages longer than I wanted, but I think that might be okay.

While I was at it, I worked in some character development and dialogue adjustments. I could probably keep tweaking this thing indefinitely, but I really feel like it’s very close to finished, so it’s time to get some Other Eyes on it.

Other Eyes are good. They’re fresh, and they can look at things with perspective, whereas I am mired in my own work and may be currently incapable of honest evaluation.

It’s a great feeling.

I did the same thing when I was a graphic design student. In an early 2-D design class, I had to produce a work incorporating (I think) seven different tricks for creating the three-dimensional illusion.

I spent days just thinking about what I was going to do before I ever started drawing. I figured out how I was going to use each and every one of these tools, and also how in the process I was going to paint something totally kick-ass.

I worked it hard, and felt pretty good about my watercolor masterpiece when it was done. The instructor critiqued everyone’s project in class those days, and when he got to mine -

I got 3 out of the 7. Four, if he was being nice. And he probably wasn’t.

If only I’d asked someone else whether they thought the piece was complete, instead of just making an assumption.

You know what happens when you make an assumption?

I’d rather not make an ass out of you and umption when it comes to sending out this script. So hopefully some cat like Greg will be able to help me decide if it’s ready for the world or needs some more TLC.

It better be ready soon. I’m sick of writing comedy.

Outlining and Other Development-y Goodness

Read ‘em and weep, bitches.

[media lost]

This is the outline board for my current script, which I am calling the Redbeard story, pending an actual title.

While I await comments from you lazy slackers who have the Cousins script (you know who you are), I’m starting on my next. I feel a little guilty that this is also a rom-commy story, but hey, that’s how I roll.

I’m finding the use of the board to be very good for me. In the past I’ve always tried to plot out the movie in my head, figuring that if I can’t remember it without writing it down, it must not be a good enough idea.

I later decided that this was ridiculous.

The board is nice and visual, y’know? I can set it up there on the desk at work and stare at it for half an hour while ideas surge around. Then I can find the place where the idea actually fits. I can gaze at the story outline in visual form and figure out where the structural weak points are. I can move things around, cut and replace, and it all happens right there before my eyes.

It’s a beautiful thing.

So I have this new idea roughly plotted out. The Cousins script was the first time I did an actual outline before moving on to the draft. And because I was doing the 14-day thing, even that was a rushed outline, which will no doubt be apparent to those of you who actually read it.

In this case, I have no such deadline. So I spent this week coming up with a structurally sound outline and deciding what basic character types I wanted. Next week I will move on to some serious character development. This is supposed to be funny, and good comedy depends (in my book) on spectacular and outrageous characters.

Character is, in my own opinion, the thing I am absolutely the worst at, so I’m not sure how long I’ll spend on character development before I have it right. By that time, the plot of the movie may also be all different, because I will be making changes to it as the characters demand.

So I’m in for an exciting time, I think. Drafts are obviously the big rush, and I’ve determined that I can crank one out pretty fast what with my long empty nights at work. But I want each successive first draft to improve. John August claims that he only does one draft. That’s pretty damn good. That’s a good goal, and one only gets there through improving one’s planning skills.

Meanwhile, I need Greg to sell his stupid script and come back here so he can tell me when my ideas suck. I prefer to sidestep the suck when possible.

Overdrive

Firstly, congratulations to my friend Greg, whose new short film, Wicked, received all its funding and then some. Hopefully he’ll finish it soon so we can all enjoy watching it.

But back to me. I’m finally done with my three weeks of training during the day and can start to have a normal sleep schedule. Meanwhile, I realized that those three weeks of relative non-productivity have set me behind where I was hoping to be with one of my projects the Saint Regis Indiana Film Showcase.

Tonight at work I wrote a press release, and tomorrow morning I’m going to be on the phone with all the local newspapers and radio stations attempting to promote the films we’ll be showing the first week in March.

All are by Indiana filmmakers, but I can’t come out and say what they are yet because I’m still a day (and hopefully no more) away from finalizing the program.

Then I have to design posters and figure out where to hang them. There should hopefully be other advertising as well, but I’m not sure how that’s going to look yet.

I really miss those three weeks.

Paradigm Shift

This morning at my church something said during the post-sermon discussion¹ recontextualized in my mind the debate on homosexuality currently happening in the Western Church. I found myself mentally framing the problem in this way: Proponents of gay rights and those who assert that Christians should fully accept gay people tend to think of the issue as one of justice; opponents of same-sex marriage and those who believe actively gay people² can’t fully participate in Christianity tend to think of it as a morality issue.

Clearly I’m engaging in fairly abstract thinking here, so let me just say up front that anyone debating this issue needs to remember one thing perhaps more than any other: to actual gay people and those who love or care about them, it is primarily neither a justice nor a moral issue but a personal issue. When arguing about whether we can accept gay people in the church, we are actually, from their perspective, arguing about whether God made them to be the way they believe they inherently are. This seems a little arrogant by its very nature. So, even if your personal answer to that question is “no”, always keep in mind that they will see your denial as a denial of their fundamental humanity. Conversely, if your answer is “yes”, don’t think that gives you the right to speak authoritatively on their behalf. No one wants to feel like a political football.

To return to my initial thought, though, this difference in perspective explains why this particular debate has grown so bitter and divisive, with people on either side continually giving in to the temptation to portray their opponents as monsters. LGBTQ advocates see conservative Christians as something akin to people who still believe in racial segregation, or worse: slavery. Traditionalists consider gay Christians and their allies essentially willful heretics: people who deliberately ignore what the Bible says so they can keep sinning, or accept people who are sinning, respectively. Both groups, of course, comprise mostly good-hearted people trying their best to do what they think is right.³ But it is in the nature of people to engage in black-and-white, good-versus-evil thinking and consider anyone not in complete agreement with oneself to be the enemy. Moreover, with such strong motivating factors as the desire for justice and the desire for moral purity, one’s opponents will appear to actually hate justice itself or morality itself, not to simply disagree about the nature of justice or morality, and neither side will likely change its mind easily or within a short span of time. Thus the Church appears doomed, in the near-to-medium future, to war within itself, causing severe and lasting casualties in the form of damaged relationships, decreased church attendance or involvement, and—since the world is supposed to know we follow Jesus because of our love for each other—uncounted potential converts repulsed by our in-fighting.

Since the Kingdom of God in our present age must transcend such enmity and make peace between people who would not otherwise have peace, we cannot accept this state of affairs. Thus, I propose a re-framing of the issue of how the Church will accept and respond to LGBTQ people: instead of thinking of the issue as either a justice issue or a moral issue, let us consider it for the time being a potential paradigm shift. Fortunately, we already have a very explicit model for dealing with paradigm shifts: say nothing.

This is, in essence, what I interpret to be Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 8, 1 Corinthians 10 and Romans 14: when confronted with someone who has decided they can’t accept a practice you accept, don’t throw your acceptance their face. On the other hand, when confronted with someone who accepts something you don’t feel you can accept, leave that between them and their conscience, which is to say, between them and God.

Yes, this means that conservative Christians may need to allow their churches to be thronged with gay people who suddenly feel much more accepted by Christendom than they did before. It also means that LGBTQ allies may need to spend less time talking loudly in public about how the truly Christlike thing is to fully accept people of any sexual orientation. Maybe, we just… let it go, for now. If this whole culture shift blows over in a decade or so, and we all swing back around to believing homosexuality is unnatural and not to be accepted by society, traditionalists won’t have to feel guilty for how abusively they behaved toward LGBTQ advocates. And if, as I expect, twenty years from now we take for granted that a man can love Jesus and still totally have sex with another man, those who have been saying this all along will have already spent lots of time learning to be gracious toward those who couldn’t see quite so far ahead.

In the mean time, imagine the following scenario: a gay couple arrives for the first time at a conservative church. Liz introduces herself to the man next to her by saying, “Hi, I’m Liz, and this is my wife, Kari”, and the man responds, “It’s nice to meet you; how did you find your way to our church?” At the end of the service, the woman sitting behind Kari asks the couple out to lunch, and makes sure they know by the end of the meal that she fully accepts their marriage and their place in the church. Liz and Kari come back a second and third time to the church, and even though they eventually realize that most of the people there don’t agree with their host from the first Sunday, they never feel de-humanized or condemned. They become members and raise their adorable adopted children there. They give money to the church. Liz works in the nursery; Kari organizes the yearly food drive at Thanksgiving. Occasionally they engage the pastor of the church in a spirited debate on the issue of homosexuality, and at the end he says, “Well, I don’t agree, but I’m really grateful for your perspective”, and he means it.

Does that sound so bad?

People who live around here know that there’s a particular job that I really, really want.For those who don’t: There’s a particular job that I really, really want.Tomorrow I have an interview for it. Those who pray, pray that I get this.I’ll let you know how it goes.

Polishing the Jet Engine

At 5:08 a.m. EST, I finally finished this damn draft. Absolutely unbelievable, how much that thing grew in the writing. I already wrote it once! And it still wanted to get bigger when I wrote it the second time.

I sound bitter, but I’m not. I’m just not as excited as probably some people (including me) are when they finish a rough draft, because this rough draft is actually also a second draft. It should have been smoother and quicker and resulted in something much more finished-looking than this.

Now, there are good reasons why this is not the case. The first draft had kind of a pathetic plot, necessitating pretty much a page one rewrite. So as noted in my previous post, the is the jet engine to the first draft’s steam engine.

But still. It took a long freakin’ time. This is the kind of script that should be 100 pages. It’s 148 pages. I have to cut a third of this thing. And most of it feels important.

I know, I know, everyone thinks all of his material is important. I get that. But unlike some other writers (the ones I call “bad”), I actually try to make all my scenes mean something, not just be fun or funny or exciting. Probably that’s because without some sort of character development, I wouldn’t be able to make most of it fun or funny or exciting.

So I now have to cut probably at least 30 pages of story that I think actually matters.

Plus, I kind of have the feeling that one reason it’s so long is my paragraph structures. I break paragraphs often. My action is all diced up into little manageable chunks, often one sentence long.

This makes for some really long scenes, purely from a page-count standpoint.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I have a feeling if you actually shot this movie, it would come in closer to 120 minutes than 148 minutes.

But readers and managers and agents and producers like thin scripts. Thus, I must keep the pages down.

So my rewrite now commences. I need a progress bar like Emily, so I can show how I reach my goal of being done with major rewrites by February 22.

How do I find one of those? Anyone know?

Post-Holidays

As I rather expected, progress on all my endeavors slowed to virtually zero over the holidays. What with all the family activities and lack of sleep, I didn’t have much energy at work for anything but watching Family Guy on Netflix and using toothpicks to prop up my eyelids.

But I’m back this week, devouring feminist books and possibly starting to make notes about my next script. I just finished Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf, a book I’m convinced every parent of a female child in Northern America should read. It provided much raw fuel for the process of developing a story based around female sexuality, so I’m excited to butcher the topic as only a half-educated American male can.

Not that it matters to anyone but me and my wife, but I’m also super-psyched to finally be on what will (theoretically) be my regular schedule at work—four nights on and three off, a straight-up third-shift schedule all the way through the week—no more of this switching back and forth between day and night. I’m definitely getting to the age where regular sleep matters to my ability to think.

Quantity is Job 1

I did no writing tonight. Wednesday night is when I have the most paperwork and other crap to deal with at work, so I busied myself with that and then gave myself the last two hours to blog instead.

However, after another 4ish hours last night, I have 50 pages on the script (now tentatively titled The Other Woman), averaging close to 5 per hour. It would be more, but I stuck myself in a bit of a plot rut last night and took about an hour to decide what I was going to do.

But I got back on the horse, and the thing is progressing nicely.

I’m already starting to get ideas about the rewrite for it. Like, I’m pretty sure that the main character hasn’t been set up helpless enough. Too late now, but it’ll have to be done at some point.

I’ve also been trying to come up with ideas for the next project. And today I realized, I have a great idea that I’ve been ignoring for a while.

And that is mostly because I already wrote it once.

That’s right my friends, the first script I ever wrote still languishes in rough draft form on a lonely hard drive. I didn’t rewrite it because I was much dumber back then and couldn’t think how to go about it.

But the premise was great. I still remember that premise, and it was pretty suave (I think). And now I feel I’ve grown enough as a writer that I could start to do it justice.

So I’m going to read it tonight and try to get a feel for what needs to be done. It may actually turn out to be a page one. But that’s okay.

I also have another idea that I started to write before I had the good sense to realize I didn’t have a strong enough plot. I’m not sure the hook for that one was good enough, but we’ll see when I re-read that one.

Anyway, should be fun figuring out where to go next. Makes me excited, like the little girl that I am inside.

Quick and Dirty

Yesterday I shot a teaser trailer for my film, and it reminded me that production never goes how you expect.

We had four “scenes” to get. Three of them were single shots. One was about 10 shots, but they were all of the same thing and handheld, so they were easy. Easiest part of the day, actually.

First shot: an overhead pan, camera looking directly at the floor. I’ve done this before sans jib using a technique I won’t describe because you’d really just have to see a picture to get it. But it doesn’t matter, because this time, it didn’t work.

Apparently turning 30 makes you old and shaky or something, because I could not get a smooth shot. We ended up just taking a still shot from farther away, which we’ll pan in editing using keyframes.

Second shot: dolly of a still life. I actually knew this would be tricky, because I don’t have a dolly. I have a rolling mechanic’s stool I borrowed from a friend, on which I managed to mount the camera, but that’s not the same thing.

For one thing, dollies have tracks. Tracks keep you rolling straight. Rolling straight keeps your very carefully- and shallowly-focused shot from going out of focus.

I think you know where I’m going.

The solution was what I knew it would be: run the shot 20 or so times until it comes out right. So I’m pretty sure I got something usable.

The third shot is an effects shot, and since I’m not going to be rotoscoping anything on my schedule, the camera was locked. And it’s a shot of a wall. So that was easy.

The scene with 10 shots was great. Knocked it out in 20 minutes. Watch footage, wrap set, go home.

We’ll see how it comes out in post.

P.S. Special thanks to Chris and Evie Jones for the loan of their Nikon D7000, on which we shot all this footage.

Random Thoughts After Watching Borat

So finally I saw Borat. And it’s really funny, I won’t deny it. I laughed. A lot. And I was watching it alone—I don’t laugh when I watch movies alone.

It’s also quite clear that Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. Borat is an very smartly-developed character portrayed with stunning consistency throughout the film. It’s too bad for him that Oscars do not get given to comedy actors.

But Borat is a disturbing film in a few ways.

Firstly, it’s a mockumentary. I have no problem with mockumentaries (three cheers for Christopher Guest), but the difference between this and many previous such films is that only (I believe) four of the characters were actors.

So?

So that means I just spent 84 minutes laughing at real people. That smarts a little. I don’t really mind laughing at people when they really deserve it, but one couldn’t help feeling that many of these people were unfairly represented. In the “Southern Manners” scene, for example, it seems pretty clear that the hostility comes after the deception is revealed, but that the reveal itself is edited out. This paints the real people involved in a very negative light.

Which brings me to my next point: editing.

This may be true worldwide; I don’t know. But it is definitely true in America that people do not understand that it is possible to lie in a documentary. Fahrenheit 9/11 probably helped to dispel this misconception a little, but overall I think most people believe whatever TV-like footage you show them.

And that sits a little uncomfortably with me. I don’t like the idea of playing on the audience’s ignorance.

And overall, Borat seems designed to highlight the most outlandish, bigoted, intolerant and insane aspects of middle-class America. Apparently I live in a country populated mostly by racist, sexist, homophobic idiots.

But you know what I thought while watching many of these scenes? “Wow, Americans are really nice people.”

It’s true that some people in the movie have little excuse, however they were edited. That guy at the rodeo who says all gays should be hanged? It’s hard to think of a context in which that could have been an okay statement. That’s pretty damning footage.

But scene after scene depicts people who were manipulated into self-condemnation simply because they didn’t want to be impolite. They wanted to be nice to this strange but friendly foreigner, and they tried to just nod along and ignore some of the crazy things he was saying. And then their responses were quite obviously edited and their intents twisted.

Now, to be clear, I have no sympathy with the people who are suing Fox and Baron Cohen. Suck it up, Cupcake: you signed the release. Next time read more closely.

But I found Borat to be intentionally misleading. I don’t like that. And don’t come telling me it’s okay because it was just a comedy. If anything, that makes it worse.

Lie to someone with a straight face, and they might be able to see through it. But get them laughing, appeal to their sense of the ridiculous, and they’re at your mercy. You can feed them all kinds of half-truths, and they may never notice.

So while I cracked up (and so will you, if you see it), I wasn’t deceived. But that’s only because I keep my brain on at all times.

I guess that’s my moral, if this post has a moral. Keep your brain turned on. There’s no such thing as “pure entertainment.”

Reel

CONTENT REMOVED.

Formerly my reel. Now nothing. I’m sorry for your loss.

Refrigerator Letters

She likes me.

Research

The other day I went along with a friend to do some Christmas shopping (his, not mine), and we stopped at Half Price Books. I bought two books for eight bucks. So great.

One is The Chalice and the Blade, which from what I can tell by the synopsis is about male-female sexual dynamics throughout history. The other is Promiscuities, which follows the sexual coming of age of several young women across the world.

If you know me personally but don’t talk to me much about my writing career you might find this pretty odd, but it makes sense for two reasons. One is that I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing over here on the subject of female sexuality, and I’m starting to reach the limits of my ignorance.

But more importantly, since I’ve found that what I primarily write is romantic comedy, I, a man, need to learn a lot more about women fast. So I’m pretty excited about all this women’s studies reading I have coming at me.

rfkelly:

This person’s posters are pretty amazing.

Sadness Vodka is for Pity Parties

I’m not going to go into it, but I’ve been feeling sorry for myself and flirting with depression quite a bit over the past few weeks. That’s over now.

Earlier this week I was listening to the most recent episode of Back to Work, and Merlin Mann seemed to be talking directly to me. Specifically, his larger point (although you should really listen to it yourself) is that even if you’re in a less-than-ideal work situation you should still act like you’re the one in charge of your own destiny. Because you are. (Feel free to keep your Calvinist-based comments on this concept to yourself, fellow Christians.)

(P.S. If you’re going to listen to that episode, you should probably skip to about the 35:00-ish mark, because Merlin spends the first chunk of the podcast talking about super-nerdy stuff like TextMate Bundles.)

Anyway: No, I have not been using alcohol for self-medication, as the title of this post might suggest, but I have been acting like someone without agency, so no more of that.

I’m actually pretty lucky in quite a few ways. One of those ways is that I currently get to edit a movie. That I wrote. And produced. And directed. No, no one’s paying me to do it. Yes, it was still a pretty fantastic thing that I got (and get) to do, even if it never results in money. How many other people got to make a movie this year? Probably only about 10,000 in the entire U.S., and that is not very many, proportionally.

If you’re curious, I’m about 40% of the way through the rough cut of the movie. A little bit that’s because it just takes a long time to edit movies, and even more it’s because I don’t have as much spare time as I used to have at work (I work a third-shift gig with some dead hours in it for accomplishing personal tasks). But it’s also a little because I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted and pulled in multiple directions, and that’s where we circle back to that concept of agency.

I am not naturally good at multitasking in a macro kind of way. I’m pretty decent at micro-multitasking, such as when three of my clients at work ask me to do things for them all at once and I have to prioritize those requests and get them all done before the next thing comes up. I am not good at the kind of multitasking where I have to manage three or more different projects for several weeks or months and give each of them exactly the right attention at exactly the time they need it.

Recently, this has meant that I’ve ignored a lot of emails or answered them late, not finished blog posts in a timely manner (or at all), let personal chores slide while I worked on other things that ultimately turned out not to matter very much, and heavily used the internet for procrastinating because I felt overwhelmed by all the other tasks clamoring for my attention.

On the plus side, I discovered Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery by John Allison, which you should totally go read right now if you like funny and endearing comics.

So henceforth I will be focusing on two (2) things: editing this movie, and another thing. Which I won’t tell you about. It’s a secret, and you can wait along with everyone else for the official announcement. Builds character.

In other news, there’s a new Dresden Codak page coming soon! Look at this preview from Aaron Diaz’s blog:

SAG May be Getting its Contract On

http://blog.sagwatch.net/2009/04/05/rumor-watch-back-channel-deal-to-be-reached/

This is good news even for lowly-PA-non-actors like me, and here’s why.

Regular PA work on a film or TV set usually gets you between $150 and $250 a day. Some gigs are lower, but this is pretty standard.

Right now, work is really scarce, because the Screen Actors Guild don’t have their shit together (blame whomever you will). So the other week I get a call from a guy I’ll call PRODUCER. It goes like this:

PRODUCER: Hey Ryan. You don’t know me, but do you want to work my crappy little short film this weekend? It’s pretty low-paying, but it’s work. ME: How low-paying is low-paying? PRODUCER: Well, it’s … ummm … it’s low … like, low …. RYAN: How low? Low? PRODUCER: Yeah, it’s low. RYAN: HOW LOW? PRODUCER: $150 for three days. RYAN: $50 a day, eh? That’s shitty low. I’ll take it.

In my defense, it was really one pickup half-day, one return half-day, and one shoot day that he said was going to be a half day but was really 10 hours, which makes it a full day.

But still, $50 a day for a whole weekend is nasty low.

The reason people like me (who are still relatively new in town) are so desperate for work that we’ll take $50/day jobs for yahoos is that the de facto actor strike has so brought the town to its knees that this is the only way we can keep the money coming in. And I have a wife. She likes things like eating and paying rent. Me, I can do without those things. She’s the picky one.

So the SAG stupidity is keeping the studios from starting new shows, which means the old, experienced PAs are only working 12 days a month instead of 20, the less experienced PAs are working 3 days instead of 12, and forget breaking in right now unless a UPM or AD slept with your mother about nine months before you were born.

It’s a great time, I tell ya.

Next time I’ll tell you why you DON’T want to work these $50/day jobs.

sakimichan:

I’ve been waiting to draw Ariel so here she is: )

if she were in more modern times, maybe she could of found headphones XD ?

I can’t even describe how happy this made me.

scarygoround:

BACK BACK BACK ON MONDAY

Shootin’ in the Rain

Instead of going to see some low-quality remake last Friday, I worked an infomercial shoot. Another thing that happened that day: RAIN.

For any non-Angelinos out there, I should clarify that it never rains in LA. This is one of the things that makes it such a great place to shoot movies and TV—you can schedule your shoot whenever you want without worrying about being rained out.

Hahahahahahaha.

So it rained all day at the shoot, which was in Agoura Hills, at the house where they shot the last season of The Bachelor. Most of the shooting was going on inside the house, so the rain didn’t really hurt our schedule.

LUNCH, HOWEVER, was outside. So we lowly PAs had to set up all these tents and tables and chairs IN THE RAIN so that the crew could eat while trying to avoid having their plates fill up with leaking rainwater.

By 11 a.m., I was quite wet.

Don’t shoot in the rain.

Skew Toward the Story

I frequently worry that I am not providing myself with a sufficient diversity of inputs. Only consuming ideas and opinions that already align with your own leads to intellectual stagnation, bigotry, and arrogance, and since I so dearly love to be right and, on the whole, would like to be liked, I try to keep feeding myself writing and commentary from sources opposed to my own current positions.

Feminism, one of my primary areas of interest, tends to skew in a certain direction, as all movements do. For example, if you follow many feminists you will hear frequent discussion of “rape culture”, which you may not feel certain exists, even if you understand the term. Or, to cite the impetus for this particular post, you may hear many feminists and feminism-inclined women tell stories of the times they’ve experienced sexual harassment, sexist behavior from colleagues or supervisors, unwanted physical contact, sexual violence, or rape. You may start to wonder whether these stories actually represent the norm, suspecting that you may have skewed your input volume too far toward the voices of angry or activist women, who have now convinced you that women are more disenfranchised and oppressed than reality reflects.

I have certainly asked myself this question from time to time, just to keep myself honest, and I have tried to give due credence to the voices in my life suggesting that everything isn’t really so bad for women—that men are, on the whole, supportive and “nice”, and that while sexual harassment and sexual violence persist in our culture, they do not constitue the pervasive, systemic problem feminists would have us believe. These voices argue, somewhat persuasively, that people mostly act with kindness and in good faith, and that the many examples to the contrary represent only the most egregious acts of violence and bigotry.

But. These voices are making an argument—reasoning from a dearth of evidence in their own experience. On the other hand, the stories of women who have been hurt and abused are actual stories, not abstractions, and while they also represent a limited and skewed sample, I doubt not at all that the events described did actually take place. Let us leave aside for a moment the question of whether abused or disenfranchised women under-report their own negative experiences, thus resulting in the aforementioned dearth of evidence in the everyday lives of the majority. Instead, let us reduce the extent and ubiquity of sexual harassment and violence to something we can’t deny: many, many women, particularly at times when some nationally-noteworthy and horrendous act of violence has occurred as the result of ingrained misogyny, report feeling constantly fearful, objectified, harassed, and de-humanized because of their gender, and this is not to be borne. It is not to be borne, I say, even if it is only happening to one woman, and I have received direct evidence in only the past two days that it is happening to hundreds of women.

If my own Twitter feed can tell me that hundreds of women report these experiences, can we doubt that our society has a problem that we must correct? Are you, my reader, content to know that even the relatively few women within the reach of myself and the 205 people I follow on Twitter suffer from frequent harassment, abuse, and violence? Then how much more should you feel outraged to know that an even greater number—whatever number your process of extrapolation might suggest—also feel compelled to structure their lives around these threats of oppression?

Given the choice between listening to a persuasive voice contending that sexual harassment and sexual oppression cannot be as bad as all these feminists make it out to be, and believing the stories of hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of actual women, which will you choose? Personally, I find concrete stories much more compelling than argument, and I am willing to risk making a few good and caring men feel uncomfortable or affronted by suggesting that they and I participate in an institutionalized misogyny that keeps many women—even if only hundreds—fearful and at risk.

Even if it’s not All Women, it is more than I am willing to bear.

Inspired by the #YesAllWomen hashtag.

Slacking

You think that I’m a huge blog-slacker, but I tell you that what I really am is just a plain old slacker. I haven’t blogged because I haven’t done anything.

I’ve sat around and thought.

I’ve made a couple notes.

I talked to Greg over the phone.

But that’s it.

Got some notes from Blair about the draft I finished two months ago. If I can get some notes out of Greg about it, maybe I’ll go back to that.

I finished my preliminary character development for what I’m calling the “Polygamy” script (see above sitting around and thinking). I’m just starting to plot it out. I might have been further along, but it’s been an absolutely insane week at work. Don’t get me started.

Tomorrow, meeting with Greg again, now that he’s dragged himself back into town. Maybe something productive will come of that.

And I’ll get something done. Or pretend to get something done. If so, I’ll post more.

But don’t get your hopes up too high.

So I’m watching Captain America: The First Avenger for the first time in a while, and I realized: WWII is basically part of our mythology. It’s not that it’s not real---it’s that it’s historical and also more than historical. We feel like our role in the war says something deeper and truer about America than the mere historical facts can communicate.

The thing is… does it?

Some Love (and a Little Hate) for Comics

I was thinking this morning about the amount of time and mental energy I give to indie comics and wondering if I should spend more time reading screenplays and online short stories instead. For example, if you’ve been paying attention to my recent posts you’ve probably seen references to at least some of the following:

• Dresden Codak
• The Meek
• Kiwiblitz
• Bad Machinery/Scary Go Round
• Gunnerkrigg Court
• Rice Boy
• Lackadaisy

And these aren’t even all the comics I read–just the ones I love the most and spend the most time on.

Later in the day I decided that the answer is: No, I don’t spend too much time on these. It seems like a lot in the aggregate, but really it only takes a few seconds to read a comic page, so even the ones that update daily don’t usurp too much of my attention.

(I’m going to conveniently ignore the time I spend re-reading the same ones over and over. Scary Go Round, I’m looking at you, you sexy, addictive beast.)

Anyway, even the comics that suck up a significant portion of my time are ultimately still “literature”, and they provide most, if not all, the same benefits that reading narrative fiction or watching movies provide.

For exmple, I’ve been puzzling over why the characters in Scary Go Round are so very delightful and endearing. You’ll have to go read it yourself or just take my word for it, but the majority of the characters are selfish, blindly-inconsiderate people with no real ethics of any kind. You should really hate them, and you would if you knew them in real life, so why do I actually love them so very much? I finally figured it out (I think): because they’re all just big kids.

John Allison, the writer of Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, gets away with writing alarmingly near-sociopathic characters because he writes them like 5th-graders–non-empathetic beings full of life and cheeriness and curiosity. They can be thoughtlessly cruel one moment and overwhelmingly affectionate the next, then throw relationship out the window to wander off on some vain and quixotic adventure.

This may have significance for me because I struggle with giving my characters flaws. Maybe my way into creating people who have actual bad qualities lies somewhere in this notion of turning them into pre-adolescents, who can be forgiven because they’re just so damned cute.

Urgh. Don’t judge that last sentence too harshly; I’m still following up this train of thought.

Anyway, Shut Up! I’ll keep reading comics if I want, and you should, too. Start with the ones I listed; if you like one of them, move on to other comics they recommend.

For example, Gunnerkrigg Court is a particularly wonderful blend of sci-fi and fantasy and British boarding schools.

Some Love

A few days ago I responded to an open invitation for guest bloggers from Church Marketing Sucks. Today they posted this piece by yours truly.

How can I leverage this free publicity (term loosely used to describe literally tens of readers) to advance my screenwriting career?

Stale, Flat and Unprofitable

This hasn’t been the greatest week for writing. I’m shifting my daily schedule around, and the shift is only temporary. Soon my life will have to be restructured yet again. So far the weekend has been consumed with small group stuff and car-fixing adventures, and that’s not the same thing as writing.

But I did get some notes on my script from a couple people. One person (you know who you are - :) - ) in particular said a lot of things about the story as it now stands, and while many of them made sense and in fact agreed with what Greg had already said, some of the comments seemed completely unbelievable to me.

My story centers around a conflict between a husband and wife, and issues of the value of relationships in opposition to other concerns. And many of the notes I received yesterday showed that the person who was giving them had, against all expectation, sided with the wrong person in the story.

Now, I did a sanity check last night with a group of both men and women, and I was correct in thinking that everyone I know sides with the correct character in my story. So I was put slightly more at ease about that. But here is a comment that really kind of threw me (paraphrased):

“They both just act so immature; I wanted to slap them both in the last scene.”

Now, by way of enlightenment, the person giving me these notes belongs to an older generation than both me and the two characters in question. So it is quite possible that these characters could be behaving in a way that is true to life but still seems immature to someone older.

But this brings up a point that this guy emphasizes: People don’t have to like your characters; they just have to care what happens to them.

So maybe it’s okay that this person thinks my characters behave immaturely. Even if it’s true, it’s not necessarily a problem; sometimes people are immature. The fact that someone is sufficiently emotionally connected to my characters to be irritated by their immaturity is almost a good sign.

What was more alarming was this question: “So, you actually intended the main character to have a flat personality?”

Now, I haven’t figured out how this character can be both annoyingly immature and, concurrently, lacking in personality. I’m sure it’s possible. But it’s very worrying, because this character is definitely not supposed to be flat. He’s a programmer-geek experiencing feelings of isolation compounded by guilt for both controllable and uncontrollable failures as a husband.

If after all my musings on his character, all my subtly-developed setup of his situation, all my careful tweaking of his dialogue, and all my well-crafted interactions with other characters, all I’ve arrived at is “annoyingly immature,” I’m about to have serious rewrite issues.

There were other equally provocative notes I got from this particular person (thanks!)—not equally as troubling, but definitely requiring attention and care. So while I still plan to hold out for notes from Blair before resuming work on this monster, it’s definitely maintaining a nagging foothold in my consciousness.

But on a positive note, the windows in my car all work now. Take that, screenwriting career!

Star Wars ‘99: The Star Wars Prequels: Some Things are Better Left Unsaid

starwars1999:

A brief examination of George Lucas’s prequels and the purpose of Star Wars ‘99

There’s no shortage of explanations as to why George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels are considered a failure, but I personally believe the usual culprits (execution, screenwriting) are symptoms of a more fundamental…

You guys. You Guys. YOU GUYS. Aaron Diaz is finally going to reveal more of his Star Wars 1999 project.

There will be more than one woman and more than two black people.

You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.

permalink

Stay-Kay

I’m going on vacation, Nerds! T minus 3.5 hours (-ish) until I’m off work for a whole week!

Get ready for lots of exciting blog posts from places like: My Desk and The Couch. I’ll be sharing lots of beautiful images of my adventures. For example:

Also, prepare yourselves for mesmerizing tales with titillating titles like: “How Hard This Scene Was To Edit”, “What It’s Like To Sleep At Night For Once”, and “I Spoke With My Wife Today For Five Whole Minutes”.

That’s right: I’m really just taking a week off at home, and my goal will be to finish the rough cut of this movie. I did this once before, in December, but instead of accomplishing my goal, I got sick. So this is Try #2.

I’ll let you know how it goes. There may be blogging, but only if I’m making fantastically speedy progress. Otherwise you folks and your endless need for entertainment based on my life are going to lose pretty severely to the competitive powerhouse that is Me Accomplishing Things.

Summer, Not Modest, Is Hottest

In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul is not saying that we should self-regulate to prevent other people from doing sinful things on our account. He is saying that we may need to self-regulate to prevent other people from doing totally permissible things they think are sinful (but aren’t) on our account.

This is the meaning of the phrase “cause to stumble”. We want to help our fellow Christians avoid “stumbling” into the sin of legalism toward themselves; we are never told to limit our own liberty by being paranoid that we might make someone “stumble” into the sin of actual sin.

So, please, for Christ’s literal sake, stop telling women that when they wear bikinis or sundresses they are “causing their brothers to stumble”, because that is not at all what Paul meant, and it’s mega-hot outside.

Sweater Threads

So for the three of you have been wondering, the house is pretty much fixed (hurray for good water), and the rewrite has been finished and emailed to the interested party.

I don’t think he’s too interested, because he seems to be leaning toward doing a short rather than a feature, but the whole situation gave me good motivation to finish the draft, so I’m not complaining at all.

This draft was the second, and it was significant. I’ve never done a second pass at a script before. (I tend to lose faith in my own work before I even get there.) So this was my first encounter with the phenomenon that I shall henceforth refer to as “Pulling at the Sweater Thread.”

That is, every time you make a seemingly small change, it will force you to change five other things you hadn’t previously realized would be impacted.

For example, I decided that one of the characters should be met several pages earlier than she was in the original draft. Hours later, I found that I had been forced to write a completely new scene with that character and the hero, as well as moving several of the hero’s other scenes around into a completely different order. I then had to change a bunch of scene transitions that now didn’t make any sense, and finally drag in a much later scene that seemed to want to go there.

Needless to say, my script is quite different now. Same movie. Even, same basic plot. But better: more concise, more structured, and with better character development.

Of course, the outline is now so different that when I tried to pitch it to someone yesterday, I couldn’t even remember where all the beats went. Thank goodness it was only Greg, and not someone who is actually part of the development process (as if I would know someone like that, anyway).

I give myself the rest of the week off, and then it’s draft-three time. Already making mental notes for it, because I can’t help myself.

Taking Your Time

Today I read a screenplay by a producer friend of mine from LA. Great guy. Really solid script. Gave him some notes that will probably turn out to be no help at all.

But also, reading his script reminded me of a lesson I’m always trying to teach myself: take your time at the beginning.

I read an interview once with Michael Arndt, in which he said that while writing Little Miss Sunshine he let himself have lots of time at the beginning of the story for just setting up the characters and their relationships, without putting any pressure on himself to be funny.

Of course, the film is funny right from the get-go, so he must just be a funny guy.

But it’s an important lesson to learn, and I’m really bad at it. I’m very much a structure guy, and I’m always trying to hurry the story along so that I get to Act Two by page 25. Or whatever.

As I round the corner toward my tenth script, I’m trying to get away from being so formula-driven, and I think this is one of the things I’ll have to focus on the most.

In other news, I’ve finished the first draft of my half of the episodes for the web series I’m doing with Shawn Victa. We’re supposed to meet later this morning to talk about what comes next. Exciting!

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

I thought it would be fun to respond to this post over at the Web of Lies and Deceit. Ignoring Greg’s most recent ranting about the progress of his movie (love ya, man), you can just skip on down to the place where he starts talking about me.

That’s what does my ego good.

First point:

_I have been told twice in pitches that audiences don’t like to be manipulated or misled.

I take great exception to that.

There are few things I like better than to be misled and manipulated when I am watching a film. Especially if it is done well. To be misled and manipulated poorly - well… For that there is no excuse. But when it is handled correctly - it is a great great feeling._

Now, I can see Greg’s side of this point, but just to be a pain, I’m going to argue against him.

Manipulation is for only certain kinds of movies. Don’t write me The Game when I ask you for a RomCom. It just doesn’t fly. But even for movies that spin webs and trap viewers, there are two kinds of manipulation.

This is where I would normally warn you about spoilers to come, but we’ll only be discussing old flicks here, so it’s your own fault if you haven’t seen them.

Since Greg cites The Sixth Sense, we’ll go with that. The viewer is in the shoes of Bruce Willis’ character for much of the movie. We know things when Bruce knows them. Everything that feels right and true to Bruce feels right and true to us. So when everything Bruce has heard and seen comes together at the end of the movie to produce the colossal explosion of the realization of his own death, the same explosion is happening in our heads.

That’s some good manipulation, my friends.

But here’s a situation where manipulation is mishandled. And it involves a classic I know you’re all going to be upset that I’m attacking, but I don’t care.

In Rear Window, a moment comes early in the movie, after Jimmy Stewart has already begun to suspect the salesman across the way of harboring evil intentions toward said salesman’s wife, when Hitchcock opens a curtain, as it were, for the viewer. While Jimmy is dozing in his wheelchair, we see the salesman and his wife leave their apartment together. When Jimmy wakes up, the salesman is back sans wife.

Now is this or is this not a sure sign that, while Jimmy leaps to the conclusion that the wife is now lying six feet under, we the viewer are supposed to feel confident that something quite different has occurred? In every other mystery/suspense I’ve ever seen, such would surely be the case.

But not so. The salesman really did kill his wife.

Now, leaving aside all comment on the kind of movie where the thing the main character thinks is true really is true (Jimmy thinks the salesman killed his wife—and he did!), this is some mean manipulation on Hitchcock’s part and one of the only fumbles I’ve ever seen from him. And it’s a kind of manipulation that, in subtler form, you get with some frequency in poorly-written movies: tricking the viewer without tricking the hero.

There’s one type of movie in which this is acceptable, and that is the anti-hero movie. Greg is currently working on a movie in which the main character turns out to be a liar. Thus the viewer must be deceived throughout, just as the people to whom the hero is telling his story are deceived.

But in other genres, the viewer should only be as manipulated as the hero is. Don’t lie to me unless you’re lying to the person I have identifed with in the story. For as long as I sit in that seat, I am that person, so I should feel what they feel, and nothing different.

Next time, since I went crazy long with this post, I’ll respond to Greg’s other contention, with which I disagree much more strongly.

Telling Stories To Ourselves

I was in Ft Wayne today at the Bridal Extravaganza because my wife was exhibiting there. My presence is required at these events because there are lots of things to lift, carry, assemble, and disassemble, and Sally’s twiggy arms are insufficient. But once the show starts there’s not much for me to do, so I usually end up finding a place to hole up and entertain myself (by which I mean: “nap”).

I always do a quick tour of the vendors first, though, and this time I met Samuel from Thread & Film, a Ft. Wayne-based wedding cinematography company. Notice the careful use of the word “cinematography” as opposed to “videography”. Thread & Film creates wedding movies, not wedding videos, complete with trailers and shot at 24 frames per second.

They have a very beautiful, useful website, and I particularly love their explanation of the philosophy behind the services they provide and the artful way they seem to occupy the space between documentary and narrative production. Watch some of their trailers if you want to see what I’m talking about. UPDATE: Apparently these aren’t live yet, but make sure to check back later.

Browsing their website got me thinking about what it is people are hiring them to do, and I don’t think the answer is: “make a visual record of the events of their wedding day”. Certainly that’s part of what they offer, but it’s almost incidental to their actual product, which is the experience of hyper-reality–the near-tangible feeling that your wedding (and by extension, your very existence) is a larger-than-life event.

I’m definitely expressing my opinion here; the fine people of Thread & Film might disagree with me, and I don’t want to put words in their mouths. I feel like this is an interesting concept to explore, though, as being indicative of a larger overall trend.

People understand the world in terms of narrative, and the best communication leverages this. The prevalence of black-and-white thinking in politics, for example, illustrates the fact that people like a story with a hero and a villain, because that kind of story is easier to process than one in which all the characters have mixed motivations and do both good and bad things, often at the same time, for reasons that aren’t always entirely consistent.

Because we process in terms of story and serially consume so many different types and lengths of stories as part of the inescapable over-abundance of media in Western culture, our mental paradigms have evolved. We’ve grown to expect life to have that heightened, epic, near-mythical quality so frequently present in depictions of normal life on both the big and small screens.

How we deal with the perpetual disappointment of discovering that life almost never resembles our over-hyped mental image is a subject for a different day. Every now and then, though, the opportunity comes along to participate in something that will give us a taste, if only for a few moments, of that longed-for adventure we imagine life to be. People with abundant resources are naturally better positioned to take advantage of these opportunities, but not all of them are life-shattering or expensive. In fact, Donald Miller argues that the best kind of life is one that consistently makes the decision to seize small moments and build them into a larger, better story.

Thread & Film does the same thing I do, but targeted at specific individuals. Whereas writing and filmmaking provide escapism to a large audience from their life into a fantasy life, Thread & Film provides escapism to one couple from their life into a better, more idealized version of their life. I’d love to learn about the psychological impact of having a piece of your life adapted to the screen. If you watch the movie of your wedding once every few months, will it inspire you to idealize other parts of your life, then make those ideals reality? That kind of thing could prove addicting.

Far-fetched, maybe, but I firmly believe that telling a good narrative about yourself affects your self-image, which in turn can effect life change. While not everyone can afford to have a movie made about their wedding, the concept is adatable and extensible, and it’s worth thinking about how we can re-tell our own story to ourselves in a way that inspires self-idealization.

For brides-to-be, this involves a single, magical day that will live on in their memories. For the rest of us, the process may look more prosaic and mundane. Build a good habit of self-narrative, though, and we might see long-term change in reality, not merely in our imagination.

The Big Tiny Dream

If you’re hoping to start producing your own movies, you should check out kickstarter.com, a quite interesting experiment in patronage.

After checking out kickstarter and reading for several hours about the state of the indie film business, I had a long conversation with my wife about what I think of as my Backup Plan.

My actual plan is to keep writing screenplays until someone decides to pay me for doing it. I will then write a bunch of gun-for-hire stuff, save up all my dollars, pay off all our debt and the mortgage, and be financially liberated to continue pursuing my goal of making movies.

Since you can’t in any sense guarantee a dream like that, I also have the following dream. It comes in multiple steps:

1. Return to Winona Lake, IN.
2. Somehow raise \$5000, through kickstarter or some other group of schmucks.
3. Trick some people into spending a week of their vacation helping me make a single-location movie for free.
4. Self-distribute said movie.
5. Profit.
6. Repeat, with slightly more money.

I think anyone can see that the major logical gap is in steps 4-5.

There are several variations of how to accomplish self-distribution. Here is my current favorite, again with steps (steps are easy to read).

1. Don’t go over budget.
2. Pre-market your film with blogging, social networking, target-marketing, teasers and ancillary media, and pavement-pounding.
3. Persuade everyone in your town to come to the movie by virtue of its being home-grown and featuring people and places they all know.
4. Profit-split with the theatre or your other venue of choice.
5. Hit the small local film festival circuit hard, making sure to sell DVDs and other swag at every showing.
6. Having (hopefully) built up a lot of excitement in other cities, take your movie on the road, four-walling or profit-sharing with exhibitors.
7. Leverage this success to find investors for your next film.

Once again, there are lots of gaps in this process, but you hopefully get the idea.

Since editing the movie about which I recently blogged, I have been thinking quite a bit about truly independent filmmaking and self-distribution, and I think this may be the route I eventually end up spending the rest of my life taking.

The indie producer who makes a small movie and thereby breaks into mainstream Hollywood seems to be disappearing in favor of the “blue-collar” regional filmmaker who makes a living producing films but never gets rich.

Anyone planning to take the independent route would do well to rethink all her assumptions.

I know I am.

The Constitution of the Appleton Estates

Staying up late, working and thinking about the Constitution.

The Indiana Film Showcase

This past Friday The Saint Regis Club hosted our first ever Indiana Film Showcase. I organized this event, so Thursday and Friday were busy, sleepless days.

We were showing three films in a row, all by Indiana-based filmmakers. Since you should check them all out, they were:

Finding Xanadu: The Life and Films of Samuel W. Truss by Benjamin Lancaster

Ghost Stories 4 by Dan T. Hall

Trippin’ by Devi Snively

A good time was had by all. Or most. We even had some people attend who were actually involved in the making of these films, and they were gracious enough to do short Q&As with us after the screenings.

This was in important event to me and The Saint Regis Club because we’re also planning on organizing a full-fledged, multi-day Film Festival with two capital Fs later this year. This was a microcosm of that, so it was good to see what the challenges and requirements would be. And among other things, I learned two primary lessons:

Lesson one: advertising. What I did for the Showcase failed miserably. Literally not a single person came because of advertising; it was all word of mouth. So I’ll have to regroup and rethink my strategies.

Lesson two: doing everything myself. Don’t. I felt like I was going to die from exhaustion, and this was just a short, one-day event.

But my next step is a grant application, due later this month. That I can do by myself.

The Martini is a demanding drink; the Manhattan is an accommodating one.

The second Tropes v. Women! (by feministfrequency)

The Story About the Story

Yesterday Apple announced the upcoming version of its desktop operating system, Mountain Lion, or for people who don’t like kitschy names that are easy to lose track of, OS X 10.8.

You can read about its new features at… well, pretty much everywhere. Despite that, to me the announcement of Mountain Lion, apart from its earliness, is not that huge a story. The story about the story is actually bigger than the story.

Yes, I used my title in my post. You’re free to leave if you don’t like how I run things around here.

You can read over at Daring Fireball how John Gruber and an undisclosed number of other Apple/Tech journalists were invited to individual presentations by Phil Schiller showing off the features of the new OS. This is pretty strange because I can’t ever remember Apple introducing a new product in this manner. They either do a quiet website update with a press release or throw a big event in Cupertino and invite everyone in advance.

But from Gruber’s description, they essentially replicated the format and tone of one of their big events, just for one person at a time. No one knows how many of these mini-keynotes they did, although I suppose you could walk around on the web and count the number of tech writers telling the same story. So far I’ve only seen it from Gruber and Andy Ihnatko. UPDATE: It turns out Andy Ihnatko was not included. He’s apparently just really quick on the draw, because he had that article up like lightning.

Anyway, check out this quote from Gruber’s story:

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion–or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

“Now” presumably being delicate shorthand for “now that Steve’s gone”.

Interesting things afoot at the company I love.

The thing with writing is the better you get, the longer everything takes, because you are working in more modes simultaneously. — Twitter / matociquala: The thing with writing is the…

The United States Just Finished 46th in a Press-Freedom Study

Here are the top 10: Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, and Sweden.

Raise your hand if you’re afraid to visit any of those countries.

Romania finished ahead of us. Think about that, anyone who remembers The Iron Curtain.

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There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought. — David Allen, Getting Things Done

These guys might be the best gay couple in the entire world.

(via All You Need is Love « Black, Gay and Jewish)

This is a banner moment: I have written an Apollo client-side query, and it ran on the first try.

Mutation failed, but whatever

This Is Why Apple Rebooted FCP

I don’t know how this works in FCP X, because you don’t change to a new NLE in the middle of a huge project, but the Boris FX 3D Text plugin Apple licensed to do titles with fine-tuned controls and effects, such as drop shadows, drives me totally bonkers. It’s a tyrant that doesn’t play well with others and forces me into hacky workarounds to perform what should be relatively simple tasks.

Example: I want to cross-dissolve between two screens worth of credits¹, so I should be able to just drop in a cross-dissolve transition from FCP’s extensive library of effects. But because I have credits for two different characters on the screen, I used two different instances of the Boris plugin, and when I drop in the dissolve, only one of them dissolves. The other vanishes immediately when the transition starts, while its counterpart on the next screen remains absent until the transition has finished.

Positing that this might be due to a bug in the alpha channel implementation, I tried cropping each slide to exclude the expanse of empty space surrounding each title, but to no avail. Instead, I just now finished keyframing every clip individually to change the opacity from 0 to 100 (or vice-versa) over the course of 24 frames, which took far longer.

Also, I’m pretty sure the render time increases over using FCP’s software-optimized transitions. So I’m writing this during the 25-minute wait it takes to render out 2 minutes worth of still images with text over them.

Thoughts You Shouldn’t Think

I caught myself doing something alarming today.

See, I’m working on this comedy. I drafted it once. Now I’m rewriting it.

It’s kind of biting me on the ass at the moment. In a slow, deliberate, cud-chewing sort of way.

I don’t generally think of myself as a very funny person. Some people laugh at me. That may not always be by my choice. But often it is. Still, if anything, I’m more of a one-liner type of guy. Exploiting a situation to its limit isn’t really my bag, baby.

Of course, when writing a comedy, that is exactly what one is called upon to do.

To me, comedy is made up a two elements. I may have said this before. What you do is you get 1) some great quirky and outlandish characters, and then you think of 2) some crazy situations to happen to them. You throw 1 and 2 together, and that’s how you create comedy.

I think that comedy is so much harder than drama, which is why I’m always angry when the Oscars are over.

Anyway, I was thinking about how unlikely it is that I’ll be writing the next 40-Year-Old Virgin (which I think is the most recent truly original comedy). And even the odds of writing another movie like Wedding Crashers, which I didn’t think was very original but was definitely hilarious, are pretty low for me.

Then this sentence formed itself if my head:

“I really just need to write something that’s funny enough to get sold, and lots of extremely not-funny comedies are made every year, so selling one shouldn’t be that hard.”

Do you see the trap in that? The seductive but fatal lure? No?

It’s the Siren call of mediocrity, my friends. The belief attempting to take over in my mind that all I need to do is just be a tiny bit better than all the other trash out there.

Now, even if this was technically true (which is debatable), this is not at all the kind of artistic philosophy with which I am anything close to on board. This is anathema.

So even though I’m not very strong in the world of comedy, this script is going to have to be worked on and worked on and worked on and worked on until either I can’t possibly make it any funnier, or it really has reached the heights of excellence at which one wishes to aim.

But if someone offered to buy it from me tomorrow for a reasonable price, I wouldn’t say no.

Now that’s some good philosophy.

To my two regular readers: the next post exists to display video clips for reference by a potential employer. Feel free to disregard.

Too Many Chores

Pre-production, as it turns out, is all about time management and task-prioritizing.

Here is a rough list of things I have to do right now, in no particular order:

1. Send several emails
2. Fill out insurance applications
3. Build a website for the film
4. Post things on the website
5. Record a video podcast. Every week.
6. Draw stick-figure storyboards for the entire film.
7. Do an inventory of the gear we have at our disposal
8. Get bios and photographs of the crew
9. Write sides to hand out at auditions
10. Make the production schedule
11. Read two books on directing actors
12. Watch several movies for inspiration
13. This blog post
14. About 20 more things I can’t remember right now.

Figuring out which of those things to spend my time on is probably the biggest challenge. Nearly all of them are easy to do, or at least close. That’s not the problem.

Cheap, fast or good. You can have any two of those three.

I’m trying to leave out “fast,” but even that is turning out to be hard.

Unpaid Me Will Rock Your Overpaid Development World

I like knowing Greg, because he’s hooked up to the world of film, and sometimes he gives me unproduced scripts to read. I read two of them this week, and I realized something:

I’m a better writer than most people.

I know you’re all surprised to hear that a screenwriter thinks himself better at the craft than other people who are actually making money (screenwriters are usually such humble people), but it’s true, I tell you. Every single one of these scripts has had quite obvious flaws to which I am pretty sure I have simple solutions.

Of course, no producers are paying me to develop these ideas, so this helps me not at all, in a practical sense.

But for encouragement, there’s nothing like it.

I managed an hour-and-a-half-ish of writing tonight before exhaustion overcame me, and I brought the page count up to 20 on the rewrite. More importantly, I summitted a minor story hill I’d been climbing all week, leaving the path open for some solid progress next time I write.

And what’s even better, most of it is feeling at least mildly funny, and much of it very funny. This may not sound like a big deal to all you other comedic geniuses, but for me it’s bloody amazing.

From now on, only dramas. Comedy is stressful.

Up and Running

This is the inaugural post.

It took me way longer to get this site going because I agreed to take over the planning of the Saint Regis Film Festival at the same time I started planning a web series with Shawn Victa.

I should be updating this blog at least once a week, which in theory means I’ll have something new to say about one of my projects at least that often.

No reel yet, because I had originally intended the reel for a different purpose and now find I need to re-edit it to be more generalized. But that should happen some time this week.

For now, I guess this is pretty much just Hello, World.

Vesper

I don’t always have lemons, but when I do…

(via Carbonite frozen Aurora by pushfighter on deviantART)

(via Jedi Ariel by pushfighter on deviantART)

Watch the Reel. Because.

Because it took me so long to figure out, that’s why.

This is how publishing your own website is. It takes you fifteen minutes to make some minor changes to your reel, then another two hours to figure out how to do HTML5 video while also supporting certain backward browsers built by companies who disdain plebeian things like innovation.

And don’t get me started on Ogg Theora.

Anyway, the reel is up; I hope you love it.

Edit: The Reel is now no more.

We can combat painful pleasure only with pure pleasure. — Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Website UX

I’m currently building a website for a new business I’m starting, and I keep being surprised at the user-interface challenges posed by designing a way for people to give you money.

Hitherto, most of my web development experience has been about presenting information, which just means doing a specialized kind of graphic design. Self-critical as I might be about my graphic design skills, this limits the number and kind of choices I have to make.

In this case I’m using the much-vaunted (and so far not over-sold) Squarespace for the design and hosting. I went with one of their lovely templates for the site because I didn’t want to spend forever on the coding part of the process.

This works as advertised. What Squarespace can’t do for me is make decisions. Which page should contain this or that idea? How do I want to describe the services I offer? Will people just click a button to go the payment page directly, or should I first take them to another informational page so they know exactly what they’re getting into?

It all needs to fit together in a way that makes people feel confident about what they’re buying, and that’s challenging. I know how my brain works, but it may not be the way the masses’ brains work.

I guess this is just another way that everything takes longer and gets more complicated than you imagined when you started.

Welcome Back, Shelley!

Can’t wait to have Shelley Winters back in my life.

We’re* taking our baby food game to the next level. 

 *Sally

What are the Odds?

So one of the projects I was going to do next was a book adaptation. I figured this would be fun to do, since I’m supposed to be all good at anaylsis and stuff.

The novel in question is The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, a personal favorite of mine.

I started reading it last night and got about halfway through, reinforcing my belief that it would be super-easy to adapt to the screen.

This morning, I thought that since I hadn’t yet checked on copyright status, I might as well crack open the first couple pages of the book and take a gander.

“Take a gander.” What a great phrase.

Anyway, opened up to the copyright page, and … nada.

This was encouraging.

The next step was some googling. And Lo, if I did not immediately discover that the book, first printed in 1908, is in fact in the public domain.

And there was much rejoicing.

Then I thought I would just throw “movie” onto the end of my google search, to check whether (unlikely as it might have seemed), anyone else had already had my bright idea.

And damned if right there, some bastards hadn’t had my idea just a couple months ago. Forensic Films, who were behind Idlewild (which I haven’t seen), have actually commissioned some jerk named George Smith to do the adaptation.

So now my job is clearly to plot how I can pre-empt them in some way, or failing that, steal Mr. Smith’s job (unlikely, since he is quite naturally connected to the producers, as I am not).

Barring that, I’m really just crossing fingers that Forensic doesn’t actually end up making the film. I’d really rather not see it come out all low-budget and stuff.

Unfortunately, Forensic seems to have a history of actually producing movies. Those jerks. So I’m probably out of luck.

I was really looking forward to doing that adaptation. Dammit.

Who We Are

Before you read the rest of this post, watch the video linked below. It’ll take you almost exactly one minute:

Valentine’s Day Announcement

Are you done? Good. I hope you enjoyed it. We definitely enjoyed making it and showing it to you. Now, on to why I’m writing.

One of the things I know lots of people will ask us is: “Why are you doing this?”

Because we’re a new family—that’s why. At eight-plus years of marriage, we may not seem that new, but we know our family history on both sides, and… we’re pretty new. Rather than choosing one or the other of our existing family lines to identity with forever, we’ve decided to choose a new identity all our own.

We aren’t doing this to make anyone sad, or to symbolize any kind of rejection of our families or our families’ values. We’re embracing a new identity, not abandoning our existing ones. Some people probably will feel sad or hurt, and that makes us feel sad as well. But I will always be a proud member of the Stauffer family, just as Sally will always be a proud member of the Wallin family. We have a new name now, and we as one have a new identity, but each of us is the same person we were before.

I’m sure many people will also want to know what our new name means, or why we chose it.

I’ve always identified very strongly with the Scottish part of my heritage. My mother actually gave me a new Scottish name when I turned eighteen, and I got married to Sally wearing a kilt of our actual clan’s actual tartan.

Sally, for her part, has always thought of herself as primarily Polish. Her mother and all her mother’s family are Polish—second-generation immigrants who escaped from the Nazi regime.

Both of us together have also come to strongly identify with being artists and people of craft. So, after a lot of research and deliberation, we decided on combining the following elements:

“Ealain”, a Scottish Gaelic word meaning “art, learning/profession, poetry”.

“-ska”, a common Polish suffix meaning “of the….”

We decided to drop the first a to make the English phonetical spelling match the actual Gaelic pronunciation of the word. That gives us “Elainska” (pronounced “eh-LINE-skuh”).

As in, “Sally & Ryan Elainska”.

Why You Want a Monitor On Set

Here is an un-corrected A-Camera still from the scene I’m working on right now:

Obviously it’s too bright (this scene takes place at night, in the dark), but that’s easy to correct. Going darker is not a problem; in fact, we shot it this way on purpose. I’m not going to comment about the blue tint. That’s not the point.

Now, here is another, also un-corrected still, from the same scene, and in fact the same moment in time, but from our B Camera:

In case I wasn’t clear above, these shots were simultaneous; we were shooting multi-camera. The compression on this image makes it look a tiny bit worse than it really is, but you get the point.

Now, the two cameras we used were different models–similar, even down to the sensor inside them, but not the same. One of them had a few stops more latitude than the other, which probably explains the difference. This is a limitation we just had to deal with. The proper way to deal with it in this situation would have been to throw more light at the scene and lower the ISO on Camera A.

But we didn’t do that. Why?

Because I didn’t realize what was happening. You’ll hear me singing that song a lot (here, for example) about this movie, because everyone was doing too much, including me, and we were all exhausted most of the time. I lost track of hundreds of tiny problems that should have been noticed and resolved. This one isn’t quite as tiny.

See, I can fix this, but the B-Camera shots will get grainier. It’s way harder to go lighter on digital footage than darker. So when you eventually watch this movie, look for the disparity, because unless I discover some sort of magic previously unknown to me, there will certainly be disparity.

If I’d had a monitor with us on set I would have looked at it, and I would have noticed. In fact, we did have a monitor on the show, but making sure it followed the cameras around and got hooked up every time we moved so that I could look at it to check on what my camera ops were doing was another one of those tiny things that didn’t get done because it wasn’t anyone’s job, in particular. Welcome to no-budget indie production.

My friend Greg would probably favor me with a regretful shake of his head right now if I was talking to him about this, and David O’Donnell would graciously refrain from pointing out that he warned me I’d need an AD on set, because he’s a classy guy. But their point would essentially be made: you’re going to make mistakes like this, and they’re going to bite you later, and hopefully if you’re smart, you’ll not make the same ones again.

If you’re smart.

Wicked

My friend Greg Francis just shot a short film based on the true story of a rape/attempted murder survivor.

He’s got a great cast and crew, and a fantastic script—I know because I read and gave notes on it. But he needs a little more money to pay for some of the unavoidable costs of film production—and possibly festival submission. So he’s started a Kickstarter project to try to raise \$2500 to finish the film.

Worth a look. Follow the link below to support Greg and Wicked.

Winona Lake — Night

Winona Lake Town Primary Election Today

So my vote counts twice, right? #civics

You can’t live without the fire\ It’s the heat that makes you strong\ ‘Cause you’re born to live\ And fight it all the way\ You can’t hide what lies inside you\ It’s the only thing you know\ You’re embracing that, never walk away\ — Within Temptation, “Iron”\

You Just Shouldn’t

If your response to something you dislike or disagree with in your chosen subculture is, “I just can’t with this,” you’re writing in the wrong place.

Non-writers can afford the luxury of being too triggered or disgusted to respond to something. Writers focusing on one particular niche topic may feel free to disregard or shrug off ideas in a different niche than their own. But if an idea in your subculture starts to gain traction—any attention or viability at all—excusing yourself from the conversation with “I just can’t with this” probably means you should excuse yourself from the conversation entirely.

This isn’t a knock against people who have wounds or trauma that make it too difficult for them to address certain subjects. And it may just mean you need to narrow your focus. For example, if you, a fashion blogger, have experienced emotional trauma from fat-shaming such that you can’t write about body image issues, fine: you’re a fashion blogger who doesn’t write about body image. If, on the other hand, you claim to be a fashion blogger who does want to address body issues, but every fifth article you read on the subject makes you shut down for the day, you probably need to stop writing on this subject.

I can hear you thinking now, “Oh sure, invalidate my opinions because of their strong emotional component.” Nope. Your opinions are totally valid. Your status as a writer is not. If you want to have a voice in a certain discussion, you have to be present for the entire discussion. Nice, considerate people—people who already feel kindly-disposed to you and eager to hear your thoughts (that is, the core of your existing audience)—will listen to whatever you have to say, even if you need to duck out of the conversation halfway through. If you want everyone else to pay attention to you, though, you’re going to have to grit your teeth and stay in the conversation, refusing to back down in the face of not only strong, direct opposition but unintentional triggering as well.

If you want to call yourself A Writer, you don’t get a choice about this. Do you think war correspondents with PTSD get to keep their beat as long as they don’t have to see anything too grisly?

I run my personal website on Netlify, but most of the production NextJS apps I’ve worked on have been deployed to AWS or Google Cloud. For a startup, there’s a good chance the cost savings of running directly on one of the big platforms outweighs the extra engineering effort required.

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Every now and then it’s worth taking a deep dive into language nerdery. Here’s a great article for anyone who’d like to understand more about the JavaScript prototype system, which is quite a thing if you’ve only seen the ES6-style class syntax.

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A bit of an inflammatory title, and it’s also kind of a promotional post for a product that benefits from a “yes” answer to the question in the headline. And, on the contrary, it’s also a classic example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. From the penultimate paragraph:

NoSQL isn’t dead.

Duh.

Nonetheless, this was an interesting read. I’m not all that often called upon to make decisions about databases, but when I do, and even when a NoSQL DB might be a good fit, I always end up choosing relational databases.

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If you don’t want to read the entire “You Don’t Know JS” book series (which I highly recommend), it’s good to read occasional articles about nerdy JavaScript language stuff. You don’t need to be a CS geek to benefit from learning more about the language you use as a frontend developer.

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I’m on a roll with programming nerdery, I guess. What is “Declarative” programming?

It’s like trying to answer What came first, the chicken or the egg? except everyone seems to think the chicken did, but you don’t even like eggs, and you’re confused. Combine this frustration with the bastardization of the actual word “declarative” to basically just mean good and all of a sudden your imposter syndrome is tap dancing on your confidence, and you realize you don’t even like programming that much.

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Here’s a nice bite-sized post on TypeScript generics: A great introduction if you’ve never used them before!

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