Thursday, October 20, 2005

Monday, October 17, 2005

Drizzle in the Hizzle

Shower and then write, or write and then shower? Always the dilemma of the morning. This morning: write then shower. Feels right. An adventure, my life.

I realize my last post was a lunatic blob of despair. I was pretty overwhelmed at the idea of panic in the post-petroleum streets, but I think I've come back to my senses a bit. It's raining today, and that's oddly restorative. Of course, being awoken every time thunder freaked out the cat was not restorative, but, you know, he's a cat, he gets scared. Anyway, LA doesn't get a lot of rain, or weather of any kind, really. So to actually see something normal, something working the way it's supposed to (unlike me, blogging while I should working) is helpful. Cheerful even.

I also realize that last post was pretty off-topic. No showbiz stuff to speak of, so let me make with the latest.

My project with Santa Barbara writing partner is due next Monday. I've got one scene left to write, and then she and I have to break act three and get it down on paper. In a week. I'm terrified, but I think we'll get it done. She and I have been working for about three months now, and we've really gone to great lengths to beat the story point-by-point before actually sitting down to draft pages. I've not really done that in such detail before, and I think it's the key to us having gotten so much done in so little time. And it's also the key to it being a great story. Notice I didn't say script...I can't confidently say we've written a great script, the story I have a huge amount of faith in. If we just can get it on paper and then refine it to its purest form, THEN we'll have a great script.

This I've really come to learn is the best way to work. To resist the urge to get a few ideas sketched out and then jump into the pages. It NEVER EVER WORKS better than writing and rewriting and putting it away and then rediscovering it and asking HARD QUESTIONS and then rewriting it all out again... and only then sitting in front of Final Draft to start writing the script. And here's the kicker - when you do finally set down pages, it comes so easily and quickly, it feels like you're cheating. You go around that dreadful feeling of being in the middle of a scene not knowing why he just said that and she just did this. It will sing. It will ROCK.

Speaking of, the TV thing I'm doing with my other writing partner has been given a blessing by the William Morris agent who's going to "shepherd" it to networks and production companies, etc. So he's going to start setting up meetings this week and hopefully we'll get into the room with the good folks at HBO, Showtime, FX, Fox, USA, and a few other places. We were pretty good in our pitch to the agent guy - a little stiff at the beginning, but funny and relaxed when we warmed up. Practice is what we need.

Unfortunately, I've not done anything on any of my own stuff, writing-wise, in a while. But I'm letting paying gigs and the hopes of selling this pilot keep me afloat for a little while. Though I am starting to feel the hot breath of 2006 on my shoulder. It is sizing up to be a year I'll need full time work and, more than anything, to just crank out as many scripts as I humanly can. Ah, yeah, always something.

Well, the sun came out. Rain doesn't last long here in the desert. So that probably means it's time to get to work.

PS - Wallace and Grommit is the feel good claymation roller coaster ride of the year.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

This seems...

Sort of increasingly stupid, this whole blogging thing, don'tcha think? I mean, really, every motherfucker out there has got one, and no one's any more or less interesting than anyone else when you come right down to it. And on top of that, who has time to read? My girllfriend is away for two months, I'm unemployed (though writing all day) and I have maybe two nights a week of stuff to do. And I don't read. I hardly have time. I read when I'm in bed unable to sleep. Not sitting upright at the computer. Okay, except for the occasional TruthOut article or Pitchfork review. But is anyone doing one of these really keeping me hanging on by describing their thesis paper woes at grad school? It's like in The Incredibles, you know, if we're all Super, then what's the point? I think what it is is I'm losing interest. Either that or cat-sitting my girlfriend's white furball is starting to get to me. Cat hair everywhere. Constant meowing. A nice chunky hairball yesterday. Yeah.

I guess I'm in a bit of a grim mood lately, or a "what's the point" mood, at least. I've been reading (when unable to sleep) The Long Emergency (which further contributes to insomnia), which is all about the Peak Oil thing. We are in for it when the tap runs dry. According to this guy, at least, pretty much the world as we know it is a nice piece of burnt toast. Then somebody told me about the Maya Calendar last night, and, I mean, that's all I need - although there is a weird comfort to knowing what is possibly the exact date of end times.

All this has led me to some awfully dark places lately, which, at the recommendation of my highly paid professional therapist, I've tried to leaven by watching reruns of The Simpsons. Ol' brain doctor thinks I dwell on the negative. Really? What next doc, gonna tell me that I could stand to lose 15 pounds? What mighty powers of observation, Dr. Freud.

Anyway. It's a nice enough day here in soon-to-be-returned-to-the-sands-of-time Southern California. So I'm going to go for a walk and see if I can spot a bluebird or something and not think about the doomsday of my writing career, which is as fucking dead as those bird-flu chickens in Turkey.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

The Constant Procrastinator

Go see The Constant Gardener. I'll just call it right now: best movie of the year.*






*Excluding The Big Lebowski Special Edition DVD set for released in two weeks.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Rock on the Brain

Yeah, I've been away from this a while. The last couple of weeks were sort of a logjam of obligations and celebrations, among them my birthday, my parents visiting town, my trying to meet a script deadline, and my girlfriend leaving for two months in Paris. Today is quite literally the first day I've not had some pressing thing to attend to. There are things, of course, that need to get done, but I've got a few hours here, and it feels nice.

One of the things I've got to get around to is prepping a pitch for various network types, based on a show my writing partner and I developed. It's a music-focused show, and between "researching" it (watching music DVD's, buying CD's I can't afford) and doing some drum work on a batch of demos for a bass player friend of mine, I've definitely got rock on the brain.

Lately, what's been humping on the stereo around here is a mix of classics (The Jam, Husker Du, The Replacements, Gang of Four, Stones) and newbies (Fruit Bats, Robbers on High Street, Rogue Wave, I Am Kloot, Magic Numbers). It's as if a Keith Richards-like blood transfusion of rock n roll has begun working into my veins, reinvigorating me and reawakening zombies from an old life. ROCK N ROLL ATE MY BRAIN! I am really surprised at how much the...passion...for Rock n Roll has come back. I guess when I became a writer, or more accurately DECIDED to become a writer, I purposefully set that part of my creative self aside, thinking that there wasn't room in town for the both of us. But, much as the lead character in the proposed show I'm writing, I'm finding that there's only so much you can put those passions to bed. They will wake up. The sleeping giant will be disturbed. And so I find myself eating and breathing and dreaming about music, about drumming, about playing on stage. Not that I was ever some grand rock star who turned his back on the "life," more that I'm just aware of how long I let a certain very vital part of myself atrophy. And the truth is that it's a part of me I never realized how much I missed.

I'm not saying I haven't played music or bought a CD in the intervening years, because Lord knows I have, but there is something happening here that is more about the FEELING of it all, the impossible-to-replicate-elsewhere-ness of it that I haven't realized until now, until I've come through the other end of writing's satisfactions. The satisfaction you derive from writing is peculiar and short lived, like a nitrous oxide hit that spins you upward for a moment and then dissipates in thirty second's time. Music is there, you can hear it, you know when you've done well, when you've done justice to your skill or your stated goal: the band nails the song, the fill drops in exactly the right pocket, the song ends (always touch and go) on a dime and is followed by that wash of elation that, like the nitrous, only lasts a moment...but is shared by all participants, as with a family watching fireworks. You feel the bursts in your chest, thumping in and out of a rhythm that resolves in slow dissipation, prompting you to elbow your brother and look him in the eye as if to say "did you see that?"