The Spine's the Thing

I'm back from New York and driving from place to place, living the life of an itinerant writer. No office, no desk, no smartly-dressed assistant. Today my exploits took me from Mani's Bakery on Fairfax, to the Beverly Hills Library (where there was a most disruptive fire drill), to the Noura Cafe (where I saw tattoo enthusiast Fred Durst), to the relatively new coffee shop on Cahuenga and Sunset, Groundwork (in front of which a motorcyclist was injured in accident, though not badly enough to forgo a cigarette while awaiting medical attention). I feel like I really got a mouthful of Los Angeles today. At least the coffee shops.

Digression: sooner or later, I am going to write about the coffee shops. The "public spaces," too. Anyplace that's amenable to writers and their particular needs. I'll rate them in the detail I expect you would expect from a writer, and might even employ a scale. Something like 1-5, 1 being Hell, i.e. writing while sitting on the men's room toilet in Jumo's Clown Room, 5 being Heaven, i.e. writing at that pay-as-you-go place theOffice... if it were free and in Los Feliz.

ANYway,

My task for the next five weeks is to finish the script I've been nesting on for, oh, the last couple of years. Long ago, I decided to take the I'll-just-let-it-tell-itself approach after spending literally years grinding out the structure, structure, structure on Get Low. I was exhasausted of fucking structure. I just wanted the freedom to write, man. Well, a hell of a lot of good that did me, four years down the pike. There's kind of a *reason for structure. Go figure. So guess what? Back to plotting it out moment for moment until the spineless blob of a "story" I've puked up makes some sense. And so that's what I've done for the last two days (my first two days back at it since I dropped the ball in NY). I've scrapped all the stuff that was going nowhere and laid it all out. It's all about the outline, I don't care who says otherwise. I've tried it every other way and it doesn't work any other way. It just doesn't. And it sucks.