Just after midnight at the end of the workweek here on the east coast, and it's perfectly understandable that a moderately hip guy like myself can let the lateness of the hour and the fatigue of the week affect him so much that a little unintentional Neil Diamond quote slips out.
It's been a summer of family outings, trips to the ballpark, Saturday morning tee-ball followed by afternoons at the beach. I've enjoyed my family's company very much these last few months. My son has just entered the first grade and is determined to be more grown-up (don't rush it, kid) and my daughter is approaching the age of three with the demeanor and attitude of a kid four times her age, plus my wife and I have just celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary, which also marked ten years to the day since we first met. I am truly blessed beyond what I could have dreamt of for myself ten years ago.
I have been writing, albeit that form of writing that can best be described as spitballing and is often referred to by others as daydreaming. I came up with the endings of a couple of specs I've been breaking and can now fill in the gaps moving backward, which is a departure for my usual approach of spilling out the toy chest and tearing loose with abandon. I've (big surprise) never been a disciplined writer, this has always been my downfall, but I'm planning to use the gaps I'm able to take during my work day to wrote more efficiently.
As I was thinking along these lines, I stumbled upon a listing for this book on Amazon: The Coffee Break Screenwriter.
Okay, now let's rewind about three or four years when I started renewing my ambition to become a produced screenwriter. I had already created an account at Zoetrope when it first hit the web, had a couple of specs under my arm, and had little idea how to proceed, but one thing I did know was I hated how many books I'd purchased about screenwriting. I hated how other writers championed their chosen screenwriting guru like they were facepainters at an NFL game. I even tried starting a group on Zoetrope called "Screw You, Guru" where people could vent about ridiculous adherence to hard rules, especially when those rules dictated and informed your script with the same formula that you'd seen in countless movies. I'd vowed back then never to buy another book on screenwriting.
Why the change of heart? Isn't the first thing they tell you about fixing a problem is that the first step is realizing you have a problem? I have a problem using short bits of time to work on my writing.
I think I'll pick this book up. Hell, it beats spending ten minutes doing a crossword.
Family. Dayjob. Writing. Pull the cords & start juggling. Careful you don't drop one.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Better Late Than Never
I wasn't going to enter the Nicholl competition this year. I hadn't been focused about doing a polish on the script I'd thought I'd submit and I didn't feel like I had the time to do it justice. I went out to a movie on Saturday night and put the whole thing behind me.
However...
When I went online Sunday, I read that the application site had undergone some major outages the night before and that the submission deadline had been extended.
The regret I'd been suppressing won out. I took a look at my last draft and found it tighter than I'd remembered. I made the additional changes I'd wanted to make, read the script through again and made the PDF.
The extended deadline was 3 PM Eastern time. As I uploaded the script, I saw the clock on my computer switch from 2:59 to 3:00.
I would have felt bad over the next year if I hadn't gotten one in there, but I think next time I'll shoot for the early deadline.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Handicapping
Three weeks ago, I was working on a new blog post about handicapping the Nicholl Fellowship. I don't know a thing about picking winners, but I thought it would be provocative and fun to check into past winners and see if there were any predictors to be found, a way to gauge what's likely to win and what isn't.
I was a couple of paragraphs in when I got a text from my brother. Our mother had been rushed to the hospital.
My mother, aside from her many fine qualities, was a dedicated smoker, as most people from her generation look to have been from her photos of parties and nights at the Copa. She had started in her mid-teens and continued for 45 years or so until her lungs were so wracked that she often spoke through coughs and we could understand. Twelve years ago, she started having serious breathing issues that eventually turned out to be chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with a congestive heart disease chaser. She was prescribed a prolonged steroid treatment that went on longer than it should have and one day her body just flat out stopped working. She was on a bed in the hospital with no time to get her parish priest to her side, so the hospital chaplain read her the last rites as we, her children, watched in stunned silence. Then we waited and waited for an end that didn't come. She finally stabilized and within two days was sitting up and ordering us around. She had a long rehabilitation and returned home after several months. Over the years there have been returns to the hospital followed by increased needs at home; an oxygen tube, a part-time aide, a walker. Some days we'd show up at her door to find her full of pep; some days she'd just sit, unable to get to her feet without help.
The years in between were very good to me. I met my wife, we had our two children, I moved from a creative but stagnant career into a few more interesting and worthwhile fields, all things I could not picture for myself at the point when my mother first fell ill. Had my mother died twelve years ago, she would not have been able to see my bride walk down the aisle toward me; would not have answered my calls when I needed to vent as my wife and I butted heads with hospital staff during the labor process when my son was born; would not have seen how much my daughter resembles herself at the same age, a curly blond with piercing blue eyes.
The years since her initial crash have had so many medical interventions that my mother decided a year ago, once she was determined to be worthy of hospice care, that she did not want to be revived should she falter again. She spoke with us all, her five children, then to her teen and adult grandchildren. She gave us each tokens from her life and started us on the road to prepare for her death, which she believed would come within weeks if not sooner. It came as no surprise when she somehow graduated from hospice care to just needing a part-time aide again. Her aide would share movies with her (I was floored this past Easter Sunday to find a bootleg copy of Avatar in her bedroom) and help her with sewing projects. On Easter, Mom presented us with a blanket she'd finished for my daughter. We weren't expecting to visit her for Easter, we had plans elsewhere, but we drove over to her house afterward as a surprise to her and the rest of the family, some of whom also had not planned to be there but somehow changed their minds at the last minute.
Three days later she was in the hospital, having collapsed in her living room. Her aide, although familiar with my mother's wishes, having read the DNR and placed it with the rest of her medical information, called an ambulance anyway. Once at the hospital, she was tubed and sedated. We were shocked, but hoping there might be some hope that with minimal intervention from that point on, Mom would have a chance at recovery. When the sedation was ramped back to gauge her capabilities, she took the opportunity to non-verbally request that the tube be removed. The doctors convinced her to allow them two days to process how she'd respond to minimum treatment. She had severe pneumonia in both lungs and looked to have had a heart attack that was curbed by the internal defibrillator she'd been given a couple of years back.
After the weekend passed, the doctors crunched the data. They called my oldest sister, my mother's health proxy, and asked to meet us all the next morning. We didn't need to stretch to figure out what was going to happen next. We met at my mother's bedside the next day to hear that she was not recovering and they had determined she was capable of deciding whether to allow or deny further treatment. A short time later we met with the hospital's risk management specialist to see whether we had any objections to this plan. We didn't.
For all the hospital dramas you've seen, you'd think there were more doctors than nurses. Everything happens with at least one doctor there, usually two or three. When someone dies like my mother died, surrounded by family hoping the patient will be comforted by their presence and touch, there aren't any doctors. There isn't an improvement to life to be made, nothing to be saved. Doctors don't dally in the intensive care ward, they move like butterflies, alighting briefly before disappearing into the sunlight. The last medical professionals to help my mother were two nurses, one of whom had been tirelessly helping her since her admission. They moved her up on the bed, sitting her up as best they could, then removed the breathing tube, replacing it with a mask providing oxygen, the dial for which the nurse turned up to the maximum. My mother had collected nurses in her previous hospital stays, often getting visits in one ward from personnel from another ward, leading to our confusion when we'd arrive to find nurses there on a social call alongside the nurses assigned to her care. My mother collected people from all over her life. Since I'm the fourth of five kids, I thought the people I'd see along with her in school or at a doctor's office or in a supermarket had known my mother from past visits or from an old neighborhood, but she usually had just met them and was already laughing and sharing stories. I meet new people like I'm administrating a leper colony, so my mother's gift for making strangers her own remains a phenomenon to me.
Just like she had done before, my mother stayed in the game, leveling off and breathing on her own, able to communicate with us, her eyes opening a bit to take us in, her five children expanded to nine with the sons- and daughters-in-law there, all of them embraced by her as though they were her own. Her levels remained the same for two hours before they spiked and then fell suddenly. Alarms were pinging urgently, but instead of a few people running in to intervene, one nurse came in to switch the monitor into Comfort Mode, silencing the alarms, hiding the readings, and she left without a word to us. When my mother died, we each had a hand extended to touch her. Skeptics will tell you there is no way to tell without instrumentation when a life passes. I can only say that we felt her leave, and I can only hope we helped as she left.
I was a couple of paragraphs in when I got a text from my brother. Our mother had been rushed to the hospital.
My mother, aside from her many fine qualities, was a dedicated smoker, as most people from her generation look to have been from her photos of parties and nights at the Copa. She had started in her mid-teens and continued for 45 years or so until her lungs were so wracked that she often spoke through coughs and we could understand. Twelve years ago, she started having serious breathing issues that eventually turned out to be chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with a congestive heart disease chaser. She was prescribed a prolonged steroid treatment that went on longer than it should have and one day her body just flat out stopped working. She was on a bed in the hospital with no time to get her parish priest to her side, so the hospital chaplain read her the last rites as we, her children, watched in stunned silence. Then we waited and waited for an end that didn't come. She finally stabilized and within two days was sitting up and ordering us around. She had a long rehabilitation and returned home after several months. Over the years there have been returns to the hospital followed by increased needs at home; an oxygen tube, a part-time aide, a walker. Some days we'd show up at her door to find her full of pep; some days she'd just sit, unable to get to her feet without help.
The years in between were very good to me. I met my wife, we had our two children, I moved from a creative but stagnant career into a few more interesting and worthwhile fields, all things I could not picture for myself at the point when my mother first fell ill. Had my mother died twelve years ago, she would not have been able to see my bride walk down the aisle toward me; would not have answered my calls when I needed to vent as my wife and I butted heads with hospital staff during the labor process when my son was born; would not have seen how much my daughter resembles herself at the same age, a curly blond with piercing blue eyes.
The years since her initial crash have had so many medical interventions that my mother decided a year ago, once she was determined to be worthy of hospice care, that she did not want to be revived should she falter again. She spoke with us all, her five children, then to her teen and adult grandchildren. She gave us each tokens from her life and started us on the road to prepare for her death, which she believed would come within weeks if not sooner. It came as no surprise when she somehow graduated from hospice care to just needing a part-time aide again. Her aide would share movies with her (I was floored this past Easter Sunday to find a bootleg copy of Avatar in her bedroom) and help her with sewing projects. On Easter, Mom presented us with a blanket she'd finished for my daughter. We weren't expecting to visit her for Easter, we had plans elsewhere, but we drove over to her house afterward as a surprise to her and the rest of the family, some of whom also had not planned to be there but somehow changed their minds at the last minute.
Three days later she was in the hospital, having collapsed in her living room. Her aide, although familiar with my mother's wishes, having read the DNR and placed it with the rest of her medical information, called an ambulance anyway. Once at the hospital, she was tubed and sedated. We were shocked, but hoping there might be some hope that with minimal intervention from that point on, Mom would have a chance at recovery. When the sedation was ramped back to gauge her capabilities, she took the opportunity to non-verbally request that the tube be removed. The doctors convinced her to allow them two days to process how she'd respond to minimum treatment. She had severe pneumonia in both lungs and looked to have had a heart attack that was curbed by the internal defibrillator she'd been given a couple of years back.
After the weekend passed, the doctors crunched the data. They called my oldest sister, my mother's health proxy, and asked to meet us all the next morning. We didn't need to stretch to figure out what was going to happen next. We met at my mother's bedside the next day to hear that she was not recovering and they had determined she was capable of deciding whether to allow or deny further treatment. A short time later we met with the hospital's risk management specialist to see whether we had any objections to this plan. We didn't.
For all the hospital dramas you've seen, you'd think there were more doctors than nurses. Everything happens with at least one doctor there, usually two or three. When someone dies like my mother died, surrounded by family hoping the patient will be comforted by their presence and touch, there aren't any doctors. There isn't an improvement to life to be made, nothing to be saved. Doctors don't dally in the intensive care ward, they move like butterflies, alighting briefly before disappearing into the sunlight. The last medical professionals to help my mother were two nurses, one of whom had been tirelessly helping her since her admission. They moved her up on the bed, sitting her up as best they could, then removed the breathing tube, replacing it with a mask providing oxygen, the dial for which the nurse turned up to the maximum. My mother had collected nurses in her previous hospital stays, often getting visits in one ward from personnel from another ward, leading to our confusion when we'd arrive to find nurses there on a social call alongside the nurses assigned to her care. My mother collected people from all over her life. Since I'm the fourth of five kids, I thought the people I'd see along with her in school or at a doctor's office or in a supermarket had known my mother from past visits or from an old neighborhood, but she usually had just met them and was already laughing and sharing stories. I meet new people like I'm administrating a leper colony, so my mother's gift for making strangers her own remains a phenomenon to me.
Just like she had done before, my mother stayed in the game, leveling off and breathing on her own, able to communicate with us, her eyes opening a bit to take us in, her five children expanded to nine with the sons- and daughters-in-law there, all of them embraced by her as though they were her own. Her levels remained the same for two hours before they spiked and then fell suddenly. Alarms were pinging urgently, but instead of a few people running in to intervene, one nurse came in to switch the monitor into Comfort Mode, silencing the alarms, hiding the readings, and she left without a word to us. When my mother died, we each had a hand extended to touch her. Skeptics will tell you there is no way to tell without instrumentation when a life passes. I can only say that we felt her leave, and I can only hope we helped as she left.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Previously on Three Chainsaws
I lost my e-mails last week. 4757 messages in my inbox. At first I thought it was just the application being balky. After all, I know what I'm doing, I'm a computer technician, I service hundreds of users for a living, this couldn't be a user error, couldn't be my error, never never never.
My mantra since I started this job has been this: It's always the user. Sure, it's not politically correct to think that, but 99 times out of 10 (that's not a typo, I mean 99 times out of 10), the problem begins with the user. They've modified something intentionally or through a misunderstanding of how things work and then they call for help. Thank God they screw up, or I wouldn't have this job. When I saw my mail had disappeared, though, my mantra was off having coffee and I figured it was a software problem.
Ever play one of those damned Facebook games? The kind where you need to accrue friends who aren't actually friends?
Don't play those damned Facebook games. I added my e-mail address to a list of people looking to amass a lot of friends who would make up the ranks of their virtual mob with their own virtual avatars. Eventually I lost interest in the game, but I kept getting requests to add friends. It turns out my e-mail address was then added to a larger list on a blog created for people to harvest addresses to invite to join their mob or their farm or their harem or whatever, with the added bonus that since the listing is available to anyone on the web through that blog, any spammer can pick up e-mail addresses with zero effort, so now I've been getting a ton of new spam.
After putting up with these messages one-by-one, last week I decided to set a rule in my mail client. Being such a handy computer technician, I made a rule that would move any of the e-mails associated with that mass listing into the deleted items folder...Aw, the hell with that, just delete them completely, I don't need to review those! I set the parameters to weed out those messages, then added the caveat that if the sender isn't in my previous senders, torch the message.
Except...I set the rule to sort out those messages, then told it to verify that the senders WERE among my previous senders, and instead of making sure both criteria were met, I made the rule work if either of the criteria were met, effectively targeting Every Single Message. At least I know the app works.
Luckily for me, I was able to get most of them back, but decided I'd take the opportunity to sort through and get rid of that which I did not need. Out went the newsletters from a bargain site I've never purchased anything through. Out went the weekly tech tips newsletters. Out went the almost-endless string of notification e-mails from Facebook telling me exactly what it would tell me when I logged on next.
I was left with a huge amount of e-correspondence with the wife (I've saved every last one, honey) and a great many e-mail addresses I hadn't seen in a long time. In sorting through these, I found a few responses to a callout here two years ago for legal advice. I'd been discussing optioning a script to a producer so that he could in turn shop several projects to some investors he needed to pitch in a hurry before they left the country a few days later. Yes, it sounds like just as solid a plan as it did back then. I might as well have gotten that excited about buying a lottery ticket. I didn't know the whole story then, however, all I knew was what the producer was telling our mutual contact: The investors had $25 million to spend and wanted genre projects set mostly in one location.
I have a script that fit that bill, a genre story (sci-fi/horror) set mostly in one location (a hospital), so at the urging of our mutual contact, I sent the producer the script. He let me know later of his intent to sell the investors several projects that were already packaged. He wasn't going to produce, he wanted to secure the deal for 10% of the investment. I was supposed to be the producer. After adjusting myself to this development, I took the leap and let him know I was fine with the change in roles, but the deal would have to be for 5 percent. He responded that he'd try to just sell the script for that five percent, which he didn't seem to realize was a different deal to try to make entirely. It will come as no surprise that the whole thing evaporated in the space of a few days.
I revisited the chain of events while reading through these e-mails, and one of the messages came from someone with a market research group, a very encouraging and insightful e-mail reinforcing my suspicion that the figures the finder was floating were way over the norm. Something about the message caught my eye this time around.
The sender's address was the very building where I am now working two years later.
About eight months ago I moved downtown in a new position as an onsite tech for the advertising/PR corporation I work for. The work is at the same time more tiring and less mind-numbingly boring than my previous position. My days are usually very busy, but there are also stretches where I can work at my own pace and there is something new on a daily basis. I like it, mainly because I can gain experience that will keep me employable. The job services three large companies based in the building, but there are other smaller companies in the building I don't serve, this market research group must be one of them. How could I not have noticed this before, I thought to myself, I'd been in the building a few times over two years before I moved here and had been giving phone support to the users here. Hell, I've even been on the floor the sender worked on when the e-mail had been sent.
Seeing this link between my present job and the blog made me think seriously about Three Chainsaws for the first time in months. I opened up the blog, read through a bunch of entries, tried to remember what I was thinking back then. It will come as little surprise that screenwriting has not been a priority lately. That chainsaw was placed down gently and occasionally started to make sure it still turned over. I've still been working very slowly on a couple of things I'd mentioned here:
- I hammered out a rough outline and revised a treatment for the animated movie idea I mentioned here in anticipation of meeting people last year at a videogame press event for a major animation studio. I met the studio's story supervisor and he politely shot me down before I could even bring up the idea of making them a pitch, but he was otherwise encouraging and made me incredibly jealous of the creative culture they've developed in-house.
- I've been revisiting two ideas I had years ago, one for a western about a gold rush town's dying days, the other a romantic comedy that I only started looking at again because I figure it can't be any worse than the releases that have been ripped apart by critics over the last year or so.
- I edited the trailers for two independent films that have been well received on the festival circuit in the past few months.
So even though I haven't pursued producing at all, I figured since I've got this one response from someone who may have advice if I get a package together, maybe I can see if their company is still in this building...
Hey, wait a minute. I work on Park Avenue South. This reader works on Park Avenue. Same building number, totally different neighborhood. It doesn't mean I can't make contact, but makes it a lot more unlikely that we've met in the elevator.
At least now I've got the blog back on my mind, and I think I have things to say.
Friday, March 26, 2010
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