I hate this little peanut man.



Can’t believe that Thanksgiving is mere days away. I have too much to finish before the end of the year, and let’s not get started on Christmas presents. This time of year in Raleigh is kinda charming because it’s less crowded and I feel like I have the place to myself. The Christmas parade Saturday didn’t even wake me up, which is an issue on weekends living street-level downtown when you stay up until 4AM taking machetes to Chargers and Smokers.

Majority of casting for San Souci is done and now I get to wrangle scripts and rehearsal spaces and squib counts and other minutia until Janurary, which will then hopefully pass in a relatively pain-free blur. The locations have worked out pretty well thanks to Bogart’s and Hi5 but the Funeral Home where most of the action goes down is still somewhat tenuous, so I’m stressing more over that than anything else. Also, you can apparently rent caskets, which is news to me. But if anyone has a casket lying around that they’d be willing to lend us, shoot me an email.

Writing-wise I continue to grind. I’ve got two new scripts I’m eying for Austin/Nicholl next year, that I’m struggling to get into some sort of shape for workshop. I do myself absolutely no favors by being neurotic on each draft I know, so someone kick me in the head please.

Finally, since the Hurricanes are doing their best to emulate my other favorite franchise, the Cubs, Mom and I will be heading to VA to catch some AHL Hockey with the Albany River Rats. With the way things have been going, in all likelyhood many of the Rats may be in Raleigh at the time, so I guess we’ll be watching high schoolers or something.

Won’t waste time or effort on the CS Open again



Updates being few and far-between I don’t expect I get much screenwriting traffic on the blog anymore, but just in case, I thought I’d pass along an opinion on the CS Open screenwriting competition- avoid it and spend your time doing more productive things. Like clipping your toenails or something.

The CS Open sounded interesting $12 an entry for an elimination style tournament. You get a prompt and have increasingly shorter deadlines to return a new 5 pg scene with each round. Since I’m a spec writer and I’ve been out of college for a while, the idea of a deadline really appealed to me. (I’m sure working writers who genuinely sweat crazy deadlines are thinking I’m crazy, but… Well okay, I can’t really deny being crazy.)

Here’s how things have played out… First, there were technical problems with registration, then some folks had issues submitting their entries by the deadline so it was extended, and now it appears some entries have just disappeared into the ether. But as far as I knew until this morning, I wasn’t having any of these problems. Got my proper #digit entry ID, had my pages done and submitted, properly formatted and title paged, by the original deadline, got a confirmation page and everything. But no score. No nothing.

I’ve sent several emails after each “Check by” date they posted to the site and still have not received a direct response. Found out via Twitter that a few other people are having the same problems. Done Deal reveals others.

So to hell with that noise. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a lot invested in this. $12 ain’t gonna break me, which was half the reason I entered. Plus I had a lot going on the weekend of the first round, SparkCon was going down in Raleigh, bands were playing, I had even gotten a little sick. But I came up with my 5 pages anyway, trying to put a fun spin on the vague plot requirements- but that was it, these weren’t characters I’ve spent months learning about and I guess I like my process a lot more when I live and breathe my characters for more than 5 pages.

Caught a break



Made it to the next round of Page International with N&D, and subsequently dinked the next cut which isn’t much, but I’ll take validation where I can get it.

In other news, the Ghostbusters video game is just about the greatest thing ever. However my love is slightly mitigated because I’ve got the difficulty cranked all the way up, so invariably Ray and Peter are getting possessed and attacking me, and Egon won’t get out of the damn way when whatever giant monster is rampaging so I keep dying trying to save his ass. Janine runs up the long distance bill and Winston just wants some pizza.

The fact that it’s the 25th anniversary of Ghost Busters is kinda weirding me out.  Both flicks are artifacts of my childhood, near and dear to my heart. I’m willing to bet the Real Ghostbusters cartoon modified my DNA at some point and it definitely put a few wrinkles in my brain. But it’s cool to see Ramis out and about doing a ton of PR for the Blu-ray release (and his new flick of course). Not entirely sure how I’m feeling about the talk of a sequel. There’s much potential for disaster, but George Lucas isn’t involved so I have some hope. What would really be great though is if some smart writers out there would diligently spend time and effort creating a new Ghostbusters-esque comedy, different premise, fresh characters…

Oh hey, some of those script meters are actually moving!

First ten verbs redux…



Brett relaunched the meme, and Pooks jumped it to Facebook, so I figured I’d bandwagon along…

mirrors
claims
heaves
curses
trades
fight
drains
crushes
tossing
flicks

Transitive verbs all up in this piece! Not a single “is” or “are” or “seems”on the first page. What do I win?

My ongoing Transliterate crisis



So. It’s been a while. I’ve been doing things. Things other than blogging, obviously, and on the whole, generally things other than writing. Maybe I’m getting less verbose, slipping into a coma of non-thinking activities, congealing my brain into mush. I mean, that’s what you do when you age, right? Lovely thought, that.

But then, I do a lot of Twitter and Facebook. Not that there’s much thought or interpretation in those bite-sized chunks of randomness that flow from some narcissistic impulse. The continuing evolution of communication conspires to rob me of all motivation. In the PRO column, they do curb my desire to blog about the various whacked television developments, and since I hardly add much that you can’t find in the 40 million other Interweb television discussions, I’m going with that as a good thing. … Though it needs to be said that LOST is still the bomb, and all you bitches better recognize that John Locke, the zen-master-ninja-pimp of all things, has returned and will be kicking so much ass. Also, I love that Ashes to Ashes is back! Okay, so not entirely curbed…

While it’s been quiet here the short film I was working on is generally done and I hope to have a cut to show off at some point. I hadn’t been planning on entering any of the writing comps this year, just because my brain-lock set in around Febuary and I’ve taken a break from the workshop scene– BUT I got a little nudge and ended up doing a quick re-draft for Nicholl and while waiting for the submission page to come up, I got impatient and entered PAGE, BlueCat and Austin as well. Need to figure out how to make my ADHD work for me more often! if only it’d do the dishes.

Speaking of the non-existing attention-span, I’m bored now and can’t be bothered to figure out how to end this post. Considered a positive outlook- need to work harder- kinda declaration, but meh. I want to write, so I’m gonna just continue trying to hold off the distractions.