eyeball twitch!
Gah, my eye is twitching again. I don’t know why, my script is printed, ready to go, my form is ready, I’ll get a M.O. tomorrow and hit the post office. It’s as done as it’s going to get. Stupid eyeball. Anyway, I wanted to post my synopsis/logline for N&D and get any comments if anyone has any, this is what’s on my entry form:
NICKEL & DIMEby Nicolle C. JonesEdison Wiley, Chicago’s hot, young criminal architect finds herself in debt with the Mafia and must scheme her way around Ex-boyfriends, rival mob factions and the US Secret Service to steal the world’s most valuble coin before her hitman crush puts her in an early grave.
So whatcha think?
Keeping at it
Jeez, blog, you need to update yourself. So I’ve been plowing along on Nickel and Dime, it has to go in the mail Monday morning, and I’ve reached equilibrium on the draft that’ll be going out. Just a few tweaks on spelling etc tonight, and I’ll hit up Kinko’s tomorrow and that’ll be it. I’m going to throw in on Austin this year too, just to keep things increasing every year, as some sort of delusion toward progress, whatever.
So now what? Well I probably get started on implementing the ACTUAL rewrite that I had plotted out for N&D, maybe retackle that Laugh Dance rewrite, since it’s so nicely still on the sidebar here, and it’s similar genre for N&D so I have two of that in somewhat decent shape before I move on to something else. Brain though has been giving me some feedback, with a few ideeeas, not that I guess I’m ever at a shortage for that, it’s just being geared for one particular idea at any given moment. That’s about all I got going on in the profession front right now.
Other stuff wise, weather has been nice. The Cubs are killing me, the Canes are killing me, I don’t know what the hell is going on. Situation with the Cubs, man, got dire last was when superstar Lee goes out with a broken hand, and with Kerry Wood and Mark Prior still not healthy, I mean, hell, they slide to 4th in the Central. Coupla guys stepping up, and they’re 2 games behind, but April is ending, they need to shape up. Another baseball bit, I’m annoyed Griffey Jr. is STILL on the DL. If he was healthy I’d have another team to pull for. As it is, the METS, the NY METS are on FIRE. 6 wins up on Atlanta. BWAHAHAHA! I’m sorry Braves-fans, but Atlanta is like the bizarro-Yankees and I still can’t quite pull for them with a good conscious. (I still have playoff grudges from back a few years). So my team prospect of the year is the Mets, since Bonds have given cancer to the Giants. It’ll take a while before I can feel okay about calling the SF Giants one of my franchises. (But I’ll still totally say I’m a NY GIANTS fan. Coz I am! Which = like the Mets obviously.)
Canes, jeez they tie up the series 2-2 last night in a good game. Cam Ward is doing well, but he gets the kid treatment a little, not that that bothers me, starting in playoffs at 22 years old, that’s pretty heafty stuff. I’d like to see it finish in 6, but I expect 7, with a Canes win of course. Also- STAAL. We have a nice roster, and they SHOULD do well. But after the season ending losing streak, well go fig.
TV- House excellent, excellent, excellent. Doris Egan and crew just punch my buttons so effectively. House vs. God was well written, everyone was in top form, and they threw in some really nice Wilson-story. Almost feels like they’re priming something, and yeah, okay I read the spoilers, but I didn’t come across my theory, although given my insanity, it’s unlikely I would. Anyway, sweeps is going to kill me if nothing else. Advise fans to stay tuned in. Other favorite Tuesday shows: poor poor Scrubs gets ignored on broadcast night, but I d/l! JANITOR! Love! NCIS has been consistantly strong all season. Man, I think back to last year, and Kate gone, but they have done a GREAT job with Ziva’s character, the cast is fun, the really seem to enjoy working together, I love Sean Murray, hell all of them, but I’ll give Sean the shout cause he doesn’t seem to have the crazy fans in spades- so there you go, Sean, you’re very own insane fan! Pay no attention to that person in your garbage…
Okay done babbling for the now, need to hack back at it. Here are some fun YTMNDs for you courtesy IRC- Grand Prix Butt racing (http://buttracinggp.ytmnd.com/) and Giraffes have one weakness… (http://giraffeweaknessomg.ytmnd.com/) Enjoy!
gotta get me some of that flow
Deadline-arific. Heating up here on the push to May 1. I should decidedly not be wasting time blogging. I’m going to have to remove myself from my enviroment to get some work done. This is about the quickest and most effective way of getting my shit done. Library, coffee shop, whatever. I wish I could figure out why precisely and replicate it. Very similar to my sleep issues- visiting friends, on trips, having an organized schedule for a few days, I can get 6 hours and be completely kosher. Saturdays even too, to an extent. But the standard day, where I try to get 8 hours of shut eye, know I can kinda arrive someplace in a certain time frame, I get 9 hours and I’m still exhausted. Totally mental. The division between work and play is psychologically huge. I guess one thing would be to start telling myself the script stuff is play compared to everything else. I enjoy doing it and I enjoy getting better. Hear that, brain? It’s F. U. N. Now get back to work!
The idea that attitude initiates productivity, okay, yeah, that’s not too original. Common sense, right? Sometimes you just don’t realize it though, so saying it is a step toward realizing it, mentally and physically. I came across a brief on the topic of Flow optimizing work and play (http://www.apa.org/monitor/jul98/joy.html) in which some U of Chicago Doc with consanant-superflous name, kinda analyzes ‘the zone’ that everyone always talks about. As part of an examination on ‘a better life’, Csikszentmihalyi calls it ‘flow’ but it’s the same basic premise. This site summarizes Chicks-send-me-high’s lecture (http://www.austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm), and as I said it all seems pretty common sense when you look at it, but ‘Chiks’ ties it into some evolutionary human development and looking at it this way is almost-kinda a way for me to rationalize it. I mean… as an artist, I have no need for rationalization of what really should be the Muses (or Flying Spaghetti Monster as the case may be) communicating from me. Bah! Emotion! Feeling! That’s all I need! (But as an insecure little writer who can very easily drown herself in details and justifications, maybe, just maybe, it’s a little freeing….)
I have to admit it’s been a while since I felt flow when writing. Thinking back I can pinpoint ‘flow’ when I’m learning something, like the 3D modeling that I mentioned previously, but in the past, I know I would lose whole weekends to learning Photoshop, programming and editing back in college. The accumulation of knowledge, and that curve of skill increase is addictive. Writing however, tends to be a little less tangiable than mastering Rotoscope and making your friends have their own lightsaber battles in Final Cut. Rob Jellinghaus states nicely (http://www.unrealities.com/essays/flow.htm) what I think one possible angle for why I have a hard time narrowing down my ‘flow’ experiences (holy cow, that sounds disgustingly biological) while writing is that one of the key angles in ‘Chiks’ theory is:
Some activities lend themselves to flow. Immediate feedback, commensurate challenges and skills, and clear goals are all precursors to flow. Lack of these makes flow difficult to achieve.
And writing, man that immediate feedback, that’s kinda hard to get. With art being so visual it’s a sublime awareness of if the craft has accomplished what you set out to do. Look at it. Does it emote? Yes or no. With my writing lately I’ve gotten so analytical, justifying this scene, this location, this conflict, this plot point, whatever, I can’t read it myself now and say, okay this is accomplishing what I want? I may have one slug line where a character picks up a button, but is the reader going to notice that or just float over it. You can CAP it, to draw attention, but then I feel like I’m showing my hand early. THEN you go scale, the dialogue works, the scene works- Does the sequence work? Does the Act work? Does the whole damn thing work?! *head asploded!* That’s the craft of all this, the agonizing and eventually trusting yourself and your choices. And hell I don’t even trust myself to wake up on time.
So I definitely got a feeling for this ‘flow’ jibbajab, I just gotta figure out some method to induce it. Meanwhile I checked out Wikipedia’s insane entry on ‘Motivation’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation) which is about as extensive as any I’ve ever seen. Obviously I’m not the only one which it elludes. From there I’ve wandered over to the Nootropics, because like any good american, I just want a pill to fix everything for me. As my dear friend Cory cannot yet prescribe medication, (hurry up you 18-hour study day SLACKER!) I’ll have to look into the vitamin options. Can it really hurt? Oh and hey if you know any Voodoo Priests drop me an email, too.
I should be doing something else.
Okay. Past my bedtime, but I have a few days off here to work on my script. You know, that thing, I do… Yeah well, I decided I’d rather learn how to 3D model instead. Okay, not completely that cut and dry. I did spend the better part of today writing, got about 20 new pages written and realized there’s no way the new draft is going to be done on May 1- so I think I’m going to shoot for a hybrid of the two, that is leave the main heist the same (which when I pulled that out took out 100 pages of guts from the thing). This way I will have something to enter, coz not entering at this point = failure. I’ve been working on this one too damn long. So now energies going into the hybrid plot for the comp, and then I’ll work the summer into getting the new version fixed as a whole.
So I got a lot done today, but I have grabbed Blender 3D and started screwing with that, which is about a million time more successful than when I’ve screwed with 3DSM and Maya in the past. Also my computer didn’t explode, which is nice. I’m going through a wikiBook on the subject just picking stuff up, and I grabbed a few scripts tonight to play with. The result is now my own virtual House (click, he pops!).
Well he’s getting there. I actually just had this people model and Xiao and I were talking, and I was just babbling incoherently about how phenominal Hugh looked in this past week’s episode (2×17), and I mean, come on he looked great! A tux! Poker! I die! So the Model is now going to be House. Mind it’s only a few hours work right now. Hours, days, weeks and months from now I may actually be able to slap some clothing and a grin on him. How am I supposed to concentrate with this possibility?!Anyway, let me know what you think, anything that looks off, etc.
vacation
Work madness is done for the time being and I’m taking a mini vacation. Hanging out in Gville yesterday and today and then I have four days set aside to tackle the rewrite for last ditch heading into May. Think I’ve retooled some of the problems, so now it’s page grinding. Sometimes I manage amazing work backed into a corner. Other times, ehhhn. We’ll see.