With much activity, don’t forget your towel.



Tomorrow, May 25 is Towel Day and I encourage anyone who stumbles over these words to pull out your favorite towel and carry it around with you where ever you go. Towels, you may or may not be aware of are the Universe’s most dynamic and useful tool! All good froods know exactly where their towel is all at times. I’m planning on buying a new, exceptional towel just for the event!

As it happens I’ll be going to Greenville for my long awaited Pirates of the Carribbean: At Worlds End viewing. Thus far I’ve managed to avoid any major plot spoilers, previews and promos. Which was a feat since I had the script on my computer for the better part of six months, and have had to be on my toes during primetime television. The last couple of days have been trying simply because spoilers leak out everywhere and the word is really getting out. I read a few little non specific blurbs from the reviews, and it seems that aside from the 8.6 the film is sporting over at imdb.com, reactions are pretty mixed. Not much different from Dead Man’s Chest, which I really liked for the extensive setups, something audiences seemed mixed about. If @WE is the same I expect I’ll love it passionately. I was actually planning on geeking out major for the opening, but time and work got the better of me and all I ended up to show was a scraggly head of hair which hasn’t been trimmed in 8 months and a real pirate sword that I won’t be allowed to take into the theater anyway. But in the interest of not rolling out of a Ren-faire style (and therefor completely abandoning my thin facade of sanity) it may be for the best.

TV- LOST’s finale culminated in a moment of John Locke badassery so I was happy, if not a little whiplashed. I’m still not scraping the numbers off my car window and throwing out my Dharma tees though.  NCIS is getting a little thin. HOUSE remains to be seen.

Other stuff: Script Frenzy will be starting soon and I think I’m building up a good amount of steam for it. Just need a title and over arching theme. The characters are bouncing around in my head, and the plots is niggling here and there- but I’m up for suggestions.  For anything really, food, music, reading. If you’ve got something cool turn me on to it already.

new paint



Updated to the Wordpress 2.2 today and figured I’d try on a new template, which for once I didn’t modify very much. I like the grungy accents. If it annoys you, c’est la vie.

Meanwhile I’ve again come to the conclusion I’m a complete moron for even pondering the idea I could write something. I guess this is tradition. Maybe my spleen will explode and save the world any further drafts of my hackneyed delusions.

Awake where I usually am not. Also pitching!



Screwed up my sleep sched today so I thought a good use of my time would be to cop to signing up for Script Frenzy. There’s a good chance that if I don’t mention it I’ll wander off and forget about it and honestly blogging doesn’t really hold me that much more accountable, but every fractional bit helps. If anyone else has signed up and wants to add me that might provide further guilting.

That said, for SF I have a new idea I’m going to tackle- in addition to continuing to draft Gallows Gulch and hammering out some honest to god pitch-like-things. (Which, if you have 90 seconds, I would love to hear some feedback on. Also it’s better with beer, but really what isn’t?) I haven’t done any pitch-fests or anything in the past and aside from a lot of reading have no experience in it, so it’s time I got off my ass.

In other pitching news- okay what the hell Chicago? Here I was ready for another year of bitter griping and you jump from last to second I the NL Central. With the Brewers at no. 1 even. It’s awesome, but strange in an apocalyptic kind of way. I’m going to have to check the August sched to see if there’s a good looking matchup on deck, cause I want to get up there this summer.

And before I try and get back to sleep, I have thoughts on LOST for the two folks that read the blog and also enjoy the show, but I’ll save it or the weekend when I’m drunk and incoherent. Well, more incoherent.

Stephen Fry now appearing in my bedroom.



Maybe it was the Queen’s visit to the States, maybe it was that I couldn’t stop listening to Bloc Party and Muse. It probably had a lot to do with the Doctor Who. And I even went out of my way to buy some Marmalade this weekend when I already had one kind in my fridge. I’m drinking tea right now, Irish Breakfast if you’re curious. But I’m clearly on some sort of Brit-kick, so be warned.

I will explain the title of the post in a second, but I want to comment on last night’s HOUSE, episode 3×22 ‘Resignation’, which I felt was again in top form. This season has had some phenominal episodes, Son of Coma Guy, Informed Consent, but the March-April plots were doing nothing for me and the characterization really felt flat. Last week and this week really pulled me back in with reinforced plot elements and backstory- and but damn Wilson cracked out on speed was hilarious. The wink ALONE was worth a million dollars. So brilliant. A lot of sharp dialogue and gasp! Progression in House himself. Wonders never cease. A few things really stick out- Cameron waltzing up into House’s pad, intentionally familiar in what I suppose is the writers trying to explode a few brains out there. I also want to give Foreman hugs. They’ve done a great job over the course of the entire show priming him for this realization and I love it’s getting stretched and played between both House and Foreman, but diffusing through other character reactions. Some very nice emotional structure here and good writing. Love.

Meanwhile re: last post title, I am completely cracked out on Doctor Who now. It doesn’t fail- because BSG goes off the air and then DW comes on in March, so the obsession train keeps on rolling. But it’s off this weekend, so I’m going to show Megan and Jeremy the first two series, last weekend I showed Cory and Mary a few. Which is typical- I insist on sharing the awesome. I’m a plague carrier as far as television goes. It gets a recommend, least of all because David Tennant is exceptionally nice to look at.

So Stephen Fry. Yes. I don’t know how I missed this, but BoingBoing dutifully informed me this morning that I can get an Stephen Fry alarmclock and dear God help me, I need it! Not only that, but the makers released the samples via CreativeCommons, so if you navigate to the ‘Downloads’ section of their website you can download your own Stephen Fry wake-up sounds for phone, computer, whatever. The Good Morning Madam ones- all of them actually are hilarious. And I can scarcely imagine a better way to wake up without possibly facing criminal charges.

I love Doctor Who – but that has nothing to do with this post!



Unk’s been posting some gold in the form of his Transformation Character arc stuff and I couldn’t agree with him more without resorting to some very naughty and inappropriate adjectivez, so I’ll just point everyone over to his blog and give him a big QFT.
In the latest installment, part 10, he gets to what I think is the heart of all storytelling: Character = Action. Action = Plot. Therefore Character is plot — Plot is character.

I don’t know that it can be put more succinctly than that and because Unk does a lot of in-depth examination I won’t really recap it, but you should definitely give it a read. What I will do is share with you when I first started to figure out the importance of characters in storytelling- in 5th grade.

In 5th grade Nicolle had a horrible haircut, a crush on a kid named Hans (don’t tell anyone!) and a super awesome teacher named Mrs. Raynor who often had Harvey the invisible Rabbit stop by the classroom. Yes, the same Harvey you’re thinking of. Mrs. Raynor was a pretty sharp one and in addition to the hijinks of Harvey in the class, we would have a weekly story writing assignment which would be read by classmates and then the best few of the stories picked to go on display in the hallway and ‘win’ a small prize with first second, third place etc. I don’t even remember the prize or anything more specific except this one kid named Eric would always write about this crazy character Rufus and would win a lot, because all the kids thought Rufus was goddamned hilarious. I wanted to win. I wanted my story on the board in the hall and I would really try and come up with something stellar. But Rufus was a class favorite and all I could do was pay attention to the class when the finalists were read and start noting what was getting the biggest reactions. 5th Grade humor isn’t all that refined, but I remember being struck that sometimes the stories that got the best reaction would have some of the writer’s friends in them, so I decided I was going to put every student in our class in my story. Playing to the audience, sure, but how else to make your characters immediately identifiable?

My real stroke of genius was not only to just have the entire class in my story but to put in all their personality quirks, the positive things that they were associated with- so Eric was hanging out with his insane friend Rufus, adding another layer of depth to the characters and winning over each person in turn. It went over really well because each kid not only got to be characters who did things in the story but everyone in the class recognized everyone else to great amusement. I had completely won my audience before anything ever happened in the story because the characters were completely bankable. But the best part was- and the thing that maybe would have ended with me being suspended these days- was that I turned our 5th Grade classroom into a death trap. The story ended up being about how the whole class got locked in our own classroom with a bomb. People panicked, jumped out of windows, turned on each other, I even threw in some comic amnesia and I knew it was going to work. It was probably a psychologist’s wet dream, because yes, I was willing to kill the whole class to win that goddamned writing contest! Teachers and Principals too- a perfect way to win your audience- take out the resented authority figures! Hilarious at the time, and a whole lot more innocent than what I imagine 5th Grade is like these days, but I won unanimously that week.

I can’t remember any of my other writing from 5th Grade. I might have gotten on the board a few more times, but nothing as spectacular as that story and the class reaction to it. And yeah, I think it was a pretty keen moment of insight on my part.