A sometimes half-arsed record of the process of writing in its' variegated many forms.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Drawing a straight line

Alright, so as of that last drunken post, it's clear that I'm running in circles a little bit, and I've got get my head right. Coincidentally or perhaps omenly, my crappy old computer has finally had a major hardware malfunction. So, it occurred to me that some non-wired time might be just what the doctor ordered. Take a month or so to clear the old head and get out in the sunshine. Try to get a grip on directions and steps towards goals and all that kind of nonsense. It's good to unplug once and a while.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

the update

I've got fragments of success with the once again probably too many irons in the fire process, so I thought I'd do a quick rundown of what's the what.
To start I've just finished the first act of Eddie the Grouch, which actually went fairly well. There was a roundabout comparision of Hemingway and Chechkov, and it ran fairly deep while still remaining conversational. Eddie blows up at Harold, the director of Lilly's play The Seagull, over his lack of appreciation of Hemingway. Well, actually we need to build the psychology of that a little more. Somehow maybe the Harold/Lilly, director/actor, relationship should be made more explicit. Maybe she is not necessarily awed of him but respects him, and Eddie of course feels she just pities him. The blow-up, as did Sal's in The Coffee Shoppe, feels forced and just a way to have something happen, which in a sense they both are. So little action occurs in either of these scripts, but...
I reactivated Darwin's Child last night with great success. I brought in a quick car chase in which the French Canadian Woman, who is completely unaware of the shadow conspiracy, then has to evade a bunch of goons in black audi's while pissed as hell at the American Man for getting her into this shit. It's a good scene, and I brought forward all of the characters that were introduced in the last act of the first draft of the script. I'm not sure if I now want to have two twin pregnant women because of the babysitter twins from Planet Terror or not, but it's a cool idea, so...I've written a fairly good little expository section before their safehouse is attacked and we get the first taste of the AM's genetically superior strength and agility. I can't decide if their should be another quick car chase before they make it to the cargo ship headed for Japan.
I've got some good ideas for FCW too. I've said here that I really want to make her a mythic character, well all of them, but especially her. Over the course of the three films she ultimately comes forward and takes the leading role in not saving the world from the apocalypse but helping to give (I want to say the forces of good here, but that's way too manichean) the survivors a chance to start over.
I could spend all day running out the storylines on some of this stuff sometimes, but given that I'm feeling the writing bug, I should continue to push on those two just now.

There is just one other little thing, and I'm just gonna start it here and get more on it in el futura. I've been thinking about the Masters program I want to get into, which is an interdisciplinary program called Critical and Creative thinking. It has the unique feature that they have a design yr own degree option, which...well, to be fair that can be a dangerous concept for me because when I did that in undergrad the project got so far out of hand that there was no way the whole thing wouldn't blow up in my face, which it did as in enough credits to graduate with a triple major but no degree because yr senior project was a fricking PHD dissertation. Every advisor I ever had as well as almost everyone I even knew casually told me I was nuts, and as it turns out they were all right, but I've gotten away from myself here.
Here's where I'm trying to get. I'd been offhandedly putting together a program in my head. The triangle I was originally looking at was art, spirituality, and mental health and illness. These were essentially the corners of my undergrad project. Hold on, just to prove my insanity sometimes and then I'm gonna break off this rambling nonsense for another post, I'm gonna post what was tentative title of my undergraduate senior project. Your gonna laugh.

A neuropsychohistoricosocio-cultural and philosophical look at the relevance of spirituality and art in efficient human cognition and it's relation to the extremes of neurochemical variability

and I wasn't being ironic at all.