Day Zero

120 hours of vacation time… Two years of planning… One contest later… it all comes down to tomorrow.

For the next three weeks, 12 hours a day, I will be immersed in storytelling. In the room with some of the most knowledgeable and recognized industry people right here in Seattle. Like a kid the night before the first day of school I am nervous, excited, apprehensive, eager, curious and a thousand other emotions that have made sleeping this week a bit of a chore.

What do I intend to bring out of this experience?

I want to know if I have what it takes to be a storyteller. I want to be able to take the ideas out of my head and get them on the page. I want what I put on the page to move the reader. I want to meet others like myself and learn from their struggles. I want to be a better storyteller.

See you tomorrow, that is all.

End of line...

Spoiling the shit out TRON so if you haven’t seen it stop now.

The movie starts with the Disney Castle all lit up in the TRON style which is awesome. It sets the bar high right off the bat then bangs it’s head on it.

The visuals in this movie are awesome. The action sequences are pretty cool. The light cycles and planes are beyond awesome.

Daft Punk score. I will definitely own this.

My Issues:

There are shades of Star War slash Jedi stuff that kind of make me wince. Some of the costumes and weapons are too similar.

This story feels like fragments of several story lines developed over the production of the movie and they mashed them all together.

Somehow, for some reason, Flynn’s son is brought into the “Grid”. We find out CLU is the one that brought him in and that is it. That story never plays out. Presumably CLU does this to draw Flynn out but that only happens because the son chooses to go out and the father has to follow. Reactive, not proactive.

Quorra is some special, self manifested program. That whole story line was great and I thought the movie was headed in the right direction finally. No. With flashbacks and boring expositional dialogue they puke out the story of that whole mess and that’s it.

CLU creates this massive army and we never see it in action.

There are hints of some insurgency that never gets explored.

WTF was up with ZUES channeling some combination of the Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Jim Carrey’s The Riddler. What the what?

The TRON story line pisses me off the most. The build it up only to let it fizzle at the bottom of the ocean. So frustrating. The movie is called TRON damn it. You can’t even resolve that story line of the namesake? Weak.

This movie is not about video games as it should have been.

The hero brings his physical skills into the Grid instead of learning new skills and using them. This was supposed to be about a geek manifesting greatness. Some spoiled rich kid is not my Hero.

What security guard would walks out on a crane? Come on. So disappointed.

That is all.

-Jim

I suck

I suck. Seriously, one post in three months?

Still writing though. When I have news I will post it. Hang in there fan(s).

That is all.

-Jim

Yeah... yeah.

I suck.

A blog post once a month? I can do better than that. So to you fearless reader(s) I promise to do at least two posts a month. Baby steps.

So… Classified Prime. A story I’ve been tossing around for awhile. A retired military man seeks some peace and quiet in a rural town but I DON”T THINK SO! Of course his past is going to come back to haunt him and threaten to destroy everything. But wait! Is there a glimpse of redemption somewhere in the impending doom? We will see!

I am doing some research for this story. Reading a book on several special forces branches as well as a book on the psychological and physiological effects of combat on soldiers. This should give you a hint as to what is about to go down in the tiny, peaceful, but way out of the ordinary town of Red Ridge.

My next story (After C:P) in the queue is a awesome. I can’t wait to get into it. Again it’s going to be a lot of research but I love that shit. Lets just say the human race is in deep shit. Ever the underdog, us scrappy humans are going have to bring our A game to get out of this mess. Awesomeness.

I might have to sneak in a another run on Air Bears at my wife’s request. She likes the story but as with all newb writing it needs a lot of work.

Met some awesome people at a screening of The Machinist followed by an interview of the director Brad Anderson by Warren Etheredge. The networking is really starting to pick up. All it takes is a hello and a handshake. Easier for some than others.

That is all.

-Jim

How being a finalist crushed me.

I learned a valuable lesson after placing in TheFilmSchool’s short screenplay contest. Everything that is wrong with my stories suddenly slapped me in the face.

I submitted three stores. Click the download link on the right to check them out. Of those three, the one I liked the least placed. “No Such Things.”

After mulling it over for a few weeks and conversing with my wife it suddenly dawned on me why that one was special. Then my other stories started trickling into my mind, and everything that is wrong with them became glaringly obvious.

They are a series of events. Damn cool events but just the same. They are gauntlets that I am running my characters through. That’s fine. But it’s not good enough. It needs to be about the character themselves before we give a shit that they are even going through the gauntlet in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, I could link a hundred books telling me this very thing. But until you see it, and realize it, and live it, and do it, it makes no sense and you don’t really get it.

When someone asks you what your story is about, how do you answer? Is the story about a boy and his car that’s not really a car? Or is about giant transforming robots? Which story do you want to see? Transformers rocked. Transformers II was polished turd.

The good news. I get it now.

The bad news. Holy shit do I have a lot of work to do.

I just finished my second rewrite of I.F.O. I was hoping that it would be done so I could turn it into the guild. Wrong. Last month if someone were to ask me what I.F.O. is about I would have something like; “It’s about a boy who becomes trapped on a UFO.” Today I would answer that question with; “It’s a story about a strained father-son relationship. It just so happens it’s set aboard an alien spacecraft under siege.” That’s not a polished description but it’s a damn sight better than the first sentence.

What is Air Bears about? The dawn of the age of the flying car? Or a comic book geek living a dream only to see it come crashing down…pun intended?

Is Rebooting Andy about a gamer who games to much or a young married couple being driven apart by his gaming descend into a tit for tat game of extremes? I need to work on this one.

Bottom line, I couldn’t be happier. Above that line, I am pissed that I spent hours building those stories only to have them be flawed at the core.

Silver lining, I would not be where I am today had I not written that shit.

That is all.

-Jim