Brief Notes

I will be 35 tomorrow.

So many clocks are ticking its making my head spin. A good portion of the writing community seems to think that I am too old to start a writing career. My hair has noticeable gray (thanks sweetie). And to top it all off I can’t find a decent MMO to play to save my life. It feels like the entire gaming industry is incapable of an original thought and afraid to pop that Blizzard tit out of their mouth and quit making World of Warcraft clones.

Writing is going well despite my age. After frustrating iterations of attempting to write off of weak outlines I went back to square one. Grabbed a well known beat sheet example and filled that out. Yes it was Blake Snyders. I’ve met the guy personally and I like him and his approach. I then expanded the beat sheet into scene headings, added a few descriptions, included some notes on twists I wanted to include and a list of characters. I jotted down some general settings/location notes on some of the scenes to get me thinking about where all this takes place and started writing.

What a fricken difference let me tell ya. I’ve read quite a few screenwriting books up to this point; my night stand is piled high with them. Until you start doing it yourself, fail, and then go back and tweak-merge-adopt-adapt-modify a system that works for you, writing isn’t a whole lot of fun. It’s really is a breath of fresh air and the wheels are really starting to turn.

I also began preliminary writings on the other projects I want to do. Wordplay and John August are big on having several projects in some stage of development. I took that to heart and off I went creating a high level beat sheet of my “techie comedy” and a short story piece on my sci-fi space adventure. With three stories at various stages and my “primordial soup” notebook full of ideas and tidbits writing is constantly in my head and it’s a blast.

I also find myself really excited when I find a good title. Some people like to leave that open till later. I find myself really wrapping myself around a good clever title and it seems to drive me to write and keeps things exciting.

Most of these are newbish revelations to the pros but like any job, career or hobby you really don’t get it until you work things out for yourself. It is nice to be pointed in the right direction by a very helpful and giving scribosphere.

A few other thoughts….

Once again the Mariners suck. Thank god my wife bought tickets to early season games when they were still worth the price of admission.

The Seahawks killed me last week. Hasselbeck and Alexander decided to have a team meeting on the Arizona 37 yard line with less than 2 minutes to go, and dropped the fricken ball a which point the rest of the game went like this:
Denial - Oh hell no that just didn’t happen.
Anger - What the fuck are you ass clowns doing? Son of a bitch are you kidding me?
Bargaining - Is there a flag? Call time out? Do over? Mike, say something!
Depression- Fuck, the season is over.
Acceptance - Who’s playing the late game?

After I slipped into a semi-coma on the couch from being blown through the grief fire hose my son came up to me, patted me on the head and told me it would be ok. It was.

If you value your cuddle time or being able to roll over and spoon your wife/husband/whatever, do NOT buy a sleep number bed. The bed is split into two sides where in each person can set the firmness of his/her/it’s side using a control. As comfortable as this is, any attempt to traverse to the other side of the bed to see your hopefully better half is problematic. Let me explain.

I have a fairly high sleep number which means my mattress if firm, i.e. pumped up with air. My wife sleeps on a cloud thus her side of the mattress is deflated quite a bit. I literally fall of a fucking cliff anytime I cross midfield. So now I am wedged in between my mattress and the wife who is elbowing the shit out of me to get the fuck back on my side. Inversely my lovely wife has to clip caribiners to the headboard and use a rope system to get onto my side of the bed. In the event that one of us makes it successfully onto each others sleep space the sleep number is all screwed up because it doesn’t adjust for two people. So you’re together yet bitchy and uncomfortable. That’s hot.

For added difficulty have your 4 year old son constantly fuck with your controller so you truly never know what setting your bed will be at when you get in. There is good news however! Hours of fun can be had if you wait until your partner begins to set their number. As the mattress is inflating/deflating to reach the desired firmness secretly place a leg or appendage on their side of the bed thus screwing with the pressure calibration. They will spend hours tossing and turning and readjusting their number. I advise you do this only on the weekend.

Thanks for reading.

-Jim