"...press one for English"

Fuck you!

-Jim

Sweet... sweet pages.

Thirteen glorious pages completed over the long weekend!

Saturday was mostly spent watching football and checking out PAX. Sunday was a lot of sleeping and some gaming… but Monday I knocked that shit out.

I had a chance to run down some story points with a friend of mine over Thai food on Saturday. He liked the story points and said the story thus far was strong. He is pretty critical when it comes to sci-fi fantasy action stuff so coming from him that was a huge boost. I spent the next day or so visualizing the ending of the story and when Monday came around I banged it out.

It felt tremendously good but damn it wore me out. I guess expending that much brain power for that long takes its toll. Good think I engineer software for a living. Writing is easy… creating something from your mind out of thin air is an entirely exhausting process.

Go Ducks!

PAX was really cool. I had never been to a Gaming convention before and seeing all of the demo’s and even a few familiar faces from the videos and interviews online was cool. As fun as it was I doubt I will go again. $30 cover charge and huge crowds to see demo’s of stuff that I have seen on the internet isn’t going to draw me back.

Warhammer Online open beta begins this Sunday. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

My goal is to get my first ever completed draft of a screen play done by September 21st… my birthday. I am well on my way and confident I will reach the milestone.

Go Seahawks!

-Jim

Monthly Post

I suck. I need to post more. Been busy and shit… anyways…

I am failing miserably in trying to teach my five year old son football. We recently picked up Madden 09 for the Wii and he and I were playing on the same team. I was the quarterback and he was the running back. He does ok with runs up the middle but anything to the outside he would turn around and run backwards.

With my patience wearing thin after another 40 yard loss and asked him why he kept running the wrong way. “They were chasing me daddy…”

I highly recommend Madden 09 for the Wii. They did a good job of incorporating the control movements to play the game. They also have an awesome "All Play" mode which tailors the game difficulty down to the players as you go along. Good stuff.

My new favorite shows are Dexter and Weeds, both on Showtime. You can catch the first few season of these on the Watch Now feature at www.netflix.com. There are also some episodes on www.hulu.com.

Dexter is based on a set of novels by Jeff Lindsay. It’s about a man who experienced and severely traumatic event as a child and grew up a serial killer. His foster dad recognized him for what he was at a young age so he instilled a strict moral code in the boy to focus his killing urges on other murderers. The show is awesome. Dexter cleans up the streets but chopping up murderers at night and is a blood splatter expert for the Miami police by day. I recommend watching it.

The novels are good but they are all in first person so you don’t get the added story lines and drama that you do in the series.

Weeds is an odd show about a widow forced to sell weed to make ends meet for her family. Obviously the occupation comes with all sorts of drama and the writers make it compelling.

I find it interesting that both shows are about someone who has to make a choice that on the outside looks horribly wrong but on the inside it’s really all they have. Kind of makes one view the world in a few more shades of grey.

Football is finally here, the Mariners just breathed a sigh of relief. Not that we gave a shit about them anyway…

Writing is cruising along, at least a few pages every day. The rewrite is going to be brutal but I like what I have so far. I visualize the day I register my script with the WGA and hamd it too a few choice people to read for the first time.

-Jim

Getting it done!

This is the longest continuous stretch of writing that I have been on. I am approaching two weeks now of writing something each day and I feel really good about the story I am building.

A lot of my struggle comes from process. How does one go about fabricating a compelling story out of thin air? There is no right or wrong way, only what works for you.

After reading countless screenwriting books, blogs and forums I have tried several different methods. All of them have some merits but they just weren’t working for me. So after trying and failing numerous times I arrived at my current scheme and things are moving along quite nicely. It is a good feeling to see progress on my story and most importantly feel good about how it’s shaping up and where it’s going.

This go round I started with a two page short story. I revised that a few times to get a good high level idea of the story I want to tell. I then took that and translated it into a beat sheet. Blake Snyder’s beat sheet to be exact. Love him or hate him I don’t really care. I can sit down with his template and go beat for beat with any successful film made to date. It works and I like it.

As I revise the beat sheet it turns into an outline. Still using the beat sheet framework I begin to add scene blocks under each beat header and add story notes and “trailer moments” I want to include but not sure where they go yet at the end. I think I am on my fourth revision and as you can tell excited about my progress. I hope to begin writing the actual script by the end of the weekend.

I am excited, motivated and can see the scenes in my minds eye. I am having fun.

Have a good weekend.

-Jim

Multitasking

When my son brushes his teeth we have a little “two minute” hour glass timer that he flips over so he knows how long brush for. I walk into the bathroom last night and he is bent over the sink bucking like a mule and trying to brush at the same time. I ask the obvious question;

“What in the hell are you doing son?”

“I have to go to pee.”

“Put the toothbrush down and go!”

“I can’t, the timer is running.”

Mom came in and rescued us both but tipping the hourglass on its side to stop if from running. Way to go Mom!

Come to think of it I don’t think I’ve ever taken a whiz and brushed my teeth at the same time so I can’t blame the lad.

-Jim