travisezell

Just read the Amazon.com synopses for Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City, and Thomas Pynchon's new one, Inherent Vice, and honestly I thought maybe they got the two mixed up. Is Lethem writing a Pynchon novel and is Pynchon writing a Lethem novel?

Also coming out, in the new releases that look interesting: Atwood's The Year of the Flood, Denis Johnson's Nobody Move, John Wray's Lowboy, and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (which is so big I am sure to never read it, and anyway I haven't even read his "cult success" The Savage Detectives).

Books are neat.

Writing is hard. But having a goal is wonderful. I recommend it.

Tonight, I have to acquiesce to a more minor, meddlesome goal -- that of nightly sleep. I am still fighting a thing wherein hunger manifests in me as a terribly uncomfortable clenching of my chest muscles, and it's quite unpleasant. I'm theorizing that exercise may help, and tonight was supposed to be a return to gym habits, but Writing Group ran long, ideas came after, and inertia outweighed imperative.

This weekend, I may have to suck it up, brave the crowds, and get myself out there.

Good night, internet.

End of another meeting: Open needs a little more work, but the ending is stronger (finally) and I think maybe we've finally identified the problem. It's the George Washington of Talking Bears. And Good Night got cut (almost literally) in half, from 13 to 8 pages, and was better for it, until Andy pointed out (rightly so) that even if it's unintentional, there's really no way to tell that story without homosexuality being the twist/punchline, and there's no way in our short film/festival/"heterosexist" market for that not to be an annoying, hokey gimmick.

So: Open advances, and Good Night is, I think, retired. It was time. I cut it down, I made the pacing (mostly) work. Maybe (if I feel like it, tonight) it will get one last, closing edit and fix-up, and then I'm shelving it as a mostly-finished unfilmable script that was never my best work anyway. To paraphrase Andy, "Of all the things I've read of yours, this was the least interesting."

Tomorrow I meet with Colin, to "write--Valet style," as he put it. Should be good.

Debi emailed me last night/this morning with quite a proposal. She wants, essentially, to produce a film I direct, this December. She has some suggestions for cast and crew, of course--pretty much the same ones I would have--and beyond that she's open. By default Russ is involved (not that I'd have it any other way) and tomorrow the two or three of us are meeting to discuss how to proceed.

No script, no location, no cast, no crew. A shooting date (well, we're meeting to lock one down). This sounds familiar, doesn't it?

This could be a #5.

We've all been antsy as hell to be involved in something again, to make a film, so maybe this is it. I was about to suggest we start my Film Club idea, sort of a Five Obstructions Club, but maybe I ought to get the ball (or at least a ball) rolling first. Also I solved a problem with the story I mentioned some time back as the "elliptical story," also as the "gangster story" (although now it's more crime and less mob, which I'm more comfortable with, I think).

Monday and Tuesday I work at Laika, doing what I think is going to be a ridiculously easy job for decent pay, which'll be fun and nice. Monday night is the meeting with Debi and maybe Russ. Tuesday night is writing group. That means I actually don't have very much time to edit and revise Open and, if I bother, Good Night. Not to mention I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do for the 16mm Edit assignment. (I spent most of yesterday, before we all went drinking that night, staring at blank textedit documents and bashing my proverbial head against the proverbial wall, my brain completely constipated and unable to produce a single good idea.)

So. Something on the horizon? And time slipping away. Sounds about right.

Oh, and (sort of) unrelated, I love John Campbell's comics and this one is great: it's a 24-hour comic, written over a 24-hour period. He makes comics the way I've made films, and look how good he is at it. (Check out his others if you're at all curious; he's fantastic).

Open got a little better. Sort of. It went from "I can't see why Will and Annie are even together" and "every line is too bitter" to "I can't see what the crisis in Will's and Annie's relationship is anymore" and "they get along too well."

So, motivation and backstory: better. Trajectory and conflict: worse.

Good Night, aka the Drunk Girl story, is still floundering. My next goal is to literally cut that bitch down to under 5 pages. If I find the time. And to figure out why Maya's so drunk in the first place, because it makes a lot of difference to the likability of my character.

In fact, so far neither of my main characters are scoring a lot of likable points right now. I guess that's a common problem for me, the protagonist. But, progress is progress. Russ said nice things about it. That's a big step.

Ahh.

Open and Good Night both need so much work.

Which is why we have Writing Group. So that's good. Because before I didn't know what needed work in the stories. But, I will say, Open is further from being solid than I'd hoped... probably.

So it goes.

Melissa sent me an article that's pretty cool, Wong Kar-Wai interviewing Tony Leung.

Unrelated: tonight is Writing Group. We're going to have it in just about an hour, over at Colin's and my place. I'm bringing both stories because I don't know if anyone else is bringing anything. Open (which hasn't changed drastically; this draft is my attempt to not reorder the entire thing... which will be the next step) and Good Night (the working title of the "Drunk Girl" story... it had to be called something).

Man, what boring fucking titles!