Screenwriting 101

I know very little about screenwriting. I'm not letting it deter me, as I suspect that most people who try this game don't know shit about it. Or they know all the tricks and techniques that someone like Robert McKee sells them. I ain't exactly knocking the latter approach, but right now I'm working with the sort of hubris that comes from a person who has seen all the Coen Brothers and Tarantino films and also happens to have a masters degree in creative writing. I just gotta kill a character in a darkly comic way and I'm in, right?

Anyway, as I've experienced in my also-quite-brief time trying to write for theatre, it's tough to know exactly what direction the script is going to take once it gets into the hands of the folks I intend to collaborate with. I don't know what we'll have to work with in the way of location, actors, etc. So in one rare fit of "I must write a stage direction here" -- something I focus on with the same intensity I reserve for drinking Squirt (see previous post) -- I have written this stage direction based on my complete ignorance of just where this thing is going to be shot:

They continue to drink and finish their whiskies. Time passes. Joe plays pool (or darts, shuffleboard, touchscreen, sticks his dick in a hole in the wall -- whatever the location has to offer).

And that, my friends, is the kind of writing that tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loans and a small alcohol problem can buy you.

Epiphany

Is not precisely what I just experienced.

However, I did make a rational adjustment to my life-situation here. I was sitting down to write after a delicious meal at the MexiCuboRican restaurant down the street. I had a bistec encebollado sandwich with tostones and red beans. For whatever reason, I also purchased a 20 oz Squirt which I have been trying with limited success to suck down -- I tend to drink sugary sodas very rarely. And it occurred to me: Why the hell would I drink Squirt when I have half a bottle of Scotch here?

And so, with my Scotch and cigar, I am going to finish the first draft of this screenplay tonight.

After I watch/listen to this awesome video:



Fuck yeah.

Sausages for Ryan settlement

That's the beginning of the message on my Google Voice this morning.

I am starting a new program. A plan. A commitment, if you will. This is one of those obvious "I always said I ought to do it this way" things, where I never actually started to work that way. Starting last night and continuing from now on, every evening I'm blocking off a couple of hours purely for writing. Every single goddamn book, advice column, or pompous asshole who gets to read his or her work in front of an audience suggests working in such a way -- or at least to use a relatively similar method for organizing one's writing time. Nobody says "Just write whenever." Because that's just stupid.

It boils down to my asking, what is the difference between those people and me? They all have books, advice columns, and they get to pompously read their work in front of an audience, while lately I just sit around eating fried chicken and playing Xbox. I don't really ever want to write a book on method or style, and I definitely don't want to write advice columns, but I do want to get in front of an audience and pompously read my work. My published work, preferably. Yet in the past, I have mainly resorted to last-minute scrambles to produce writing, even for those pompous readings. And that worked for me to varying degrees while I was a student. But now that I am an "adult" who has to balance a career, family, mortgage, dead-end job, and strong desire to watch the MLB Network and The Daily Show, there's really not much of an excuse for me not to be writing every goddamn day.

For now, it's going to be fairly open -- I won't necessarily restrict myself to working on a single project at a time, though I think that if I begin to lose focus, I'll have to kick myself in the ass to pick things up. I'm getting back to work on the screenplay that I need to get written and hopefully shot this summer. And then the book. That seems to be a good way to comfortably ease my way back into the game. And if a blog post or some other kind of writing work has to enter into my block of writing time, then that's fine. As long as I am writing something, every day. Like I said at the beginning: obvious.

Time out for grammar

I don't do much work at work. But when I do it, I do it right. For instance, I have to send an email to our company's accountant. So I just spent an extra ten minutes reading up on mass nouns vs. count nouns (and from there, I moved on to splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and possessives for words ending in S). I'm only doing this in order to decide whether to write "The data aren't in the spreadsheet" or "The data isn't in the spreadsheet," which at the end of the day, will turn out to be a completely trivial and meaningless decision. But I still haven't chosen. This may be a good time to get some coffee (mass noun). But first I have to wash my cup (count noun).

After a useless trip to an academic "career fair"

Perhaps I have the wrong view of my life. Lately (like, for the last two years) I've been really stressed about how ridiculously underemployed and impoverished I feel. I have tried with varying degrees of seriousness to get a better job, but it's not working out. And that whole depressing way of looking at myself is really bumming me out -- I feel like a loser for having an advanced degree and a shitty job. But there seem to be just too many barriers to the development of anything resembling a "career." So maybe the choice I need to make is to say "fuck it." I don't mean this in a suicidal way, but rather, a smoke lots of pot, write a shit-ton, and just relax about the various details grown ups generally worry about. Like repaying debt. Maybe I should be a slacker. A bohemian artsy wastoid. A hippy. A burnout.

It's not that I want to give up, or that I'm really even giving anything up. I'm simply adopting a new worldview. Today, I am anyway. I'll probably still apply for jobs here and there. But I think I might not stress about it so much.

I feel better already. And I've even done two hundred words worth of writing about it. All I need now is a reliable weed dealer.

Procrastination is...

I'll write more on this later.

Here's an honest assessment

I have never had a "real" job. Sure, I've worked in plenty of places. I was in the army for a bit. Bartended. Waited tables. Shelved books. Now I zap the zits off rich kids' digital faces in Adobe Photoshop. I don't get paid shit to do it. But I did go to grad school, so maybe I am a late bloomer. That big, bad-ass $28,000 a year and relatively affordable health insurance is just around the corner. I can feel it.

Today I read that some Chicago aldermen want to the city government to guarantee O'Hare foodservice workers an hourly wage of $11.03. I'm all for it, being a working man myself. I think everybody deserves a living wage. Of course, this is just a little bit more than I actually earn per hour. And by little bit, I'm talking about more than the three cents. So, any day now.

Because I earn such a small wage, I don't pay my creditors. See, it was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin on the porch with my family, singin and dancin down in Mississippi. I come from a low point in the middle class--or the "working class," really. My mom wasn't addicted to crack or anything, my parents are still married, and they even made me read books when I was growing up. And not just any books. I had to read Gulliver's Travels and shit like that. That's a real serious book, for those of you not in the know. I did not have a troubled or poverty-stricken childhood. But I did learn to do without.

Until... I got to college where I learned to use student loan money and credit cards to pay for rent, groceries, gas, beer, scotch, tattoos, and motorcycle shit, among other things. And forget about the army. My GI Bill cash went down the same hole.

I did this, like many, under the naive assumption that I would immediately enter the workforce after college and be blessed with a nice, comfortable $40,000 or so per year job. Even with my English degree from a mid-tier state school.

So I applied to graduate schools. And I got into one. A damn fine one, actually, with a name you'd recognize. My expectations grew, maybe I'd get a $60K job right after school. That's what everybody else does coming out of this place, right? Even with an MFA in creative writing? Still, I took on more debt.

And here I am: nearly two years out of graduate school and quickly approaching 30 years old. I make ten bucks an hour at a job I hate at a level inversely proportional to the level at which I feel underpaid and underemployed. And I get a dozen phone calls a day regarding my various defaults and past-dues and other nonsense. Naturally, I don't answer the phone if I don't have the number programmed in my contacts. And recently, I got the Google Voice. It's nice, I guess, though I don't make many calls with my computer. What I do use is the visual voicemail. And boy, does it produce some winners. Unfortunately, I don't save them.

Tonight's is the best I've ever seen though:

This message is for the call with Pioneer credit recovery and it's about your past due, Death

And really, that's all there is to it. This is the end, my friend. We've gone beyond debtor's prison. We're to the point of death squads marching down the street, taking out anyone in default. Which doesn't surprise me really. At any rate, I should probably seek out some parasitic credit consolidation company to help me out.

What harm could it do? After all, my death is past due.

At work

Yesterday, we all came back to work. Usually after a snowstorm, the tiny parking lot here is cleared.

This is the machine that the mysterious snow-clearing guy uses to plow the drive.

And from another angle:

If you can't tell, the machine that the mysterious guy uses to clear the snow from our drive is presently stuck in the snow. And it has been since the blizzard ended on Wednesday. I might be irritated by a situation like this, if I were driving to work, but I have been taking the L. So I can simply sit back and enjoy the irony. Plus I got a solid half-page of writing done on the train this morning, which is nice. Now to the task of syncing it across the various cloud apps I use at work and at home. And speaking of the train, I didn't get a picture, but I will reproduce for you the sleeping asshole I saw this morning:

I think, at least this morning, that CTA works best as a goofy internet acronym for "See-the-Ass." I draw pretty good, eh?

Update: I guess the email w/images thing didn't work out for me. I'll figure it out some other time.

Snow day

Last night it took me about two and a quarter hours to get home from work:

This dude was having a real hard time riding his bike in the 40 mph winds and blowing snow. Still, it took me so long to get my camera phone to take a picture that he was almost past the car I was in by the time the shutter snapped.

kv

This White Castle sign said something really funny about a sack or something. But it got blown out, so we'll never know exactly what the puerile joke was.

Today I am pretty hungover, tired, sore, and somewhat inspired. I just shoveled a metric shit-ton of snow around our building, and I think I left my lower back somewhere outside in the snow, because right now there is only pain where it used to be. But it was a great community experience. Dozens of people were out helping each other shovel snow in the alley and on the street. A guy with a snowblower came through and removed a ton of the shit from behind my building. It was an inspiring neighborly experience. Not often do people around here get together and help each other out like this. A guy who said he'd lived on this block for ten years suggested that he'd never seen anything like this, the cooperation. It was an impressive effort, and I'm grateful, since it was a lot of damn snow.

Speaking of good neighbors, there's these dipshits on my street who own this busted-up early 90s Honda Civic that looks as though it was culled together at Pull-a-Part. These assholes, for some stupid fucked-up reason, think they have something worth stealing. So they have the most sensitive car alarm in the world. The thing goes off every time a car with a busted muffler drives by or whenever a pigeon shits on the hood. Usually it's going off all night long. Today my wife and I watched them try to drive this three-and-a-half foot tall car through two feet of snow. And let me tell you, it was funny as hell. They had to get five of their buddies out in the street to push it because it kept getting stuck. Justice for those tools.

But now it's nearly 7 pm and I still haven't gotten the writing done that I meant to do today. Same story as usual, I suppose. I have plenty of time left to work tonight on it anyway.

First, this:

This makes me laugh a bit.

Admittedly

I am a little drunk right now. But I do want to say that this storm going on is pretty awesome because: THUNDERBLIZZARD.

There was actual thunder and lightning in this storm. Snow and lightning? Most metal thing I've ever seen. And snow "inside" my apartment. That is also metal:

This is a shitty picture from my phone. You may not see or understand what is happening here. But the point is that the fucking snow is actually almost inside my apartment now. That is how cheaply I live. More tomorrow. SNOW DAY!

Bowling and blizzards

Tonight after work, we gathered together for a nice night of bowling. I am not particularly good at bowling, but I am usually good enough to average around 110-120. This is an abysmal score, but when you play against mostly people who are happy with a 90, it's at least somewhat satisfying. Anyway, it's weird to hang out with folks you wouldn't normally hang out with and to have it be completely organized by the people themselves who don't normally hang out together. It's sort of like a gathering of the nerds. Things get tense around the office, because most of us hate each other. So to get together outside of work voluntarily shows a kind of strange internal desire to get along and make the best of a bad situation that I haven't seen since I was in the army. In grad school, when we hated each other, we sure as hell didn't go bowling together. Same thing applies for every restaurant I ever worked in. But when I was in the army, we always found ways to get along and to get through the most asinine situations. And it always felt like this. A bunch of nerds hanging around together. It's almost like you'd be embarrassed if anyone from outside the circle walked in and saw you with these people. Yet there's something positive in it, if, just for a day or two, you can get along with your coworkers better.

Also, we are set for a snowpocalypse beginning tomorrow night. The amazing thing about all of this weather is that the professional journalist who wrote this article actually got away with this:

Of course, winter weather forecasts for Chicagoans can be emotional roller coasters, a tense ride up to a promised "worst storm ever" often anticlimaxing with a gentle dip down to a meteorological disappointment. In this case, the dip appears anything but gentle.

On what fuckin planet is "anticlimax" a verb? As though you could say something like "Yeah, I was boning this drunk girl and right before I was gonna get off, she got sick and puked all over me, so I anticlimaxed." Come on, journalists. You're supposed to do better than that. Save the weird verbifications for the poets. Also, do not use the word "verbification."

Anyway, we could get a couple feet of snow, and we're stocked up on frozen foods and other groceries, so I should be able to get some good writing done if I skip out on work after the buckets of snow fall on us all. I'll update as the snowmageddon ensues.

Blackout

On my drive home from work tonight, I was armed with great intentions about writing. I would come up with some silly diversion to post here and then put in some solid work on the screenplay. To go with dinner, I had picked up some bread and arugula and a six-pack of some relatively unimpressive winter white ale, which doesn't really make seasonal sense to me. I guess if you have a stockpile of wheat and oranges in the winter time, then why not. Still, witbier seems like a warm-weather style to me.

Anyway, I was pulling up to one of Chicago's infamous six-corner intersections, and everything went dark.

Now, traffic at these treacherous sites always looks something like this:

Gridlock.

These are busy main roads in the city, and you're almost always likely to contend with CTA bus traffic, insane cab drivers, fearless pedestrians, and loathsome panhandlers. But when the stoplights go out, it quickly devolves into something like this:

Boom!

After I ran over a dozen schoolchildren (why they were out on the street at 7 pm during a blackout, who knows), and got into a gun-battle with some Latin Kings and a few well-armed nuns from the Polish Catholic church around the corner (in spite of this city's stringent ant-gun laws!), I plowed my way through to my house. Where everything was equally dark.

It seemed as though the best laid plans had come unstuck. I sat in the dark with my wife for a half hour waiting for the lights came back on. During that time, we discussed the various possible causes of the darkness. Armageddon. Alien invasion. That we have not yet paid our outrageous electric bill ($180, wtf ComEd?) for the past month. It could be anything. Well, actually I insisted that it was just some random occurrence, and it turned out that I was right. But that's not much fun, is it?

We finally got every candle in the apartment lit, and then the lights came back on. We made some dinner and the world has returned to normal.

Except, I never got around to working on the screenplay. Ain't that a bitch?

Well,

I didn't do so good at blogging from work last week. I need to find a way to break up my schedule at the office and manage my time better. Here's what it looks like now:

If only I had made this pie chart at work, I could have added "Making ridiculous pie charts" to my workflow.

So it's pretty clear I should manage my time a little differently. I should be working on my script and writing occasional blog posts. 

Anyway, I have at least succeeded tonight in not fucking around so much and actually doing something that is some semblance of progress toward a goal. And by not fucking around so much, I mean specifically, that I haven't been smoking pot and throwing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it. Or not catching it. Or anything like that.

Email test

This is just a test post. I have to find alternate methods, since I can't blog properly from work.

Italics and bold and shit ( ~@~ ).

And a link to... Google.

In addition...

So one of the purposes of this blog when I started it about a year ago was to track where I was going with my writing. That's one of those New Year's resolution paths that we all go down. Or most of us, even those of us who are too cool to admit that we only think about improving ourselves around January 1. Anyway, today (not while I was at work, I promise) I started working on a screenplay somewhere in my Google Docs, which is the best cloud app I can get to from where I work. The boss blocks a lot of the web (including Dropbox, can you believe it?) to keep us productive on real work shit. Thanks, boss.

And I know, I know. Screenplay ain't what I went to school for, it ain't what I want to write ultimately, it ain't even in my top three genres of interest. But I do have some friends and colleagues who are film/video people, and I have gotten a bit of encouragement to give it a try, so I am doing it. My goal over the next month or so is to come up with a script for a short film. Then, most likely, I will return to my memoir project and get a book written about all the stuff I didn't do in Iraq. I don't really like writing nonfiction, but from a market standpoint, it's really the best thing I can do as far as short(er)-term long-form writing goes. Whatever that means.The script, however, is a short story that I never wrote, but it's a story idea that I like, and I think it can look good on film. So that's what's on my plate right now. Somebody hold me to it.

This is the best thing I have ever seen

...well, it's the best thing I've seen today.


EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

This music video is artsy as hell. If you can't enjoy topless women with assault rifles or... sparklers... you can't enjoy life. Plus it's rife with theoretical concerns about metaphysics and semiotics or something like that. I'm pretty sure it is anyway.

Hi.

I am going to start sharing pictures. My lovely wife gave me a Holga for my birthday, which is the camera-of-choice for hipsters everywhere. Though I suppose real hipsters would go for something more obscure, like some piece of shit toy camera that doesn't even have a name with Latin characters. Like the 牛阴茎. 


Weird.


Anyway, I am continuing to be detached from internet life. Maybe this will change things, but I really am only about a half-step away from completely deleting my Facebook persona. 

A famous culinarian.

I am red.

This dude is a famous filmmaker.

Famous writers.

Just lookin famous.

Famous movie stars.

As is probably apparent, I am not particularly adept at scanning, cropping, and editing my negatives. Plus the machine I used is kind of old and kooky. Just say the half-assed job I did with it is part of the lo-fi idiom of Lomography. Which they obviously are very good at marketing.

Anyway, these are just some party pics. They make my life look exciting. I do have a project in mind for the camera. More will come from that later. But for now I am sort of watching the Bears decimate the Seahawks. Unsurprising.