Waiting...waiting...

Seems I've spent my whole life waiting.  Waiting to hear what my schedule will be fore the next four weeks.  Whether or not I'll be in NYC packing books.  When I'm headed to California for either the Pasadena Book Fair or San Francisco.  When I'll get all my feedback back so I can get to work on draft 3 of LD.  If Amazon's really going to republish my books like they said they were.  Will I ever make money at this writing crap?  On and on and on.  And it wears on you.

So I worked more on "Crazy Is" -- and it's back to being a scream, again, albeit in a weird way.  I now have 5600 words and no idea how long it's going to be.  One character -- the ex-con -- has softened himself at the beginning but now is back to being spooky.  His interrogator presented herself as one thing and now might be another, but has yet to be truthful and honest about anything she's done or said.  And this one is going to mess with gender identity.  A lot.  And the hell with how sex has been politicized.

I watched the rest of "Pornography, a Thriller" and somebody needed to be told that to carry off a David Lynch style film, you at least need some style like David Lynch.  And understanding.  This movie violated its own truth so many times in so many ways, it was like someone just wrote a bunch of scenes, chucked them into a blender and formed that into a screenplay, and don't worry about connecting anything because obscurity is our friend.

To me the purest example of dishonesty in a movie is when someone is being chased and attacked.  If the victim just presses back against a wall and lets the attacker come up to them and grab them and then somehow be able to stick a needle into them and inject some kind of drug and all that crap -- it's bullshit. It's the truest revelation that the filmmaker is lazy or just doesn't care.

There's nothing new or unusual about this sort of stupid moment.  I remember seeing "The Spiral Staircase" on TV years ago, about a girl driven mute by a tragedy who's being stalked by a serial killer.  It was made in 1946 and has Ethyl Barrymore and Dorothy Malone in it and nice big production values, but early on the movie lost me because when one girl is strangled, she holds her hands up in a beautiful pose that is backlit and elegant and meaningful and nonsense.  She'd fight like a maniac as she's being choked to death.  But that's not pretty and way too real.

The same thing goes for gun violence.  On TV and in movies, the hero fires one shot from his pistol and kills the bad guy, and people think pistols are really that accurate.  They aren't.  Rifles are, but pistols can send bullets all over the place.  That's why so many innocent bystanders get killed in drive-bys and why some maniac firing 30 bullets into a crowd only hits half his targets even though he's in the middle of the crowd.

Hmm...weird rant going on here.  I think I need to shower, shave and go to bed.  And dream of sugarplums that look like Chris Evans.  And get past a part of "Crazy Is" where the ex-con talks about just wanting to be with someone for a little bit.  Someone who'll have his back and he can feel safe with. It's affecting me weirdly, this story.

Say...Brendan...is this feeling of need a test run for Evangelyne?