Too busy, which is good...

Whirlwind day. A job in NYC came through for next week (talk about last minute) and two others look solid...one in Berkeley that'll be a part of history, another in NYC, again. All on top of the one outside Boston. Then there's one in Chicago that's beginning to look really iffy, because the company pushing it has gone on radio silence. I don't even know what part of the city it's in so I can't work up an estimate.

Once everything was done and dinner over, I worked on APoS...and it's taking a deeper turn than I expected but do want. What I'm now building on is Brendan's emotional reactions to what's happening to him, be it good or bad...and all of it has led to being very bad. In the chapter I just completed, he's brutally beaten for dating Vangie and suggesting he'd like to marry her. In Texas. In the middle 70s. In a part of the country that has one of the biggest chapters of the KKK. Not smart.

He's also begun to see the parallels between Derry's situation and Houston's attitudes. Is seeing betrayal in what happened to him, because it looks very much like he was set up to be attacked. Which sends him spinning into a deeper sense of loss and confusion than he's ever had. His reaction after seeing Joanna caught in the fire was psychic horror and brought about an emotional and mental collapse. But he's stronger, now, and is trying to make sense of it all.

As Everett, his gay friend tells him, he may be just 19 but he's "an old man in a young man's body." He's seen death and destruction lead to more death and destruction and already knows it's just a vicious cycle dragging everyone down to their doom. And try as he might, he cannot seem to break free of it. Now he carries scars that will come back to haunt him, both physically and emotionally.

Something I can finally see, looking back over my scripts, is how I focused more on the emotional content of them and worried less about the action aspects. William Goldman once famously said, "Screenplays are structure," and I understand why. They're the blueprints for the film. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the screen, kind of thing. But I never could get past the deliberate simplicity of that. I think that's why actors tended to love my scripts...I gave them content to play, not just Save the Cat numbers to fill in.

Something like the Paint by Numbers sets toy stores sell, and which I could never get to look right.