Begone 2015, you bitch...

This was not a stellar year for me except in one way -- I got a couple drafts of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor done and some solid feedback so I can make a good final draft. Oh, and I wrote a vicious screenplay called Carli's Kills that I am pumping like crazy. I'm even doing the totally obnoxious, you-should-never-do-that thing of suggesting Katee Sackhoff and Alex Minsky in the leads for it.

As Starbuck in BSG, she held her own with any man, even when she was being vulnerable. And she looks like she can handle herself, not like some twig making believe she's kung-fu queen.

He's a real goofy character who sounds a bit drunk when he talks, thanks to the injuries he suffered when his leg was blown off...and he plays guitar, which is part and parcel of the whole story.

I like the dichotomy of them both -- she looks like sunshine and light but winds up being a very black force; he's dark and brooding but turns out to be decency personified. I think their love scenes would be hotter than hot.

I've already sent it out a couple dozen times and, so far, only have two refusals. I may get 2 dozen on Monday, but...

I'm still thinking about the restructure of UG because it just won't let go. Not sure why. It would be a lot harder to write...and I keep thinking of it as a film project. Guess my subconscious is fighting me tossing aside film and the dream of directing. But if I had about $30,000 I could shoot it.

And therein lies the problem of my brain, this year. Bouncing around like a friggin' ping-pong ball in a small boxed in a ship caught in a storm. Even when I slow down to a few hops, the waves crash and against the walls do I go, again. It's tiring.

And fun.

So here's to 2016 being the year I stop bouncing off walls and settle into a corner to plot my next dangerous project.

What if...

I had an odd thought hit me. What if I took the relationship building between Devlin and Reg and made  Underground Guy into a long dialogue taking place over one night? Drop the serial killer stuff. Drop the involvement of a Middle Eastern Prince who's sexually fluid. Instead, make it about a man who uses sexual violence to provide him with a form of control connecting with the heterosexual man he almost raped but didn't, and who shatters his walls without meaning to.

Talk about making it a completely different story; I'm not sure why I'm even considering this. I have probably ⅔ of the book written. There are some sections that need to be joined together, a couple of bridges to build, but that's it. Yet what I did the other night between Dev and Reg tangles gentle around me, like ghostly smoke from a candle.

Could this be me avoiding the reality of a book that's turning into a novel long enough to rival the Bible in length? Again. Am I trying to find a lazy way out? I dunno. Maybe. I'm not averse to avoidance.

Years and years ago, I saw My Dinner With Andre, which is just a conversation between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, two men involved in theater and film as actors, writers, and producers. It was fascinating to sit in a theater and be entertained by two talking heads, but it was mainly on an intellectual level. I never even considered trying to do something like it.

But then I went through a period where I was heavy into Willem De Kooning's abstract-expressionist art while also loving the portraits work of John Singer Sargent...who is his polar opposite. I was living in Houston and had just pulled myself away from a hideous filmmaking experience, and I remembered MDWA and thought about working up a low-key project between a young reporter and a reclusive artist famous for his abstract expressionism but who had disavowed it. Something pure to remove the taint of what I'd been through and allowed to happen.

I was able to work up about 25 or 30 pages -- I think I still have them in one of my boxes, someplace -- where the artist agrees to be interviewed only if the journalist will model for him, naked. Only I couldn't get it to really go anywhere or become more visual, and I thought about the difficulty in working up the pieces of art that would be needed, so I dropped it. Looking back, I just wasn't that good a writer, yet.

Now I'm thinking of a long conversation in bed between two men who've made a connection after a violent confrontation, to the shock of both of them, and how they reveal aspects of themselves as they go along. That sounds like a film or play, not a book. In fact, that is basically what Weekend was about -- two gay men connecting one night and spending the next couple days together before one of them leaves for another country. I wonder if my affection for those two films is playing on this?

Thing is, it would work as either. I saw a production of Homebody, Kabul, a play by Tony Kushner, where the opening monologue was transfixing. Forty minutes of a woman sitting in a chair talking about her life and love of a country she's never been to. Breathtaking. The following act, which was more traditional and had more people, was nothing compared to it.

William Shawn opened MDWA with this comment -- The life of a playwright is tough. It's not easy as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living. I became an actor and people don't hire you. So, you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade.

I guess one of the errands of my trade is having thoughts buffet me about.

Underground Guy

I've been back to work on that story. My plan is to finish a first draft then rework Owen Taylor to simplify the opening couple chapters, then do another draft of UG, then polish OT and publish it. Then, if I feel UG is ready, polish it and publish it. Then get back to work on Place of Safety.

It helps that I've gotten some more positive response to OT in its current form, so don't really need to do much on it. I also got turned down by the NEA for a grant to work on P/S, and re-read what I'd sent them...which included the chapter of Brendan traveling to Claudy early on January 5th, 1969 to be with the students marching to Derry. And it scratched at my soul. He needs his story to be told.

I want a decent first draft of the first section of the story before my next birthday. That gives me seven months to complete three books. Right, that's gonna happen. But it's a goal, and I'm not working up the entire book of P/S; just the first one. Books 2 & 3 will follow.

I'm finally accepting that I don't like to write hyped up drama in stories like P/S. I want a more natural flow to it, especially since the events it's located in are dramatic unto themselves. When I wrote Desert Land, I used the style to rack up the intensity of the drama, but that wouldn't be something you could extend over a massive book.

I'm reading My Antonia by Willa Cather as I sit in the tub, each night, and it has a clean spare style that works for the area -- Nebraska of the late 19th Century. Nothing much happens except life and the messes it brings. The completed piece I have that's closest to it is Wide New World, which is pretty low-key but as naturalistic as I can make it. A guy takes a photography class and tears his family apart.

So I know I'm capable of doing that in OT and UG...and maybe finding the simplicity in those will help me build it in P/S...maybe.

It's certainly something to strive for.

Back from the deep end...

When I finished the 75 page rewrite of We Come I figured I'd go through it and see what I could expand upon so it could get back up to 90 pages. But as I started, I fell into my old routine of letting the characters run things and trying to make sense of it...something that usually works...but this time it collapsed. I wanted to write a nice cheap SF-horror script to sell to one of the contacts I have, and I couldn't. I hated the story, hated the structure, hated everything about it. So I had to put it aside.

It didn't help that someone who read Bugzters asked if I got the idea from Inside Out. The story of an 11 year-old child whose parents move her from a home she loves to one she doesn't like, as several emotions in various colors try to guide her to an understanding and acceptance of her new life.

Bugzters is about an 11 year-old boy who doesn't want to move from the home he loves, and who has some different colored aliens in his MacBook help him come to terms with his new life and at the end he has accepted it.

When I was rewriting this for animation, I was told over and over the ending had to be different, that I had to combine the boy with his genius next-door neighbor girl to centralize the character, and he had to achieve something, not just peace of mind. When I wouldn't change that, the script was finally taken away from me. That was 9 years ago. I'm not aware of anything having been done with it, since.

And now it's dead. Yes...the details of my script are different from Pixar's, and I wrote the first draft nearly 17 years ago, but that is immaterial. Since Inside Out is a Pixar/Disney film, the people who read it (and who knew they'd have to deal with another party if they went forward with it) feared they could be sued for working with something that could be seen as a rip-off. "Loved the script but have to pass."

That's when I went through all the submissions and queries I've made over the last year, for scripts, as well as competitions, and got overwhelmed with the rejection of it all. I have a full series of writing workshops I bought to help me write a sellable script and I've taken seminars...and they've been worthless. Nothing has made any difference.

So I tumbled into this blank universe, where words vanished and it was all I could do to just surf the web and comment on Facebook. This wasn't just a crash and burn. The ground give way beneath me, and I slipped into a sort of drowning phase. I have nearly drowned, before. I can't swim because when I know I'm in water that's too deep for me to stand up in, I freak out. It's a visceral reaction. I need to know I have that minimal bit of support in the back of my head or I cannot function.

I guess that's true of my screenwriting, as well. I needed a minimal amount of delusion to keep going, and I don't have it anymore. I'm not going to write the next Scream or Halloween or Hitchcockian action-adventure script. I don't have the ability to let go and vomit out just anything. But that's not the real drawback. It's that I do not have the kind of luck it takes to make it happen. Meeting the right person at the right time to get something like The Alice '65 into the hands of Russell Tovey or Darian's Point to Aidan Turner or Carli's Kills past Alex Minsky's or Katee Sackhoff's people. And so far the three agents who were willing to read my work will now not even respond to me.

Eventually you have to accept that the trouble is not with everyone else; it's with yourself. And it's not just that I do not know how to sell myself or network or any of that; it's that I don't write scripts that producers will go nuts for. I need the kind of luck that will help me find the one producer who will so love my screenplay, he or she will force it to get made. I thought I had a couple of times, but it turned out not to be, and I seriously doubt I will, now, living in Buffalo.

What finally pulled me out of this collapse was sitting down and working up a quiet moment between Devlin and Reg in Underground Guy. A gentle, brutally honest discussion, 10 pages long, of what was beginning to happen between the two of them -- one a straight married British cop who can't understand his attraction not only to another man but to someone he knows is a rapist; the other, the American man who abused him, sexually...and who is realizing his past actions were evil...and who is trying to find a way to make amends. I worked on it till three, this morning, and reread it just a little while ago...and I like it. I can see it. Hear it. Feel it. And it would never work on film...but I don't care.

So I am not writing or rewriting another screenplay, not until I have sold at least 2 of the ones I currently have. I've written a total of 33, but in reality 12 of them were works for hire, like Bugzters was, and only 9 or 10 are good enough to offer. I have a dozen more ideas, but it's a waste of time and misdirection of effort to do this unless I know it will be worthwhile. It's ludicrous for me to keep working up new scripts and rewriting the ones I have in hopes that someday lightning will strike. It won't. I just plain do not have that kind of luck. Never have.

I will keep submitting the ones I think are good to producers and production companies and fellowships, but nothing more. I don't know how this will work out, but I feel like I'm finally taking a serious step towards being a novelist instead of using writing books as a substitute for screenplays.

I'm finally accepting the story being told and the characters being seen are what matter, and doing that in a book is better than making a movie.

This is what happens...

Well...We Come is a grand total of 75 pages long. NOT feature length. So...I need to go through and figure out how to make it at least 88 pages, and do it without padding and in a way that will keep me engaged in the story. That's the hard part...and most dangerous, for me. If I get to where I care too much about the characters, I stop trying to please the market and just tell the story as it wants to be told. Which tends to piss readers off. They're looking for Save the Cat's plot point on every age, these days, and it just flat ain't gonna always be there.

I've been trying to figure out a way around this, all day, and everything points to deepening the characters in ways a SF-Horror film doesn't really go. I guess I'm just not cut out to do quickie one-offs...unless I get drunk.

That's how I wrote the first draft of Find Ray T -- buzzed on Corona, or something like it -- and got it done in 8 days. Even crazier, the basic structure of the script hasn't changed. I guess the booze lets me have a don't-give-a-fuck attitude and put anything down I damn well want.

That said, the details have changed dramatically, over the years. Damon grew more proactive. Tara built into someone any straight man would want to be with. Celia became more important. And oranges became a recurring motif, in that Damon doesn't like them but they keep winding up being in the middle of everything.

What I'm thinking of doing is truly screwing around with the SF-Horror genre. Make the script totally existentialistic, extrapolating Sartre into the realm of George Pal. Having Danny, who comes from an abusive family, reach an understanding with an alien that has killed a dozen people because it wants to get home to its family.

I wonder if the SyFy network would go for it? Some human characters on BSG came to terms with the Cylons, even though the latter had practiced genocide against the former. And Gravity is really that sort of film. So that might make it fun to do.

Hmph, not much self-aggrandizing here.

Many mirrors of me...

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.Walt Whitman

This quote applies to me so damn much. There are times I wonder just how many people there are in me, all fighting to have a story told or be paid attention to or just control my life instead of me controlling theirs. Sounds crazy, I know...but I addressed that in The Lyons' Den. Talking to the characters in your head. Arguing with them. Loving them more than the real people around you. Wondering if they're the truth of your existence.

Going through a bit of that, right now, with We Come. For some reason I don't know who is what or why in this story. Don't know the reason for it or the meaning of it or even where it's going. Which is silly to worry about; it's a Sci-Fi-Slasher script. Kids v. the evil creature who wants to destroy them.

Except...the creature isn't evil. It just wants to get home to its family. Just wants the hell away from this planet and sees humans as a method to do that. Like we ride horses. Like we build airplanes and boats to carry us places. People are tools to it, and it acts from that perspective.

It's funny. I think the greatest creature feature ever made was the original King Kong in 1933. Today, the stop-motion ape and dinosaurs look silly and amateurish...but at the end...even though Kong has killed dozens of people indiscriminately...including an infamous scene of him pulling a woman from her bedroom, seeing she's not who he wants, and tossing her hundreds of feet to her death without a thought -- as he's being shot down on top of the Empire State Building, you feel sorry for him. He was a wild animal who only acted from instinct to protect that which was his, and now he's dying. And it's heartbreaking. And there is my problem with the script -- I want the murderous creature to be a tragic hero.

Yeah, that'll sell fast.

The Parables of Søren Kierkegaard

When I get lost, sometimes this brings me home...
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The Two Artists

What is the difference between requiring love of the neighbor and finding lovableness in the neighbor?

…Suppose there were two artists, and the one said, I have travelled much and seen much in the world, but I have sought in vain to find a man worth painting. I have found no face with such perfection of beauty that I could make up in my mind to paint it. In every face I have seen one or another little fault. Therefore I seek in vain.” Would this indicate that this artist was a great artist?

On the other hand, the second one said, “Well, I do not pretend to be a real artist: neither have I travelled in foreign lands. But remaining in the little circle of men who are closest to me, I have not found a face so insignificant or so full of faults that I still could not discern in it a more beautiful side and discover something glorious. Therefore I am happy in the art I practice. It satisfies me without my making any claim to being an artist.” Would this not indicate that precisely this one was the artist, one who by bringing a certain something with him found then and there what the much travelled artist did not find anywhere in the world, perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him!

Consequently the second of the two was the artist. Would it not be sad, too, if what is intended to beautify life could only be a curse upon it, so that art, instead of making life beautiful for us, only fastidiously discovers that not one of us is beautiful. Would it not be sadder still, and still more confusing, if love also should only be a curse because its demand could only make it evident that none of us is worth loving, instead of love’s being recognized by precisely by its loving enough to be able to find lovableness in all of us, consequently loving enough to be able to love all of us.

–Søren Kierkegaard

Works of Love, pp. 156-57

Zap zonk zowie...

I'm plowing through We Come just to get the new structure in place, then I'll rewrite it as much as I have to for it to be fun and fascinating. Danny, the lead, is proving to be very quiet and sane. His girlfriend, Catherine, is coming across as bossy while the rest of the group haven't taken on very distinguishable personalities, yet. But those will come; I see hints in Mario as the guy with all the answers and Chill as cooler-than-thou, while Miner is hinting at being a true existentialistic villain who is angling to get away with his crimes. We'll have to see how that plays out.

I know I'll make it better because I had someone ask me for Find Ray T and I went through it to check for typos (found a half dozen, which is good, for me) but didn't want to change a thing in it. VERY unusual for me. The story works. The characters are sharp and delineated. It moves along fast. It would be a fun project to make, and if the right actor was in the role of Damon, make a lot of money. No question in my mind. Are you listening, Liam Hemsworth?

I've pretty much given up on Amazon Studio. I've sent them 9 of my best scripts and they dismiss them within 24 hours...meaning they're looking for something very specific but won't tell you what that is. It doesn't cost anything to submit, and I don't think I need to use their format to work out the screenplay...and if that is a requirement, the hell with them...but I'd like to know why I get a form letter that verges on insulting:

...(W)e have determined that (your project) does not meet the needs of our Development Slate at this time. ... If you make significant revisions to your work, you are welcome to re-submit it in the future.

Uh, no. Not gonna. I like these scripts as they are, most have won awards, and I get the feeling you aren't even bothering to read them but are still telling me to fucking revise them. Picture a one-finger salute here.

It helps that I've gotten some more positive feedback on OT. A new bit of restructuring is working its way through the back of my brain, and I think it will turn out really good. I'm keeping my opening, but shifting the background explanation to later in the story, and I'm trimming out about 40 pages. I let Jake get a bit too descriptive, at times, and there is still some repetition I could get rid of. Tighter is better.

Or so I'm told...

We-come is next...

I'm reworking a SF-Horror script I wrote that is set in the desert, about an alien that crash-lands on Earth and uses humans as batteries so it can send home a distress signal. It's being helped by Miner, a man it controls -- he brings it people; it keeps him alive. It's set up in some caves under a motel called the Welcome Inn, but the L is missing...hence the title -- WE-COME.

Everything is going great until some skateboard kids are lured to the motel to use its empty but pristine pool to play in. The pool is the relay dish the alien uses to shoot off its messages. Miner goes after the kids only to find they aren't such easy targets.

I've got the first act written, leading up to the point where the kids realize something is very wrong. One of them is hurt but they can't use their phones to call for help and their cars will not start. I've also added in a couple of victim-characters, to pump up the suspense angle. In the first draft, I did the A-B-C thing of introducing everyone and giving their back-story...and it was boring. Now?

Now I introduce the kids -- Danny, Catherine, Chill, Mario, Skye and Powell -- as they're driving through the desert en route to the motel, playing a kind of tag, Danny driving a classic convertible, Chill behind the wheel of a pickup. I envision it with aerial and tracking shots of the vehicles as Yanni's Aria plays over. Maybe the title sequence. Use the full four minutes. By that time, the audience will be completely on the kids' side without them saying a word.

Of course, if I do sell it, the director will probably ignore my suggestions and totally screw it up. I had that happen in the first rewrite job I did for a cheesy Corman series. I rewrote three episodes to add humor and humanity, but also did a three episode arc with the two main characters -- a professor and a sheltered schoolgirl; it was an erotic series meant for European distribution. Justine -- that's it. I rewrote episodes 7, 8 & 9, and the arc was for Justine and Professor Robson, and a couple of secondary characters.

Anyway, the director loved my work and shot it...and then, after it was done and on its way, told me he hadn't realized I added the arc till after it was edited, so he didn't do anything to enhance it. Even cut a few lines that would have helped. Maybe people will catch it, maybe they won't. But it was my second introduction to the blindness of directors.

The first one almost turned me into a murderer...but that story was visited in a much earlier post.

DP Synopsis

I'm open to feedback on this synopsis for Darian's Point...
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In 1910, on a tiny island off the western coast of Ireland, creatures known as the Old Women have killed a child, bringing terror to one and all. Now the island matriarch, MRS. O’BRIEN, must ask her only son, THOMAS, to honor an ancient pact that calls for his death.

That would be a problem, because Thomas lives in Boston, ten day’s journey away. However, he has already come to Ireland with his American wife, MARIAN. Things are tense between them due to her upper-class background and him being considered beneath her by her family. This journey is one last attempt to save their marriage. If this doesn't work, they plan to accept an annulment being offered by her father's friend, the Cardinal of Boston.

Mrs. O’Brien dislikes and distrusts Marion from the moment they meet, but her focus in on Thomas and convincing him of his duty to the islanders. The O'Briens have run this snippet of land for centuries and are the only ones who can fulfill the pact.

It began three thousand years ago, when the Dagda, the father of the ancient Celtic Gods, raped a woman of the Ua Briain clan after being given shelter. His wife, Morriggan, was furious and had the girl killed, but not before she gave birth to a son. This was a huge insult, and caused the Dagda to turn on Morriggan and wash his sins away in the waters of The Cliffs of Moher.

In answer, Morrigan used her powers of sorcery to form the sins into seven harpies, who lay waste to the west of Ireland. After many battles, four harpies were killed and a great many widows made before the Dagda brought about peace. In exchange for a promise to live in the caves of the Cliffs and leave Ireland's people alone, each hundred years a young man of the Ua Briain bloodline would be given to the remaining three harpies to feast upon...and Thomas is of that bloodline.

Only Thomas is now from a world that values science and reason, so he laughs at his mother’s claims...until he is attacked by one of the harpies in a crumbling tower known as Darian’s Point and understands he is bound by honor to fulfill the ancient pact. So with his mother’s help, he prepares himself to die.

Marian does all she can to prevent what she thinks is nothing more than an insane ritual murder. Then darkness comes...and a thick mist surrounds the tower...and she hears the shrieks of the ungodly creatures and realizes the legends are true. But she may be too late to keep the man she loves from being killed atop Darian’s Point.