reasons i suck

Live near Seattle? Want to see a movie?

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Back in 2004, I wrote a screenplay designed to be made on an ultra-low budget. In 2005, my friend Dan Moore shot it. Now, in 2010, it’s ready for release.

On May 20th, at NW Film Forum, the indie film I wrote will have its world premiere. It’s called THE DEAD FEED, and here’s a 21-second preview:

The Dead Feed Teaser from Blaine Street Productions on Vimeo.

Facebook users, that’s an embedded video. You’ll have to click through to the blog to see it. Did I mention 21 seconds?

Will the movie be awesome? I hope so! I haven’t been involved in post-production at all, and haven’t even seen a rough cut in the last couple of years. I will be there with a camera in hand to record the responses of the audience members. After, I will post them, even if their faces are full of boredom or scorn! If folks love the movie, I will bask in the accomplishment. If they hate it, I will flush with shame.

Have I mentioned that making this movie is what drove me to write novels? Seriously. I’d long planned to go into movie-making and once I realized I was going to be a Seattle resident long-term, I teamed up with Dan to take control of our careers and make our own. (Never wait!)

But I was terrible at it. Making a movie is a real pain in the ass and I discovered I didn’t have the skill set or the temperament for it. Immediately after production wrapped, I started work on Child of Fire. Novels FTW!

But Dan never walked away. He’s been struggling with that film for 5 years, and in that time he lost his job and became homeless. All sorts of rough shit happened to him, but he stuck with it and now he’s sending it off to film festivals.

The evening of May 20th. (I’ll post more details when I confirm them.) Want to join me there?

Update: Jeez, I forgot to say what the movie is about! Quick description: a group of friends begin receiving a mysterious video feed showing one of them being murdered… before it happens. (dum dum DUMMM!)

Online much?

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Not really. Pizza Week has been a single-parent experience, and I don’t have a lot of time to hang out online. I’m trying to keep up with my email and LJ friends list, but even that’s a struggle.

Anyway, I spoke with my agent about Project Number Next last Monday. The story idea came from this discussion, and although at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle something like that, eventually the idea started taking over my brain. I had a character I wanted to write about. I had a take on the standard urban fantasy setting that I really, really liked. All through the rewrites of Man Bites World, I was thinking of a handful of confrontations in the new project.

But I fucked it up. I wrote 44 pages with very little dramatic tension–there was no villain, no serious obstacle, just a story question that spins out without resolution. In fact, I did something I pretty much never do: I liked a character so much that I just went along for the ride in her day without a solid narrative. A character died off the page, yeah, and there’s a “Who killed the jerk?” story line, but overall it didn’t work.

Worse, the project as it stands feels very whole and solid to me. It needs to be rethought, but I’m going to need some distance before I have another go at it again. I’m too close right now.

Which means that, as I wait for a second round of notes on Man Bites World (or maybe a check instead!), I’ve gone back to The Buried King, the second-world fantasy I was writing while I was querying for Child of Fire. I abandoned it when Caitlin offered to represent me (and told me to start work on Game of Cages.) I’ve gone back to the goof and discovered I hadn’t really solved the plot yet. So, it needs a little more pre-writing planning, and then I’ll be jumping back into a new book.

And now I’ve spent too much of my writing day on this post, and it’s past time to wake my son. Have a great Friday, everyone.

Forgot to add: my back is almost back to normal today.

Weird day

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Not ten seconds ago, heavy winds out of the south have started shaking the trees on my block. It’s like a dance party out there.

A few hours ago, my back went out for no reason I can see. I’m hobbling around the apartment, trying to straighten up the place and straighten up my posture, using ice, isometrics, dishwasher, stretching, but not the vacuum. Ow. Also, ow.

My wife flies to the east coast tonight. I need to load up her iPod with TED talks before she goes In fact, I’m going to do that now, then get down on the floor and work on my core muscles.

In other news…

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My editorial notes on Man Bites World were really simple and straightforward–ambiguous dialog! contradictory description! repetitive narration!–right up to the last one. The very last comment I had to deal with bowled me over.

It’s a line of dialog that makes sense in my head, but none of the meaning it’s meant to imply comes out on the page. It is, essentially, a declaration of war on the status quo in the Twenty Palaces setting, and that’s not something you clarify in a ten-minute revamp.

For four days I’ve been trying to make this work. I’m going for a nice walk now to think about it.

You know those times?

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You know those times when you think: “I’ll just open up that game and see if I can’t finish off that really tough level” and the next thing you know you’ve retaken Guadalcanal?

Yeah. I shouldn’t be having those times.

Usually, I would post this in a review roundup…

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… but I want to talk about it a little. The blog linked below doesn’t list the reviewer’s name (at least not where I could find it) but the Google Alert that directed me there said it was written by one “David Marshall.” Check this out:

There’s a fantastic market for spin-offs, sequels when one story arc has finished, and prequels. And those prequels can go back as far as you want into childhood. Hey, you could even write some for the YA market. Get them hooked on your heroes young and they’ll follow in lockstep into the adult serial. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs to riches. That means never starting at a beginning because, by our definition (on our contract terms to be negotiated) there’s no such thing as a beginning, just a point of origin tetralogy.” So poor unpublished Harry Connolly looks at the dollar signs written into the contract for his first novel, acts on what the publisher says, changes the title and sells his second novel.

“Poor unpublished Harry Connolly” pretty much describes me when I was doing the last polish on Child of Fire. I would have made “Poor” my first name and “Unpublished” my middle if I could have afforded the courthouse fees. But I couldn’t. I was poor.

Of course, now that I’m published, I’m as rich as a Wall St. con man, and I’m famous on the internet. The review I linked to above is a pretty positive one, all things considered, so why comment on it? There are lots of reviews out there. What strikes me here are two distinct points the poster is making (roughly speaking):

1) That I published Child of Fire, which is not the beginning of Ray’s story, for a big wad of cash, with any existing prequels held back for even larger wads later on, and

2) That I structured Child of Fire as a thriller for commercial reasons but I could have written something more satisfying (which I read to mean “not a potboiler” and “more art/less formula”).

Formula!! ::clutches pearls and faints::

Let’s break it down! (Detailed blathering, including the bad-literary version of Child of Fire behind the cut) Continue reading

I love my wife.

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Really, I love her like crazy.

But she uses a pencil to mark her place in books. Hardbacks. Right up close to the spine.

At this point, I’ve gotten in the habit replacing the pencil with a combination of one actual bookmark and a little nagging. But I love her anyway.

Health and vision insurance

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If my rent went up by 10 percent a year, that would be a horror show.

If my electric bill went up by 8.8 percent a year, I’d be rendering oils for my lanterns before the end of the decade.

But because these increases are happening in my vision and health care insurance (respectively), I’m supposed to be grateful, because those increases have been bartered down from 17%.

Even stranger, my supervisor and co-workers keep talking about how they “don’t know how much longer I’ll be sticking with my job” because hey! writer! As soon as I become rich enough, I’ll be ditching the old day job for self-employment! Any week now, right?

I kid you not, writing full-time is something I want so badly I can taste it. But if it takes a corporation to bargain down premium increases to “only” 8.8%, how am I going to afford insurance on my own, esp over the long term?

Real reform can’t come fast enough.

In which I am annoying

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You know that annoying thing writers do when they announce that they have something awesome in the works but can’t talk about it yet? A Soopah Sekrit Project? You know how they do that thing?

Well, I’m doing that thing. It’s totally exciting and I hope I don’t fuck it up.

In other news, what happened to memes? I used to see memes cruise through my friends list all the time, but I almost never see them now (and I’m hankering to do something simple in a post). Maybe I should create one.

Dreams

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Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe my dreams to you. I am going to point out that I’ve had three days in a row of rest and rehab and paying back my sleep debt. Yesterday, for instance, I woke at my usual alarm-clock time (just before 5 am) and went into the living room with no writing work on my plate. Man Bites World is turned in and awaiting editorial notes. My proposal for Project Number Next is in the mail. I even shipped off a couple copies of Child of Fire for reviews. I could have revised an old short story I never sent out, but I didn’t feel any urgency on that front at all.

And this complete lack of any kind of deadline pressure must be why I dreamed the opening of a new short story, in text, just as I woke up.

I’m not ready to write the story because all I have is the opening lines, but it’s sitting on a back burner cooking down. In the meantime, I read the end of my current book, then took a nap on the couch. Does it count as a nap at 6:15 am, or is that technically “going back to bed”? It doesn’t matter. I read, relaxed, slept, and even played a little bit of computer game later. Nice! A day off.

It’s also nice to remember my dreams. Usually, my alarm clock drives them out of my memory.

Does anyone else dream in text? I only do it sometimes, but I’m curious.