A Winnie!

A long time between posts, that is for sure.  But - rest assured dear reader, I am still (Stubbornly) at work with the task of selling my screenplay.

The past few years have seen a lot of screenplay competitions.  I always make the first cut, but never the finalists.  I believe it's because the people that award the laurels think kid-friendly movies are not marketable.  That is bullshit.  Kid movies always sell.  I could go off on a tangent right here about everything that comes out of Hollywood now is a remake of an old blockbuster, a sequel or a prequel of an old blockbuster, or just pure crap.  But that is obvious to any moviegoer and I will let it rest at that.

I entered the EQUUS film festival and won first prize - a Winnie! - for Screenplay - Literary.  A poser to me because aren't screenplays by definition literary?  First thing that happened is that my copyrighted screenplay got published and is available on Amazon.  So, that's a foot in the door, dear readers!

Also, I was contacted by one of the EQUUS staff who has expressed interest in optioning my screenplay for 18 months!  She's meeting with her attorney today and will phone tomorrow.

'Nother Year Come 'n Gone

It's been a long time since I've written.

Stubborn is still dead in the water.  Hubby has a poker-playing friend who plays with B-listers.  Poker player promises to distribute Stubborn investor packets to anyone showing an interest.  That is where I am.

Something will come along, on its own sweet time.

Another year, come and gone.

So, where is your bucket?

I'm at SEATAC which is synonymous for miserable.  The saving grace is that I'm at Vino Volo, a cool place to sit and have a decent glass of wine and nary a TV-sports screen in sight.  It is lovely, as far as an airport bar goes.

General misery, etc., for going back to work in the miserable place that pays my bills most handsomely.  My ex-boyfriend Stevie summed it up most appropriately:  the things we do for money, doll.

Overheard a comment:  "where's your bucket?"

Indeed.  How is my bucket list coming along?  How m'I progressing?  Tough call on account of I didn't have one.

A Lotta Water's Gone Under the Bridge

That title fits in a bunch of ways.

1 - (and engineers love to enumerate) Stubborn will be reborn within the next two weeks.  It's been tweaked and revised ad infinitum.  This is in preparation to send it to the lovely Raven who has a Friend.

2 - I've been in Anchorage the past two days instead of my normal work routine in Prudhoe Bay (aka Pestilence Place).  If I really wanted to be anal I would subtitle this in to sub-sections (a) and (b).  But I will spare you the misery.

In my visit to Anchorage I had some spare time to cruise by my old house.  And where I first found a job as an Engineer.  I can't tell you how depressing that was.  Everything came flooding back.  That ever happen to you?  And everything I remembered was overwhelmingly bad.  Really bad.  What the hell did I ever come up here for?  This place is awful.  Awful.  Anyone trying to tell you something different is trying to sell you real estate.  Hey, you want to dispute my opinion?  This place spawned that imbecile Sarah Palin.

I met a woman today for lunch that I first met when I worked at the pump station in Delta Junction fourteen years ago.  Lunch was bad, too.  How so?  This woman had to quit her job to avoid being fired because of political pressure.  See, she didn't fit in.  She was 'rough around the edges' and hadn't learned to parse her phrases to be politically correct, easily digestible pablum.  She was chosen as a scapegoat.  And she chose to 'retire' so she could retain her health insurance benefits.  She was a sad skeleton of the person I knew before.  Where is there justice in this world?  I used to believe in such a ghost.

I used to be like this skeleton.  I didn't have a degree in engineering and was treated with the same lack of respect and courtesy.  It didn't matter where I came from nor what I knew.  I was just a dumb girl.  And that I was probably Easy.  That was the way I was treated.

Somehow, with the conferring of my engineering degree and "all rights and privileges afforded" things got turned around.  People don't treat me like a used tampon anymore and I just can't figure.  I guess it's because I can push back now with a vengeance, and damn if I don't.  But I did pre-degree and I was just smirked at.   Like my non-degreed Delta Junction friend.

If there was any justice in the world, which there certainly isn't, ________________________.

You fill in the blank.

Packing for Mars

This is from a book I just finished by Mary Roach.  It was her last paragraph, and boy, what a paragraph is was - I've separated it out in easy-to-digest bites:

"The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in.  War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism.

I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying "I bet we can do this."

Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth.  But would it?  Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research?  It is always squandered.  Let's squander some on Mars.

Let's go out and play."

The Lovely Raven Revisits

Friday was a nadir in my screenwriting endeavors and frankly my life.  You get to that point where you wonder why you're even bothering.  All the creatures from the dark side of your subconscious swim over to the light and start yowling and screaming:  It'll never work!  You're crazy for trying!  ...Well, you get the picture.  I'm certain of few things but this is one:  I'm not the only one that faces these demons on a daily basis.

Woke up on Satuday at a cruel, cruel hour, even before the alarm, ever deeper in Nadir-ville.  Came to work and in my email in-box was a holiday message from the lovely Raven:  How are you?  You have been on my mind.  How is the screenplay coming?  I took that as a Good Sign.

There is Nothing New Except a Shooting Star

Ecclesiastes:  (and forgive me if I misspelled it)  There Is Nothing New Under The Sun.  The sun goes around and it comes around.  It it all utter foolishness, all chasing the wind.  

I haven't updated this blog in a while because, There Is Nothing New Under The Sun.  Still slogging through re-writing and how many times do you want to read that trite phrase?  So I haven't written.

This morning I was thinking of the musings of Solomon in Ecclesiastes.  But riding in the clapped-out derelict school bus that is relegated to taking the pump station personnel to and from work, this morning, this morning I saw a shooting star.  At oh-my-god-it's-early-thirty.

Of course it's pitch black dark in Prudhoe Bay now for about 23 out of 24 hours so a pitch black dark sky is the norm.  But not a shooting star.  I heard words that were mine:  Oh wow.  Wow.  Didja see that?  No one else did.  Someone said, "Well, you gotta make a wish!  You gotta make a wish on a falling star!"

Cripes, have I become that far removed from childhood that I'd forgotten that set-in-stone LAW?

Evidently.

So wish I did.  We will see if it comes true.

It's a wrap, baby.

Tomorrow Act I, Scene I, of Stubborn will be sent to E.L. to document I've met the conditions of subsection 181 of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act - which will allow any aspiring investor to get a 100% tax credit for investing in the production of Stubborn.  No deadlines,  I can be 'grandfathered' in because the conditions have been met prior to the end of 2011, when the bill expires.  Hurrah!  Of course E.L. will want to charge me for opening his mail and finding the DVD.  But -  *sigh* nothing comes without a price...

On to other good news:  on NBC Nightly News last night there was an article about family-frendly movies - outside of vampire-themed movies, G- and PG-rated movies are the only ones selling right now.  Another selling point!

So all is well.  Continuing with the re-write.

A One-Take Wonder

Today hubby & I went to a studio to record a voice-over for Act I, Scene I, of Stubborn.  *false modesty* I nailed it in one take.  And sounded Fab-u-lous.  Hah!  I just may quit my day job...yeah right.  I'll quit my day job when Stubborn hits the theaters...

Read an interesting treatise on the way home from Prudhoe Bay, called Tales from the Script.  It is a compilation of interviews of successful screenwriters.  And according to Tales, screenwriters are the original red-headed stepchildren of the Entertainment Industry.  There were common threads in all of the interviews, namely:

• It's tough to get a screenplay turned into a movie, really tough (really? Gosh!);
• Dumb luck and coincidence are a screenwriter's best friends; and
• It's possible to be luckier if you have faith in yourself.

Reminds me of a John Wayne adage I read once:

Life is hard.

But it's harder if you're stupid.

When I get my video back from the studio, faithful reader, I'll post it on my blog.

Embracing the Arc

One of the comments that multiple reviewers had about my original screenplay was that my lead character didn't have a "character arc."  Well, yes, that's true.  In the script, she first came to light as a victim of an unfortunate circumstance and strove to do better.  As one would expect any contributing member of the human race.  Turns out, that's not what people want to see.

Nope, to have a "character arc" she has to be a generally rotten person who makes bad choices but is basically good inside - she just needs a good and regular thrashing by the Forces of Nature (here played by my computer keyboard) to make her see the Way, the Truth, and the Light.  So - Stubborn, Revision 1 is coming along nicely.  Slowly.  But coming along.

Oh - and I promised you the first scene of Stubborn.  Here it is sans dialogue.  Hubby has (hopefully) found a studio that will do a professional job of dubbing it in.

Thawing Out in the Midst of Icebergs

Hurrah!  The writer's block has unfrozen.  Who woulda thought it'd take me returning to The Land of Frozen Sewers to get un-tube-blocked?  Two scenes have been successfully edited just today!  Goal:  get this edit completed and get Stubborn in the Right Hands by the end of this year.  We will see.

Reading last Sunday's post I was struck by the self-pitying misery.  Faithful reader, why didn't you reach through my monitor and smack me in the back of my head? 

Hubby circumvented Tuesday's pre-Wednesday travel moping misery by taking me to an indoor go-cart race track.  For grown people.  Heck, these carts were nothing like I remembered as a little kid, scrawny things with lawnmower engines.  No - hell for stout with seriously amped-up engines that went real fast around a LeMans-style track.  Zoom!

What great fun!  Until the next morning.  Cripes, it felt like we'd been in a mondo rock-tumbling machine.  We had bruises all over and sore in places where we didn't know we had places.  Oh well, that's why God made ibuprofen.

Go Speed Racer, Go!

From Sunlight to Darkness, and I Really Mean It

It's about 10:00 PST and tomorrow I will get aboard a big, inhoSPITable airplane that will dump me off in Seattle, home of an horrific and inhoSPITable air hub, and then catch another similar aircraft - oh hey! - both rife with screaming kids - that will finally excrete me into Anchorage.  Sound bitter?  Yah, pretty much.  About 65 here now, 30-ish in Anchorage; then on to minus 20-ish in Prudhoe Bay the following morning.  Nothing like a visceral slap of incredibly cold weather in the face to make you own up to - what the hell were you thinking?

You make it what it is.

After four months incapacitation I find myself dreading and yes, afraid, of what awaits me back where I work.   My colleagues have given the disease we all have about our occupation a name:  the Golden Handcuffs.


See, the compensation is so excellent, and you cannot even hope to find a better deal;  and you're working less than half a year so it's easier to forgive the misery you deal with when you're on-shift.  I guess.

You make it what it is.


Tomorrow I'll see the little brown dogs - the ones that pester the life out of me when I'm cooking in the kitchen - and the ones that have learned that I will take them for walkies every morning - for the last time in two weeks.  How can I explain it to the little guys I'm going away for awhile - I don't speak dog-ese.

I of course will cowgirl up like I always do.  I will make it what it is - and nothing more.  It is a job.  It pays the bills.

What has this to do with Stubborn?  Not a lot, faithful reader.  But perhaps you can get an insight into my mindsight.

Cripes, don't we all have our crosses to bear?

Back to Work, and Back to Stubborn

It has been four months since I have been at my job in Alaska.  As you know, I have been sidelined with a horrendous broken ankle.  But - I have been released to return to my job in balmy Prudhoe Bay and will be returning on Wednesday. *sigh*

Well, it is a good thing on many levels.  Being off work for so long gets me to feeling uneasy, especially in this uncertain economy.  And, it's a cherry gig.  So that is one check-off in the plus column.  Another thing, I can actually concentrate enough to write, edit, and revise Stubborn.  Because there's not another damn thing to do up there after hours.  Another check-off.  I look forward to completing my revision in the upcoming two weeks on-shift.

Hard pressed to come up with a third.  I noticed the airfare up there and back has increased by $250 since the last time I purchased a ticket.  Damn!  But there's this silly little thing:  to continue getting envelopes with windows in them I must return to work.  Silly little niggling thing.  Off I go.

Oh - here's the first scene of Stubborn sans dialogue for your review:

Well...damn!

Today I talked with the Friend of Wonderful Sister.  The Friend has managed to take a bunch of incongruous, wobbly movie clips and turn them into a fab-u-lous first scene for Stubborn.  I mean it.  Complete with a beautiful soundtrack.  I will include it in another post - when I can morph a ".wmv" into a ".mov" because I have a Mac and Friend has sent it in PC format.  Mac and PC appear to be mortal enemies...

And here's the well, damn! part of it:  He saw the takes for what they were.  Here are his words:  "This is the first scene, isn't it?  And she's (he knew it was a woman!) come back to where it all began - hasn't she? Well...damn!


Wonderful sister had talked to Friend but never gave away anything about the plot of Stubborn.   And Friend saw it for what it was - an intro into a life experience of (what turns out to be) a remarkable woman. Well...damn!

Friend is a friend indeed.  Although he is between jobs, Friend would not accept a dime from me.  He said he had already been recompensed by Wonderful Sister - a gift of chocolate-covered strawberries.  His favorite.

So, Stubborn is moving along, faithful reader.  In increasingly mysterious ways.

The Gate to Success Creaks Open a Bit

From the last posting one can surmise that I am completely lacking in moviemaking skills.

From The New Oxford Dictionary:

moviemaker |ˈmo͞ovēˌmākər|  noun

        a person who makes motion pictures; a filmmaker.

Anyone read a reference to my name in the moviemaker definition?  Such as:  see Delilah.  Nah, me either.
Enter Wonderful Sister.  Who has a friend that is a professional photographer and sidelines as a movie editor!   He is going to help!  Hurrah!
Wonderful Sister sent me a copy of his latest publishing and it is fabulous.  So - the Gate has creaked open just a bit more.
When I get Act I, Scene I for Stubborn, faithful reader, I will post it.


PS - I don't know what's up with the weird font sizing or indents on this post.  Maybe one can surmise I am as talented at blogging as I am is being a moviemaker.

You Get What You Pay For

Soooo, faithful reader, I got to work with a vengeance today on taking several short movie clips and turning them into a scene, Act I, Scene I,  for Stubborn.  Five minutes into the iMovie program I wanted to rip my eyeballs right out of their sockets.  User friendly?  Not hardly.  Intuitive?  Not on this planet.  Confirms my suspicion that Steve Jobs was an intermediary for an alien intelligence.  iMovie probably makes perfect sense on whatever planet these ET's inhabit.

Going online, I downloaded the user's manual for iMovie and then printed it.  Forty-six pages of absolutely nothing useful.  Not easily deterred, I got on the Apple website and discovered there was a free workshop today at 4:00 for iMovie at a nearby Mac store!  Hurrah!  ...or so I thought.

You get what you pay for.  I paid nothing and that is what I gleaned from the workshop.  Oh, waitaminute, I learned that the iMovie 08 software loaded on my little MacBook is as useless as tits on a boar hog and to do the scene correctly I really, rilly need the iMovie11 software.  Which comes with a hefty price.  Joy!

What a zoo that store was.  Tomorrow the new iPhone can be purchased and - cripes! - I don't know what all those hordes of people hoped to glean by milling around in the store a day early.  Neither did they.  But they were there, sure enough, just like flies on a mule turd on a hot summer's day.

At 4:00 the workshop started, with me and another bewildered iMovie-er.  At 4:15 two other goobers showed up, a guy and his wife.  The instructor felt he needed to start over.  So a one-hour class is going to be shortened by nearly half because the latecomer morons do not know how to tell time.

This ever happen to you?  You get in a class with other people and someone invariably needs to show the other attendees just how damn smart he is, in fact, way smarter than the instructor.  And if you don't believe him, just ask!  The latecomer goober felt it was his duty in life to stand over my shoulder and tell me just how silly and inept I was for not knowing how iMovie worked.  While his wife snickered at me.

Kept telling myself:  Be Good.  Be Good or Be Gone.  I opted for the latter.

You get what you pay for.

And another axiom (courtesy of me):  If it was easy to get a screenplay turned into a movie, everyone would be at the Academy Awards.

Late, Ever Late

No excuses, faithful reader.  I have been remiss.  No update for last Sunday as usual.

We've returned from a visit to my folks' house in Tennessee.   Surreptitiously,  and also quite sneakily we visited my grandmother's house to film a scene for Stubborn.  It's my intention to have her farmhouse to be a part of the actual movie.  It is perfect.

The reason being for the film shoot, even though we are not filmmakers in any sense of the word, according to my ever-fee-exacting lawyer we need to have at least one scene filmed prior to the end of this year so we can be 'grandfathered' in to a very attractive investment opportunity for - duh - potential investors.

So here it is - in its uncut status.  There are several mini-scenes that need to be cut and pasted into one final scene.  When I get the scene doctored I will present it to you, faithful reader.

Thank you Steve Jobs!  For having the film editing application installed on my little MacBook at no charge.

And thank you, Steve Jobs.  You knew you could not fail.

Channeling Cecil

Cecil was my mother's mother.  She was widowed with five children, the youngest being 9 months old, on April 1, 1941.  During the Great Depression.  She had a 6th grade education and no job skills.

The saving grace was the farm that was given to her by my great-grandfather, her father, who won it gambling on Tennessee riverboats.  It became truly a working farm, nearly self-sufficient save for coffee, flour, spices, and sugar.  

Cecil found work at the local nursing home, as a nurse's aide, aka grunt work.  All five children were afforded a college education, a rarity in those days.  I often wonder how she did it.  She told me once that she knew she could not fail.  Faithful reader, does that sound familiar?

The lovely and attractive mu-mu featured in the photograph, above, belonged to Cecil.  Wonderful Sister spied it in a box of clothes in my parent's basement and sent it to me.  On particularly grim days when I'm in the Black Hole (or Black Hell if you choose) which is chronic depression, or my ankle is hurting so bad I just want to cut it off, or words won't come for my ongoing Stubborn revision - I put on this old, worn-out mu-mu and channel Cecil.

Bonanza, or, I've Finally Gone off the Deep End

Faithful reader, I am still nursing a broken ankle.  It still hurts.

Nearly two years ago I was involved in a head-on collision and broke a bone in the same foot that is now connected to my broken ankle.  At the time, Stubborn was just an idea churning in the back of my head.

I decided to do a warm-up piece before I seriously started writing Stubborn.  Here is what I wrote.  It provides insight into what was, and still is, running through my head:

Bonanza

You knew everything was going to be OK when you saw the Cartwrights riding up - or even just one of them.  The good guys would prevail and the bad guys would get their comeuppance.  In the end, 60 minutes later, all would be right with the world and as a little kid I could go to bed and sleep well.

I wasn't very old when it came on, every Sunday night, at 8 o'clock.  It took a special dispensation from my dad to watch Bonanza - bed time was also at eight but it was only one night a week so I was pardoned.  

And so every Sunday night I was at the Ponderosa where I was welcomed as a guest into Pa Cartwright's house.  

I rediscovered Bonanza so many years later when I was sidelined with a broken foot and two bum knees in December, 2009.  It was reassuring to see the Cartwrights again - albeit interspersed with commercials for motorized wheelchairs, portable oxygen suppliers, innumerable scam insurance ads, and ambulance-chasing lawyers.  

At least  somewhere justice was still clean-cut and so was right and wrong.  And I was still welcome at Pa Cartwright's house.

Yah, the acting and scripts  were terrible and so were the plots - but so what?  Good and Bad and Right and Wrong.  All right there and wrapped up in a tidy 60 minutes.  

And really cool horses.  I was always a sucker for the horses.

Not too long ago Adam (aka Pernell Roberts) passed on to be with the rest of the Cartwright family on the Big Ponderosa in the Sky.  He was the last of them, you know.  Who besides me shed a tear?  I bet more than one little kid from the 60's.

What I wouldn't give to be living on that Ponderosa.

Knowing You Cannot Fail

Faithful reader, I have been struggling for a while now - continuing with my revision of Stubborn.

Sometimes you feel like you've lived too long...
The days drip slowly off the page


And then you find yourself
Pacing the cage.


These lines are from a song I've identified with for as long as the song has been sung.  It is a variation of the common cries of anguish - due to living a life of unfulfilled dreams.

Everyone has this inside of them.

There's another common anthem:  The Road Not Taken.

They're the same, really.

When I began this epic of writing a screenplay that was gifted to me, I also started closely examining the lifestyles of successful people.  One that stands out is Jay Leno.  I read his autobiography, Leading With My Chin.  

He knew he could not fail.  It was simply a possibility he could not comprehend.  Hence, he didn't.

That is a key theme in my screenplay:  You know you cannot fail.  Who knows how or why?

When I was a young girl (ages ago, maybe eons) and so attuned to horseback riding, I had a very skittish and clumsy very tall horse.  There were huge ditches that laced my grandmother's farm where I would ride, fancying myself as a (1) fox hunting rider; or (2) steeplechase jockey.  I would urge poor clumsy Sinbad over these huge gaping chasms with the thought:  "Throw your heart over the fence and the horse will follow."  He never stumbled once.  Maybe that's all it takes.  I am trying.