Month: October 2006

So how did it start?

Writer guy

INT – DAY
6 AM. Fall morning. A phone rings. Half-awake man stumbles to answer it.

Sam (croaks): hello?
Boss: There’s smoke pouring out of the server room. I need the passwords to shut everything down. We’re going to yank the plugs soon.
Sam: Uh..is the gear hot? What about the UPS’s?

Boss checks.

Boss: All cool to the touch.
Fire chief: If you don’t shut those servers off now, we’re ripping the walls out!
Sam: Wait! If it’s the gear shorting out then why is everything operational? Are the walls hot?
Fire chief: Could be a problem outlet. Why are we listening to you anyway?

A buildings and grounds staffer rushes in.

B&G: A rubber belt in the air handler on the roof snapped. It’s burning. That air handler vents right into the server room. Let me shut off the HVAC system.

In reality this drama took thirty minutes to play out. Five hours later the server room still smells a bit…rubbery.

Go Twain

Writer guy

Because all hands were on deck Saturday for Parent’s Weekend, attendance at school Monday was optional. Which meant seven hours of work on the novel today. Even managed a workout and a chiropractor visit. Nice. Consecutive days off are good. Forgot what they felt like.

Towards that end, about fifteen pages require a complete scrub down and another fifty need light revisions. The last five will be heavily modified. This is a good and solid draft, and very different from what the Eight read. Because of their input, and Team Eagle Eye, the manuscript is very different. Much better, too. While there may be more work to do—some say the revision process never ends—if nothing else the story moves forward constantly. And the filler level? I’ve got a huge file in Notepad containing extraneous scenes and snippets I cut. I killed lots of darlings. Yes, they are dead. All of them.

Speaking of cut lines, here is my favorite:

Emptiness. A void the night could not fill.

I have no idea why I savored that one so, but I did. Anyway, the emptiness passed.

Four readers are lined up and primed.

The wrap date is the weekend of October 22nd. I budgeted seven days for three start to finish read-throughs and revisions. Unless there is a mail service issue, the crew will have their copies by November 2nd. Since my poor scheduling damns the bulk of their task to the wrong side of the holidays—learned nothing from last year’s lesson apparently—likely only only two will finish by Christmas. Honestly, I have no expectation that anyone will punch out in less than ten weeks. And that’s OK. I have a certification exam to study for and a longish story in progress. There’s feedback on the Stash to implement as well. Plus I plan to enter a script in the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship in 2007, and I’ve been kicking ideas about for that. Have the urge to write a lot of dialog, I guess.

I see a good year on the horizon.

The Porch

Writer guy

After five years of false starts, promises, two years of expired permits, the landlord began the unthinkable project. Yesterday he and a small construction crew—my first floor neighbor, a carpenter by trade, among them—started ripping down the old and busted porch and replacing rotted out columns with temporary metal strut supports. Long a scourge of the neighborhood, I often cursed this eyesore. It’s been a joke among the long term residents in passing.

When it rained, more often than not, water saturated the wooden planks so completely that walking across the surface felt like forced baby steps across a twenty by forty foot sponge. It has been a home to at least two raccoons, gophers, and the Bumblebores of Doom—bees so large that I offered my wallet up to them, no questions asked. They refused my pleas for mercy.

And ugly, man. Bad aesthetics are one thing, but the crumbling porch gave the entire home—a meticulously maintained older mansion converted into apartments—an urban renewal project gone terribly wrong look. Prospective tenants stood up the landlord at scheduled walk-throughs, without explanation, because they spied the porch from a block out and kept driving once they realized that it was the right address.

The landlord says the new porch will be done by Thanksgiving. Let’s translate that number with a landlord labor output theorem. The formula rests on five years of observing his work habits. Six week estimate x Unknown number of distractions + Cold weather fronts = Multiply original estimate by three and add two weeks.

My birthday is in February. His crew might make that date. Maybe.