Posted 2:55 PM by Alfred

Time to get the juices flowing, I did it last nite in another venue, and I’m doing it this afternoon here. I have to, I repeat, HAVE to, get the juices percolating, and the, er, coffee brewing, because, well, it has to be done, this is practice and then it’s onto the screenplay. It’s not utter crap as I had suspected, it has some flaws, yes, but the synergy, no, not the synergy, the, uh, I dunno, the mood, the lighting, the jenny say kwah, it’s all there, all the ingredients are in the pot, and the writing so far is adequate, good enough that upon further scrubbing it’ll shine, and the framework, the most important part, is, surprisingly, solid. I’d had this strange notion after being away from it for overly long that it was just crap on a stick, but it ain’t, it’s crap up on a shelf, and if you look at it right it’s actually not crap at all, and the trick is just to get people to look at it right, and that’s all in the presentation. Arrange the pieces in the proper configuration, cuz they’re good pieces, make them say the right things in the right order, and make things happen that are neither boring nor contrived, keep the plot moving, make sure you’re telling a story, make sure there’s a theme, at least the hint of a theme, make sure that the audience (if there ever is one) cares about the people you’re talking about and voila you may actually have something.

The hardest part for me is getting myself to review all my notes, settle down for a couple hours, and really dig myself into it. Between watching football, basketball, working, working out, feeding the dog, feeding myself, pining for the fjords, riding motorcycle, cleaning house, etcetera and all that gude stuph it’s like who has time for this exercise which may (actually, probably will) prove futile, but the means should not be justified solely by the ends, or possible ends, fuck that. So here I sit writing about writing, basically stroking myself into a modicum of confidence and just getting the fingers moving and bobbing & weaving and forcing myself to fill a page with words and seeing what that looks like & reminding myself that I can in fact do it, even though I’m not talking about much of anything. But, as a famous person which I won’t name (cuz I don’t know if anyone actually said it, well, I did) once said, you can find treasure within a trove of ideologue laced verbal lunacy if you look deep enough, ie, sometimes if you just blab or type or pontificate enough, later on you can go thru it and find a diamond in the buff, er, rough.

But now I have to get back to watching Cal Zona live (er, tivo’d) from Tucson.

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