The Writer Speaks (An Amazon Studios Update)

Well, that was disappointing! If you get my blog via letter, you last night received an empty blog post. I don't know what happened--it looked far from empty when I sent it...so that's a bummer. I fear also, that since I was writing late and tired after a long evening of driving, I won't be able to re-create it.
We're about to hit the road again, so I'll keep this one short. Remember when I mentioned that there was someone doing a rewrite for Children of Others over at Amazon Studios, but I wasn't sure if I should say who it was? Well, I guess I can now, since they just released an interview with Omar Naim.

My Project at Amazon Studios Update

Ahhh--haven't seen one of these for a while, have you?  Just a little one--but a happy one.  As some of you know, Amazon has been interviewing writers for the next rewrite of Children of Others for a few months now.  Last week, I heard that they've found someone.  That's exciting for me, because it's the next step, and to get a movie made, you have to keep taking steps.  I've also heard who it is, but I don't think I can say, because I don't know Amazon's plans for announcing or not announcing.  In any case, it's not the kind of  name that you'd immediately recognize.  But I looked up  his/her credits, and found those credits really intriguing. I like that it's someone with experience, but not a huge resume, because I imagine such a person is tempered by experience, but still sees a project like this as relevant to their future.  (I would like it if a project of mine benefited someone's future --as well as my own!)  My producer also mentioned that this person is smart, seems to get the original sensibility of the film but also understands the kind of changes that need to be made for its next incarnation.  So I'm feeling good about all that.
But also, since I am on the topic of Amazon Studios, something has been weighing heavy on my heart, so I am confessing it here.  My Amazon Studios mailbox contains about a dozen requests from folks asking me to read their scripts.  I haven't  opened that inbox for...eons. I haven't read the loglines, or responded in any way.  That's because I hate to say no, even though I know from my own life that nine times our of ten I would prefer  "no" to "no response," and I get frustrated with people who opt for the "no response."  But here I am, in the same boat.
So my goal, once the semester ends, is to  open those emails--one by one, write apologetic emails, and give some response.   Because I work almost full time, go to school almost full time, try to write almost full time, and I have a real-life writer's group and network of people with whom I exchange writing on a regular basis, I know I can't add the reading of more full scripts to my pile, but I'm hopeful that I can do something that might be helpful. Maybe it will be reading 5 or 10 pages in conjunction with the logline, maybe it will be something else. But it will be something.
And since this was an Amazon Studios-themed post, here are a couple of related articles that my Wordpress suggests you read:

Related articles

• 'Zombieland' lives again at Amazon Studios (bizjournals.com)
• Amazon Studios Starts Free Streaming Of 14 Original Series Pilots (ubergizmo.com)
• Amazon Studios Touts Strong Viewer Response To Its Pilots (deadline.com)

Like Sophie's Choice for Writers

A month or two ago, I think I mentioned that my blogging frequency was going to to decrease, and I promised to talk about why at a future date. That date has come!  This isn't the big topic of my post, but just to catch folks up-- in the past few months there have been big changes over at Amazon Studios. They now have a structure that is substantially different from their first incarnation, and most people who were distressed about the original deal for writers have now given Amazon Studios their blessings (i.e. John August and others). So if you're a writer, you might check out some of the opportunities they have now.  

How this applies to me is, that after my script, Children of Others, won one of the monthly best script awards in 2011, it was chosen for Amazon's Development Slate and a producer was attached. (They called and asked me first, if I would be open to that.  I said yes.)  They renewed the option, and graciously offered to give me a shot at rewriting the script. This, under their old boilerplate agreement, is something I think they could have had me do on spec--but at the first meeting they offered some money for the rewrite, making this my first paid screenwriting gig ever. 

Awesome.

And pretty intimidating.

I've been paid here and there to write other things-- like web-content or a brochure-- but it feels very different.  Somebody or some institution needs "content" to take up a certain amount of space on a page.  It's not hard to envision the final product: What I see on the published page looks a lot like the page I turn in, and thus I know in a direct way that I am providing a service for the money.  

A script is a very different thing--the final product is destined to be very different from whatever template I provide--and that different could be a dozen different directions of different.  Or there might not ever be a final product at all.  Even if I'm getting paid to write--the project as a whole is essentially a gamble for the company.  They might or might not like the script. The might or might not be able to find someone else who likes the script enough to share the costs of making a film.  Anyone might or might not like the film, or even go see the film for it to make the investment back. It makes me really sympathize with everyone involved: the producer, the creative execs and on up the ladder at the company.  You can see why people make "safe" choices (as if there are any), why they try to protect themselves, because the whole thing is really freakin' scary! 

And as the girl at the bottom of the big upside-down pyramid of investment, I feel an additional responsibility...Which brings me back to blogging less...

One of my film professors was (and probably still is) fond of saying--"Any word you type into a blog or email is a word you're not typing into your script."  

In theory-land  I am reflexively opposed to the idea of rationing my words like that--because emails and blogging are a very different form of communication, with a very different audience, i.e. often people I know and care about, and I also blog for myself--to remember my life as it passes by.  It seems mercenary to cast aside these real "relationships" for the hypothetical fame and fortune (mostly fortune). It's comparable to: "Every hour you spend drinking a cup of coffee with a friend, or visiting your mom or playing with kids, is an hour you aren't working on your script."

But in practice, I have certainly been giving short shrift to cups of coffee and other social activities.  I don't know if this is something I will regret when I'm living in an old folks home, or if I'll even remember.  The truth is that you can't know in advance how rewarding any single interaction will be.  I've had several cups of coffee where there was no discernible connection and at the end I thought--shit--I could have spent that hour writing. 

 

So I guess it only makes sense that I post less often.  

But I miss it when I don't blog.  Just so you know.

(I'm posting now because A) Work at my day-job is light today--yay, and B) Because I just turned in an outline this morning, so theoretically, I can stand "at ease" until I get notes on Thursday.  Most of the posts you have seen in the last month have occurred during this between-hand-in-and-notes window.)

The Countdown's On

So, it had been a little while since I'd hung out with the Amazon Studios (now called The People's Production Company) crew. Months in fact. They've had some stuff going on, apparently, at the corporate level, and I haven't really been tapping my foot impatiently saying "I'm ready when you are," because I've had a few things going on too. But on Tuesday I got a set of notes, along with an email saying "let's meet on Friday."

I immediately freaked out. I've been quite busy for the last three months, but now, looking back, I could not for the life of me, remember why. What had I been doing? Certainly not watching the half dozen reference movies, analyzing and breaking them down--which suddenly seemed like a no-brainer. It wasn't re-breaking the story and writing up a little treatment, or visiting art museums for visual references.

"I am not prepared!" I said to myself. "I am doomed!"

But as I went through the notes, I remember there had been one day, or maybe two, that I had spent some hours reworking a couple of characters, and reworking their backstories, and reorganizing the mythology a little bit to fit with both of these things. There had been a week over the holidays where I'd done something all day that had had something to do with this script. I guesses I had been thinking about solutions to certain problems for three months, even if it was only in the back of my mind while making photocopies.

So I went to the meeting today and it was...okay, I think. I think it wasn't too bad. I mean, you can't be sure. We talked for awhile, and then the producer went to the bathroom, and then the creative exec went to the bathroom too, and so I thought it must be the going-to-the-bathroom-break time, and this was going to be a long meeting, so I went to the bathroom too. But maybe it was going-to-the-bathroom-quick-conference time, because as soon as I came back the exec said, "Well, I think we've worked out what we need to, and we're pretty much on the same page...so maybe we'll just see a rewrite in ten weeks."

I nodded, like a rewrite in ten weeks was this completely reasonable, doable thing. "Ten weeks," I confirmed.

"Ten weeks," said another guy, "is about standard, right? Or eight weeks?"

"Ten weeks," I said, "sounds good." Which it did, in comparison to eight weeks.

Verdict

Dear Barrington,

Thank you for sharing your work at Amazon Studios.
It was a hard decision but unfortunately CHILDREN OF OTHERS was not
chosen as the winner of the Best Script Annual Award.
We have enjoyed seeing your work and getting to know you over the past year.
Thank you for your many contributions to the community.

We look forward to bringing you more opportunities to share
your work in the future.

Kind Regards,
Amazon Studios

It's okay.  I'm okay.  I am going to eat cookies though.

Tomorrow

So, sometime tomorrow I will find out whether I won a hundred-thousand dollar Amazon studios Annual Awards prize...or not. It's strange to think that right now I don't know--the outcome seems so wide open, but by tomorrow night at this time, I will know--one way or the other.

My evening tonight got a little bit Paul-jacked, and I ended up watching last week's Top Chef AND The Voice, but in a way it was good preparation to see so many people win, and so many others not make the cut. Whichever way things go for me tomorrow, I'm hardly alone in winning or losing and either way, I should be responsible for how the result impacts the course of my life. It's very difficult for me to witness, even on TV, and now in my own life, but the truth is that the profession I've chosen is like this: they like the script, or they don't, they buy a script or they don't, the film gets a greenlight or it doesn't, the box-office is good or it's not. I don't know how many rungs you'd have to climb up the ladder to escape the swings--I don't think you can.

So my plan is, either way things go tomorrow, I'm going to write tomorrow night, and either way things go, I'm going to have pie.

(P.S. I did finish reading the last two scripts that are in the finals, Animal Heads and Origin of a Species. They were both really different from mine, and from each others. Animal Heads has an indie vibe, Origin of a species was a very crisp suspense movie that read really quickly.)

All About Me! (An Amazon Studios Post)

So this week's Amazon Studios blog has been dedicated to profiles about the various finalists for the annual awards. Today's is about me. Writing answers to questionnaires can call up a fair amount second guessing...should I try to be funny? Should I play it straight? I mostly did the latter, and that is pretty much what they printed.

One of my more "humorous" answers was a ploy for Amazon studios to give finalists (or just me) a Kindle DX as a consolation prize if we don't win, which I'm still secretly hoping for even though they didn't print that part... If I DO win, I'll buy one for myself--re-investing in the company!

Back to not thinking about it now...

The Weekend

Not half bad.
Friday: I made progress on my office--the hallway is full of more candidates for the garage sale.

Saturday: The afore mentioned animated gif class and lunch with friends too long neglected. Game night at our neighbors'. We played Dune, a pretty involved game, which thankfully only took three hours--it can take much longer! I don't spend as much time as Paul gaming, but when I do, I realize why games might appeal to so many writers--how playing games can make you more aware in terms of twists and turns and strategies.

I was interested to find that Dune has an element where the circular board is divided into section, and a storm moves around these sections in a not entirely randomized manner. It immediate made me think of a similar device used in The Hunger Games trilogy. Obviously, the book is about a "game" as well, but I have a feeling that more examples could be found. Strategy games are about maneuvering yourself out of bad situations and into better ones by pursuing resources and alliances and fighting battles etc. What else is about those things? Stories, of course. And also life.

Sunday, I rode the 105 bus for the first time to a friend's book signing in West Hollywood. The bus travels north and south on La Cienega, which is a fairly major street with many shops that it would be good to have access to without having to park, so that was a cool discovery.

And, over the course of the three days, I read Gideon's Law. (If you follow the link, you can download a PDF.) It's the story of a cop who gets assigned a ride-along from hell. It has elements of movie Collateral and the series 24. I found it easy to read because the writing was so fluid though some of the logistics became confusing or incredible here and there. I thought the writer did good work adding complications, ratcheting up the stakes. I was tense and engaged for much of the read.

Reading this script made me think about the costs and benefits of ramping up action quickly. There were just a couple of quick scenes at the beginning with the protagonist (Shane Gideon) and his girlfriend/partner before she is taken hostage and his whole world changes, which isn't a lot of time to establish relationships and the essence of a character. But it's good, especially for the genre, to get right into the action and the main conflict. I thought the writer did a nice job of short-handing the the Shane's "problem" of having--at least in the perception of others--screwed up on the job so that he is being ostracized by the other cops. There is an arc whereby the opinions of those people do change by the end. But I'm not sure there was a clear character arc for Shane himself. I don't necessarily believe that every main character has to change--but I think the readers/audience usually know whether that should happen. In the cases where it should, we hope or fear that the main character will change. Not always. We don't really hope for James Bond to change. We do, however, hope that Jamie Foxx's character in Collateral can change. We enjoy seeing him become less passive and more active in his own life. In order to do this he's set up at the beginning as more a dreamer than a do-er. This is where I wasn't entirely clear about Shane. Does he agree with everyone else that he messed up, and it's eating away at him? Or does he believe he made the right call somehow? And I wonder what he would have done if his life had followed its normal course. Was he hoping to to win back favor somehow? Or just ignore the animosity? Or was he considering quitting his job or requesting a transfer?

Especially in early drafts of Children of Others, I've fielded similar questions--what is it that Skylar wants? I've always wanted her to have some ambivalence about having a child--but that's a hard picture to paint without the colors getting muddy. Even now, as I prepare to go into a rewrite, I'm trying to add to the specifics of her situation and her character. Was she someone who was fun and adventurous before she got embroiled in years of infertility treatments and lost a pregnancy and became so fearful of loss? I'm also thinking about here husband, Dillon, and now--new and exciting!-- I'm thinking about the background of the "doctors" who create the hybrid baby inside her, because I think they will need to play a bigger part in the new draft.

I'm probably thinking of all of this even more right now because I'm reading a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing, by Lagos Egri, which is really excellent so far, but perhaps a subject better for another post.

Amazon: Final Five

Just a little update: I'm in the final five for the Annual Best Script award at Amazon Studios. The announcement happened earlier this week. My "don't think about it" strategy was thwarted by a few things: said announcement, papers that arrived for me to sign, and the email from a freelance writer hired to do a profile piece on each of the finalists. The email included a list of questions for me to answer like, "how old are you?" "what's your day job?" and ""what was the most difficult thing about writing your script." The profiles will be published on the Amazon blog starting on Monday. As much as I wasn't a fan of filling out my own questionnaire, I have to say I'm really interested to read about the other writers.

I also want to read everyone's script before the announcement on February 7. Yesterday and today I read the first one, I Think My Facebook Friend is Dead which was really a fun concept and read. It reminded me some of Scott Pilgrim vs The World, in ways that were mostly good. I liked the device of the Farmville farm, and the exploration of relationships as they move from the virtual world into the real world. It got a little episodic-feeling in some places--but then so did Scott Pilgrim, and probably so does my script--When I read scripts and see a flaw, I mentally go back over my own work and often see the very same problems.

Gideon's Law is next. Let you know.

Equanimity Required

Update on the re-fi saga: It looks like it's back on the table. I went back to the bank, and it seems they overlooked something that threw things back in my favor. Which was awesome. When my loan rep told me, I was ecstatic.

Then, as I walked back to work--I realized that the profound, even debilitating, disappointment I'd felt the week before was due to the fact that I had let myself get ecstatic before. I'd engaged in future thinking, not just counting, but reveling, in my chickens before they hatched. This was fun, but engaging in the emotional high was what had opened the door to the emotional low.

Finding the correct amount of future thinking (my own made up term that for all I know means something else entirely) is a difficult thing. Certainly it's required for motivation. Motivational speakers and authors say that you need to visualize your future to solidify your goals and galvanize your movement toward those goals. But at the same time, over-engaging can be destructive to those same goals. While Paul seems to relishes future thinking, and it doesn't seem to raise too many demons for him creatively, I'm not the same way. I have to play a little game with myself, averting my eyes from possible futures. If I look at my hopes and dreams too directly, the intensity of hope vs fear paralyzes me. I do better work if I lay out a few steps at a time, and then walk the path with blinders that block out the pie in the sky.

In screenwriting, the thing you most want to do is ramp up the audience's hope vs fear for the protagonist. This is the primary tool for creating engagement. So it's perhaps ironic, or at least amusing to me, that in my own life, I can't stomach the emotional engagement enough to be my own protagonist. Disfunctional? Maybe, but on the other hand, when you watch movies, the protagonist is almost always yanked out of her daily life. While she might escape from aliens or mobsters, or prevent the world from blowing up, she can't, at the same time, balance her checkbook or get her daily quota of pages written.

So over-engaging in hopes and fears, is kind of counterproductive in this way, especially if you are dealing with outcomes that you can't control. I can work to set something in motion, but in the end, it's not my call whether I get approved for a loan or not--and obviously, the verdict can change overnight. While I have to continue to take every step I can to achieve a desire outcome, to over-engage in hope of the desired result, or flail in the fear of the opposite only makes me vulnerable.

So this was the conversation I had with myself as I walked back from the bank, and it turned out to be timely conversation, because late this evening (I'm delaying this post to comply with confidentiality), I checked my email, discovered I'm a semifinalist for the Amazon Studios annual prize for best script. The prize, $100,000, would be a life-changing amount at this point.

I could start itemizing how, but I won't.

Because the more I engage in the hope, the more I can already feel the sense of loss when I don't see my name on the finalist list, or whatever comes after that--and that's not a good place for me to be, when what I need to do, in the big scheme of things, is write.

I'm happy that when I checked my email tonight, I was writing. And I was working on the project that is in the competition. That felt right, as if being on that semifinalist list is an outcome in itself-- it's symbolic of the opportunities I already have with this script.

I was also glad I mid-writing session when I saw the announcement, because when I am writing, writing feels like the first thing--and everything else feels secondary. Thus the impact of the announcement was mitigated, which I prefer. That's a relationship I hope to sustain between my writing, and all the worldly things that surround it. Not because I think that's morally better, but because of my particular make-up, which doesn't have a big tolerance for excessive highs and lows.

(P.S. If you know me in real life, please don't congratulate me on my semi-finalist status yet--I'll be trying not to think of pink elephants. After I get axed, I'll let you know, and feel free to tell me how great it was to get this far--I think so too!)

Happy New 2012!

Very low key New Year's Eve with family, a great dinner plus games, and fifteen minutes of cringing at the Carson Daly / Ryan Seacrest filler conversations before watching the ball drop.

It's 1:10, the hubby and roommates are at a party, and I'm already in my new leopard-spot flannel pajamas in bed with my kindle at the ready.

A pretty good final day to the year--turned in a quasi-game-plan-thingy to Ed Saxon for a new draft of Children of Others (I had promised something by end of December), went to the gym, drove to San Gabriel for $15 massages with my brother, returned to said dinner and games at my sister's house.

SOOO many wishes for 2012--but tonight's not the night for lists...tomorrow-B can take care of that.

Good fate and fortune to you all in the brand shiny new New Year!

Busy, Good Day...(also an Amazon Studios Post)

Ahhhh....almost 1AM again. I wonder what life would be like with a regular eight to nine hours of sleep instead of five and a half. And still, there's so much I'd like to do with my day even now. I want to watch The Fugitive, I want to read this new book I got, and I would even like to clean my office and pay some bills. As well as write this blog. It can't all happen, because I am almost falling asleep as I write this--but perhaps I can work my way to the end of a post about my day...

Umm...I wrote that on Thursday night--and never made it to the end! Now it's Saturday morning--I'll try again.

Thursday morning was one of the few that I woke up and couldn't immediate fall back into a deep sleep--probably because of the extra adrenaline running through my system, born of anxiety and nerves. I had a meeting with some folks at Amazon Studios to get their notes on my script, Children of Others, that won their best script contest last month. I was nervous because I had gotten some comments in advance, and wasn't sure how prepared I should with a new "take" on the material. I was nervous because the meeting was in Sherman Oaks, and with my bad sense of direction, I can get lost in the valley, and somehow being late seemed a mortifying prospect, and I was also nervous because I'd recently found out that Ed Saxon was going to be at the meeting. He was one of the judges of the competition, so it wasn't completely out of the blue--but when you meet people who have produced films you really admired, you can't help but want to make a good impression.

But I found that once I got in the door (on time), my anxieties about things like impressions faded away. The offices (the ones in LA, not the ones in Seattle) feel like an optimistic start-up, cubes and conference rooms scattered in a large, largely empty space that they share with IMDB. Not many frills. It felt like people had more things to do than decorate. The woman who answered the door when I rang the bell didn't know who I was (I think she might have been from the IMDB side), but before I even sat on the couch next to the messy pile of magazines, my contact, Michael, emerged from a cubicle and greeted me. When they asked me if I wanted water and I said yes, someone brought it to me in a disposable cup, instead of a bottle. These are all things that made me feel comfortable and in a familiar element. Polished-looking people at polished reception desks as soon as I walk in doors always make me want to check for holes in my sweater.

We did the normal chit-chat then talked a lot about the world of the story. This was really fun. We talked about backstories of certain characters, and the universe and rules--and there were some notes about improving the flow and the build of the story, and adding in some bigger, better moments. I'm actually looking forward to sitting down, listening to the recording of the session (even though I have a tendency to listen back and think I sound crazy) and working with the material with an eye to solving specific problems. And when I say problems, I mean less like flaws--though I'm sure there are plenty, and more like an equation.

The problem--as with so many things in my life, is--when?!
As soon as I left the meeting, the craziness of life resumed. Before the Amazon meeting had been scheduled, I had already made an unchangeable advisement meeting where I would choose and get clearance to take a class next semester. There wasn't enough time to get back to school, so I had to pull off the road and do the meeting on the way-since navigating the 101 to 110 interchange while talking intelligently is not one of my skill sets. Work, of course, was about catching on the half day I had missed. After work I went to yoga class at the gym--which is on the opposite end of campus, followed by an event for the class I am currently taken--again on the opposite end of campus.

The event was a panel with various writers who are on faculty for the MPW program (this is the department where I'm taking my classes), talking memoir. One of the panelists was Bernard Cooper. He had been one of my class choices at my advisement meeting earlier in the day, but I had gone another direction. Listening to him speak however, he was so articulate and thoughtful, I went home and emailed the adviser asking if I could change my mind. She called the next day to say there was one spot left, she my class next semester is with him.

Yesterday was a full day. I have some craziness with work, so I worked til six, when Paul picked me up for dinner and another literary event, followed by a movie--and I'm about to leave to do a little "in service" time today as well. Because of writing, I generally try to avoid extending my day job into the weekends, but some aspects of the particular project I'm working on--which is not secret, just too big to explain here--have deadlines on Monday, and I can't trust that a constant flow of visitors to my "reception desk" won't make Monday fly by without my being able to achieve them. Tomorrow is already booked end to end, so I fear this afternoon is my only writing time--and that's only if, once again, I decide to avert my eyes from the state of the house!

Amazon Studios: Um...I won.

Which is awesome. I'm super grateful. I'm interested to see what happens next. I want say more profound things about that but all the profundity has been squeezed from my brain by sleepiness.
I will say that I am thinking about the money in my waking moments that aren't dominated by expense reports and filing...Should I use it to to plug up some leaky holes in our financial boat, some holes in other people's boats--or-- is it possible I can figure out how to use it to carve a few extra hours out of the day?

Amazon Studios, An Unexpected Turn of Events

A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from Amazon Studios saying that Children of Others had reached the semifinalist round in its Best Script contest. Yesterday they announced the five finalists, and my script was among them.

A kind of fun thing about the contest is that you can actually read the work of your competitors. I woke up early this morning and read two of the other four scripts in the mix. Both were well written. One I loved and one I hated.

The one I hated is called The Hipster and The Schoolgirl. The dialogue was witty, and the characters were stylish. If you like Quentin Tarantino and other guys who fuse gory violence with humor and style, then this is the script for you. Not so much for me. While I liked Pulp Fiction, I waited eighteen years before seeing Reservoir Dogs, because the ear thing sounded like the kind of things that would give me nightmares. When I got invited to a retrospective last year, I figured, "hell, there's been a lot of episodes of 24 since 1992--I'm sure that ear thing people kept talking about probably isn't even a big deal now." I was wrong. That scene with the ear, along with almost the entire movie Seven, are pieces of cinematic entertainment I could happily have waited another eighteen years to see.

I was originally planning to read only one script this morning (I have writing to do, don't ya know) but the first script left me so agitated and disturbed that I had to read the next one just to get the taste out of my brain. I read In the Silences, and it was exactly the kind of movie I love. The real world with a sci-fi/fantasy twist, heavy on characters and relationships. Think Source Code or Adjustment Bureau. I looked up the writer, who has a blog here. Another piece he has on the Amazon site won the Best Sci-Fi/Action Script award in a previous month.

As for Children of Others, I did a rewrite back in June that I tried to enter for the July deadline, but somehow the upload didn't take, so this was first month that the new draft was considered. I was surprised, because I guess I'd started to feel that my script was just swimming in a vast ocean of other scripts--which is not untrue-- but the recognition reminds me that there are readers out there whose jobs are to man the life rafts and search for for the living, so if you can keep splashing water, there's always a chance to get rescued.

20 Thousand Words Under the Sea

In other news, I hit the 20,000 word mark on the novel I am working on. I'm not too happy with my writing progress on many fronts, but the rock bottom, bare minimum I demand of myself, is that I write 5000 words a week on it, so that I will have a a genuine bad first draft by the end of summer. Sometimes I scribble in my notebook on the bus in the morning, then type it up on my lunch hour at work-that usually gets me the first two or three hundred, and I have to do the remaining six or seven hundred in the evening. What doesn't happen during the week has to happen on the weekend.

I'm not sure the novel is really the kind of thing can ever go anywhere at all, so it is very scary to work on it instead of a screenplay. but then I think--well I've spent that long on lots of screenplays that are also languishing in virtual desk drawers on my hard drive--so what am I so scared of?

Coming back to one specific screenplay (Children of Others--still kicking, and still kicking me in the ass) that I need to revise is so difficult and depressing that I made today's goal (in addition to the 5000 words) be to simply find and open the two most recent versions. I didn't have to write, or even look, tonight. I just had to open them. Mission accomplished.

Pre-Writing for Amazon Post

Wherein I simply say--I am beginning my rewrite today. I have been putting it off. I have been mulling it over. I have been contemplating big changes.

I may or may not (mostly likely not) have all these changes done by the upcoming deadline of february 28, but whatever I have done will constitute the new draft. Exciting, right?

Today I am going to take scenes out, and put different scenes in.

It will be haphazard. But it will be started. I am going to spend at least two hours on this project today, starting at 12:30... ore perhaps slightly after that, since I am writing this post.

I have this new thing I'm doing, since I never know where my days go, can never remember what it is I did all day. It's a rudimentary log where I try to track work that I'm doing on various projects. Do you want to see it? Here:

Costa Rica, Revisions, and Stuff

A big thing on my mind these days is that I'm traveling to Costa Rica in a few weeks. My friend is organizing some arts-related events for International Women's Day, and he asked me to give a workshop. I'm actually doing two workshops--a half day, and one that is a bit longer. It's the first time I've ever done this, and I am--no big surprise here--feeling quite anxious. I'll feel better once I have a lesson planned truly mapped out. I have a lot of things I want to talk about, but I need to make choices, and I need to have an order of presentation, and I need to understand that I won't be able to jam three years worth of full-time education into 3-5 hours.

My tendency toward anxiety aside, this is a really nice opportunity. I'm at the end of my university education, in the phase where I should be "putting it all together" and I've found that nothing forces me to have to organize my thoughts and metabolize my own learning like having to explain it to someone else. So that's where I'm at now.

The need to explain things often necessitates reading and reviewing of various concepts, and occasionally this leads to small epiphanies. I had one of these last night. I was reviewing the idea of antagonistic forces in a story: There are three locations of these forces that will test the attributes and character of the protagonist: 1) In a person (including anthropomorphized characters in animation!) whose own objectives are counter to that of the protagonist. 2) In an antagonistic or indifferent world--be that a natural world with earthquakes and avalanches, or a societal construct that works against the hopes of the protagonist. 3) Within the protagonist him/herself--when two aspects of a character are at war with each other.

It is this final aspect that has always fascinated me--characters who work against their own wants or needs. "Conflicted" characters... a Dr. Jekyll who wants to pursue his own life and love, and a Mr. Hyde who comes along and sabotages his progress toward that. My fascination is born, no doubt, from a deep empathy for conflicted characters, being one myself. I want to do a lot, and accomplish a lot--but I have a lot of the kind of baggage that makes these things difficult.

My small epiphany had to do with how I conceive of the conflicting desires. Each one needs to be positive unto itself. By that I mean, the phrase is not: I want to speak freely, BUT I'm afraid people won't like me if I do. It is that there are aspects: One wants to speak freely, AND the other desperately wants to be liked. Phrased this way, I can see the two "warring factions" more clearly. In any interaction, there will be a struggle between the part of me that wants to be honest and authentic regardless of the consequences, and the one who wants bask in the approbation of others.

It's possible you don't see the epiphanic aspect of this at all. It is small, and it is something that I am sure I have been told countless times, and at some level knew already--and yet, last night when I thought about it, something clicked. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece that's approximately the right area--you know where it goes--but then you really press it into place and feel it lock in between the other pieces, and how it fits perfectly. The whole experience of it just became a little more solid.

I'm in the midst of conceiving my rewrite for Children of Others, and this is helpful. I've always felt that Skylar is a conflicted character--but readers have had trouble relating to her emotionally, and I'm hoping that rethinking her warring wants can help remedy this.

Amazon Studios, Winners and Collaborators

At the end of January, the first script winners were announced. Congratulations to Marty Weiss and Richard Stern, as Amazon Studios describes them, a "couple of dads." A little close reading reveals that they are also a couple of film school grads. Weiss has an MFA from NYU, and Stern is "ten years past his film studies." The latter might not actually mean film school, but my point is that it sounds like there has been some concerted study/training. A film student myself, I don't consider that a bad thing. I've put a lot of money and time down on the theory that writing is a craft that requires dedication, discipline, and is vastly helped by good training, whatever form that takes. Perhaps there are those who emerge like Athena--fully formed screenwriters, chock full of wisdom and ready for battle, but I'm sadly not one of those, so the fact that these winners have made choices similar to my own gives support to the idea my choices might have some merit.

On the other hand, part of the implied mythos of the Amazon Studios contest from the beginning was that there are people in the hinterlands with stories unlike any we have seen, and that this new development paradigm would find and open the unwieldy Hollywood gates to them--the online equivalent of finding a Lana Turner at the soda fountain... in Idaho. I'll be keeping half an interested eye out to see if that happens at some point.

The other big news is that Amazon decided to revise their collaboration rules. There was a lot of criticism of the total access for would-be collaborators that was one of the distinguishing characteristics of the original contest, so this move has met with a positive reaction such as this "slightly less terrible" post from John August.

The community itself had also constructed some unofficial collaboration rules inside Amazon-town, and woe unto those who didn't catch on to them fast enough, as in this forum discussion. In general, I think the neighborhood watch team that has emerged (comprised of community members, not Amazon) is pretty even-handed, but the response was on the harsh side for this guy, who did a proof-read and posted it with a note saying that all he’d done was a proof read, only to be accused of adding a “rewrite” as if he was being sneaky or something. The Amazon construction of the site encouraged his actions--but the community constructed code of etiquette was obviously highly discouraging, despite the fact that the Amazon rules were clear that changes had to be significant for any rewriter to garner any of the cash prize.

I currently have two collaborators listed on Children of Others. The first was a very similar situation to the one above. Somebody I didn't know offered up some light edits and attached a note saying he laid no claim to the work. My reaction: I thanked him publicly in my forum for his time and effort. It's less confusing for edit notes to appear on the script-- the whole reason for uploading crappy RTFs instead of PDF was so people could make edits. My second collaborator was somebody trying out some audio software, so again, it's my original work as sound file of some sort. He asked my permission, and I said yes. It has been stated that all versions get read, so it should be impossible for any revision, even a bad one, to torpedo anyone's chances, since an amazing and unadulterated previous version would simply out-perform any sub-par revision attempts. (Of course, it would be nice to think the reason I didn't place this round is because they only sent the sound-file version to the reader, and thus my work was overlooked... but I have to trust, for my own sanity, that there is some kind of system that works better than that.)

In general, I’m fine with the collaboration change. It gives people freedom to choose for themselves, and hey, I'm pro-freedom. Plus, for the most part it the concession was academic, since no one was doing much major rewriting anyway. Philosophically however, I'm a little sad, as I have a certain nostalgia for group murals at parties, where the charm is that you don’t know who’s going to come along and what they’re going to do. There's a certain kind of utopian vision being dismantled here.

My script still has a collaboration setting of "open." Stop by and revise, if you desire. Write something good, so we can win, and split the check!

A final note, I stumbled across this personable blog post by Chris Regan, who was the source of the above forum link (I had not seen it before), and who covers some of the territory that interests me, but that I did not discuss in this post.

Amazon Studios: Two Months In

The biggest news is probably that the 50 semifinalists for the first round of competition were announced on Wednesday. (Big congrats to any semifinalist who might be reading this!) Six finalists will be announced this upcoming week.

Those who know me will want to know if Children of Others was on the list of 50. It was not. I was disappointed. The script had performed well enough in a few competitions to make hoping for top fifty seem not unrealistic. Combined with an 11 hour school day and another rejection letter in the mailbox (for an essay) upon my return home, it was one of those days that makes going to bed at the end of it a blessing. However, I've never had any illusions that I wouldn't end up rewriting, so life continues.

Also of interest is Amazon's announcement of a new competition for those who produce table reads of those semifinalist scripts, with a $10,000 prize for the best one.

In the "ongoing news" arena, the number of contestants has not increased some but not a lot since the end of the first round. It's currently at 2339.

I think today I'm going to discuss the FORUMS.

There are six forums provided on the website: Making Movies, Writing Scripts, Collaboration, Gear, Amazon Studios Issues and Help, and Commissary. These forums are maintained by maybe 100 of the 2000 participants, although there may be a number of spectators like myself. I prefer "spectator" to "lurker," as I doubt many of us are lurkers by intention. I have left a couple of posts over the course of the contest, and stay alert for the occasional opportunity to add something to a conversation, just to be friendly, but mostly, I don't see many instances where I have a lot to add. While I agree that Save The Cat is a helpful and easy read, that most rules have exceptions, that the use of profanity should be intentional, conscious, and motivated by the characters or their environment, generally, by the time I check the boards, someone will have said what there is to say on the topic at hand. If it is craft-oriented, there will be a spectrum of responses from easy sound-bites to online master-class. In terms of more "controversial" topics, there tend also to be enough responses to articulate the argument, and it just seems frustrating to get too invested. I've yet to see anyone swayed by someone else's opinion. It's like having discussions about religion or politics. I'd be really surprised if someone jumped up on the fence about God because I pointed out that there's really not any way be sure. "Oh, geez, you're right! No one has ever said that before. I'm an agnostic now!"

None of this is to say anything negative about forums--they seem like a necessary tool to provide for a site like this--only to give a sense of the perspective from which I am "reporting." I can tell that some people have used the forums successfully to form real relationships, but I'm not one of those. While I consider myself a friendly and social person in many situations, I don't know how to translate it well to this medium (or if I feel a real desire to do so). I am always happy to read the forums and build a sense of the real people who are represented there, but at the same time, doing so makes me feel a little like a ghost, floating around, looking in.

So, from my ghostlike perspective: Writing Scripts and Amazon Studios Issues and Help are most frequently updated, followed by Commissary. I check in once or twice a day (a la Facebook), and usually find that some thread in the first two has been updated within the last thirty minutes. These forums have fewer threads, but many replies. The Collaboration forum has over 400 threads, but many of these have 0 replies. People talk, and no one talks back. I see a certain logic to these numbers. Writers like to write, and a forum is conducted via writing, so Writing Scripts functions pretty well. Also, lots of people have had questions about the whole Amazon thing, and while "help" from Amazon Studios is extremely intermittent, many people seem willing to discuss and speculate, thus Issues and Help finds readers.

But Collaboration... That's kind of the theme of the whole enterprise, isn't it? That's the big experiment. If you throw 2000 people in a virtual pot and stir it up a little, will it make something, and will it be something good? But it's the most difficult part of the endeavor. Even when "teams" are custom made, like when everyone works for the same company, and is earning a salary, and knows there is a certain market or audience for the product being requested, it's hard. That's why companies have retreats, and meetings and team-building weekends. Because motivating people to create social bonds and trust in a purely virtual world when they have any other options is really tough.

My forum pick for the week, in the wake of the recent contest results is this one, about rewriting. Some people entered the contest for a lark, and are done now. Most say they will rewrite. Many say that rewriting is an important part of writing.

I'll be rewriting, of course, because that's what I do anyway, and because most people in "the industry" who have shown interest in my script think I've made a bad decision in doing this contest, so I feel like I have little choice but to work to make it a valuable experience. Also, if I didn't rewrite, what would I report on for the next 16 months?

Evening Decline

Some days take a toll on one's morale, and for me, this was one. It was a long day--on campus for eleven hours. It's funny, as this morning I was contemplating the energy and bit of hope I felt, and wondering if it would survive the day. Some days it does survive--it only takes an odd scrap of encouragement here or there, but 'twas not to be today. By 11am I had read that my script was not among the fifty finalists announced at Amazon Studios. I will give a fuller report in a couple of days.