Theresa and I decided to go to the Word on the Street Festival on Sunday, since we’re huge book nerds. We expected hundreds of people at this event (or at least I did), having never heard of this festival in past, but instead there are more in the thousands. We had some nice and costly lemonade and some fresh corn on the cob as a guilty pleasure. It’s the haul of books that I brought home that made my day.

I have been a Warren Ellis fan for a long time with his Transmetropolitan series, and I was quite happy to find a copy in a nice portable hardcover of his debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, from the Labyrinth store, and it was only 10$.

I also found at the Victoria College book sale running alongside the Festival a nice copy of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now I knew that Spielberg had been responsible for the screenplay but I had absolutely no idea that he had also written a novel. My gut tells me it was actually done by a ghost-writer just like all of those other terrible novelizations based ‘on the screenplay’.

Someday when I’m bored I will sit down and bite the bullet.Theresa also picked up a copy of Robert Sawyer’s Rollback, and Robert Sawyer just so happened to be there to sign it. Once Theresa is done reading it I’ll give it a go. I enjoyed Flashforward and if you find the Large Hadron Collider at all interesting you might like Flashforward’s sci-fi take on it too.

This is probably my favourite item of the day. It is an Alfred Hitchcock Pop-Up Book. There are some awesome pages for Psycho, Vertigo(above), and The Birds, but I am surprised there was not a page devoted Rear Window. It’s easily the best coffee table book I have ever seen and it only cost me $5. If only I had a coffee table…

Last but not least, Theresa also picked us up these Einstein Voodoo babies that I am not proudly adorning on my keychain. Out of the selection they had this was the only one I took a liking to. I only wish they had a Tesla or Philip K. Dick Voodoo baby.

I had a bit of a laugh when I saw that their website is VDbaby.com .

Not exactly the best choice for a product or domain name.

As for the photos from the festival. I hope to have them up later in the day when I take a break from my writing.

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Ben Affleck actually wrote Good Will Hunting? My money is still on Damon writing it while Ben got high sitting on the couch.

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Paul Newman becomes someone’s imaginary friend? I thought you had to be dead first before they write you a character like that. Like Elvis (played by Val Kilmer) in True Romance.

Too bad Preacher never happened. I would have loved to have seen someone played Preacher’s imaginary friend John Wayne.

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A wonderful message brought to you from the folks at the AMPTP.

Is it just me or is the strike bringing out the best in a lot of writers?

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www.pencils2mediamoguls.com

I’ll be making my bulk order this week.

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I know I should have mentioned this sooner but I’ve been spending some time on messageboards and reading comments about the current WGA strike. It blows my mind how easily manipulated people are by the rich. It actually makes me nauseous. If you don’t like Unions it’s either because you’re rich with a golden spoon stuck up your ass or a member of the Mafia… or you’re just an ignorant asshole. If we didn’t have unions we’d have sweatshops down the street and education would either be unattainable for the majority of the population or simply nonexistent.

Obviously I am an aspiring writer. I never wanted into the business because of the money but the idea of paying the rent and bills is a pleasant idea while using my self proclaimed talent. So when I start reading posts on blogs and comments on Messageboards saying the strike is ridiculous and that writers are rich as it is. Where the fuck is this information coming from? What’s unfair is the way that the media portrays writers. Somehow because of ’showrunners’ like Aaron Sorkin, JJ Abrams, David E. Kelly etc. it’s assumed all writers make millions of dollars. Heck, the names I just belted off there aren’t that rich(at best they live comfortably) considering the amount of work they do in relation to the amount of revenue they bring in. People don’t realize that showrunner also means producer and sometimes director. If someone like Joss Whedon has to struggle to get a film like Serenity off the ground with the money hound known as Buffy in his catalogue, we live in a sorry state of affairs.

I don’t mean to pump the egos of screenwriters here but does the public or the industry realize the writer is most often the prime mover of intellectual properties. People also in my opinion has the misconception of writers being millionaires because of the rare but successful writer/director/producer trinity. I’m talking about early Spielberg, Tarantino, Woody Allen, George Lucas. Ok imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels would have been with a ‘writer’. I also don’t think Tarantino or Woody Allen are Michael Eisner rich. Did I mention Michael Eisner is an asshole?

Yeah, Michael Eisner is an asshole. Do you have any idea how much this man made from being the CEO of Disney for like 20 years? Ever notice how Disney sold out and kinda sucked during that period? Remember the news coming from Orlando of performers getting diseases from the unclean character costumes or performers nearly dying from heat exhaustion? Know how much they got paid? Many of them were interns and most of them got minimum wage with no healthcare. So when I hear this asshole saying the Writers Strike is misguided and stupid, I get a little annoyed.

Then there’s king governor douchebag of Kah-Lee-Forn-ya. When Conan the Conservative was asked about the strike he had this to say

“That’s the sad story, because the studio executives are not going to suffer, the union leaders are not going to suffer, the writers that are striking, they are not going to suffer. Those are all people that have money,”

Writers have money ? Almost half the union is unemployed Arnie. The only people who have money in the Writers’ Union are the poster boys and gals. And I’m not knocking them, they are there in solidarity for their friends who are struggling to make mortgage payments. I don’t know how someone who has been in the industry so long can have such a idiotic view of the way the world works. The actors on Friends made more money than the President of the United States. Ironically enough these ‘millionaire’ actors are for the most part supporting the people who put them there. Want to know what a producer, actor, director is? A person who can’t write. The saying goes “Everyone is a writer.” . That’s wrong. Everyone ‘wants’ to be a writer. If Rupert Murdoch thinks Writers don’t deserve fair wages than maybe he should do the writing. He’s already making up the news.

For those who don’t grasp what little piece of the pie the WGA is asking for… Watch This.

They deserve 1000 times more than what they are asking for. Remember next time you see Russell Crowe in a movie making 20 million dollars for just showing up on set and being ‘difficult to work with’.

If you’re missing your shows right now just wait till the DGA and SAG join the WGA into the Voltron of strikes.

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I know being an ‘aspiring screenwriter’ doesn’t make me a greatest authority on the subject, but I’ve read a lot of books, and I’ve written a lot of self proclaimed garbage. That might as well make me a trained professional. Well at least ‘trained’.

Rather than cover some pretentious post about three act structure (which I’ll cover if need be), I just want to recommend a program that has helped me immensely in my writing if only because I’m a perfectionist.

Just to get it out of the way. I’m not in any way affiliated with the company that produces this product. I’m just a fan. The product in question is Wordweb. You might think it is simply a dictionary program that sits in your taskbar, but it’s so much more. For starters this program has heard of this crazy concept called localization. So no more annoying suggestions by MS word to correct your Canadian spelling (what an insult that is). This program sits neatly in your taskbar and provides synonyms, homonyms, and heck if you type in something like a body part it will list all of the similar ‘parts’ in a list for. Heck I use it more often than anything just to make sure I am using the word I have chosen in the right context.

Not only has it helped my writing immensely I use it just about everyday making me the arrogant speller I am today.

Did I mention they have a very powerful version this free? You can check out their site here.

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I thought I was having a bad day when my screenplay which I had written by hand was stolen out of the back of my car. At least now I can say ‘it could be worse’. I was reading on ABC News and found out that on Wednesday of this week Francis Ford Coppola (the director of The Conversation, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now to name a few) had his laptop stolen from his Argentinian home. Since all the news I have been reading on the report seems shaky, I’m not 100% sure as to what was actually stolen from him. The articles all agree that it’s a laptop and video equipment, but what was on the laptop that seems to have conflicting reports. I’ve read articles saying he had edits for two films he was working on, the script to Tetra which he is making with Matt Damon, as well as 15 years of ‘work’. As a writer I could not feel more for Coppola’s plight. Those ‘Non-writers’ would never understand that it’s like someone stole something right out of your head, and you can’t just rewrite. Whenever you write something you are writing it as you are ‘now’.I hope he gets his laptop back in one piece. After all, I would like to see another Coppola film someday…

Below is the trailer for Youth Without Youth which may have also be partially stolen.

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Mark Twain is one funny guy, and he wasn’t a fan of James Fenimore Cooper (who you may know as the author of Last of the Mohicans). He wrote these rules in response to Cooper’s first novel Deerslayer which was being praised by Professors of Literature. Not only are these rules a good laugh, but they are actually point out fundamentals in writing.

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction–some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. (I love this one.)

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt- edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. (just remember when this was written)

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. (I particularly like this one. )

Read the rest of this entry »

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For those creepy people who visit this site and don’t know me personally I’m writing a post apocalyptic spaghetti western (it’s exactly how it sounds). Of course around the millennium there were tons of end of the world movies (End of Days, Deep Impact, Armageddon) and it seems just in the last week we have The Invasion and I am Legend  (don’t get me started on how Will Smith is raping my favorite book) trailers released on the net. Also last year we had Children of Men and just a few weeks back we had 28 Weeks Later . Throw in Spielberg’s take on War of the Worlds and it starts to look like we as a civilization are obsessed with watching ourselves die.

I just wonder if this is all some manifestation of paranoia brought forth through the media (thanks Fox news). We have global warming, pandemic paranoia, idiotic arguments about a missile shield, and we have the Mayan calender ending in five years. Talk about a load of eschatological garbage.

Maybe it’s just me.

At least when the script is finished I can  honeslty say to myself that I’m a better writer than Akiva Goldsman. That’s not saying much.

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Technorati Tags: akiva goldsman, apocalypse, end of the world, writing

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