Half -Way Through My Weekend...

It's already been quite packed, too!

Where to begin?

I got a jump on the weekend by staying up really late Sunday morning to do my laundry.

(I live in a third-floor apartment and we don't have washers and dryers in our apartments. So I have to lug my laundry down 3 flights of stairs and walk to the very center of the complex to the laundry room, then back up 3 flights of stairs until it's time to take the laundry out of the washer and put it in the dryer. 3 trips down and up every time I do the laundry. So naturally I put off washing my clothes for as long as possible. I have enough socks and underwear that I can usually go every 2 weeks.)

The way I talked myself into doing the laundry Sunday morning was that if I did, I'd still be up at 9:00 am, when the office opens, and I could then retrieve my region-free dvd player and Brian and I could begin our SPACED marathon Sunday night!


Of course (as I finally remembered after half an our listening to my iPod outside the apartment complex office) Sunday was Easter.

HAPPY EASTER, btw!!! :D

While waiting for my laundry to be finished, did just about everything I could think of EXCEPT rewriting the short screenplay I hope to sell Brian and Tommy on shooting this year. (This is part of most writers' process I've been assured, lol.)

Then Sunday night I woke up in time to spend plenty of quality time with my lady. :D This was really cool!!! Her poor life has been quite chaotic lately, but normality seems to be reaccerting itself for her, and she got Friday and Monday off, so that's good! We're hoping we can get back into our daily pattern soon.

For Family Dinner Mom took us to a place called Red Robin. It's one of those themed gourmet burger restaurants. I had a burger with 4 cheeses -- one of which was Blue Cheese -- on ciabatta bread, AND IT WAS AMAZING!!! Really great steak-cut fries, too, and all you can eat!

Expensive, though. You can eat great ciabatta burgers at Jack in the Box for less than half the price.

After that Brian and I crashed into each other for a few hours. We'd pick cars, pick a track that looked fun, crash into each other until we both exploded, then watch the replay a couple of times.

Nice, relaxing Easter Sunday evening. :)

After Brian crashed -- "went to sleep" I mean this time -- I spent many, many hours going between Flash, Photoshop, Macromedia FreeHand and SecondLife trying to create new clothes to sell in-world. I had very little success, but it was fun.

At one point I even plugged my jump-drive into this computer... In case I got the urge to work on the rewrite I was supposed to already have done. (I didn't, though, lol.)

As I was working I got the desperate need for Electronica.

I should explain. When I spent all my non-working, non-sleeping time in SecondLife I would listen to hours and hours of in-world Electronica and it rather grew on me. When I was socializing, it was usually at an in-world dance club, so when I was just building things in SL, even all by myself, I started listening to Electronica. It makes anything feel sort of like a party to me. If Electronica is playing uin the background, you're having a good time.


And designing clothes (if you can call what I do actual "designing", lol) is very long and quiet work.

So I went onto iTunes and checked to see if there were maybe any Electronic podcasts. And there are! I found a cool one, IndieFeed: Electronica, and downloaded as many episodes as iTunes would let me (maybe 10 tracks) and made myself a decent little playlist to work to.

When it got close to the time my baby might be logging on I switched to audio commentary for Series 1 of SPACED, ultimately killing time until 9:00 am, when I knew the apartment complex office would be open and I could FINALLY retrieve my region-free dvd player! (My goddess is always off the computer by 7:00 am, so I knew I'd need something to kill 2 more hours when we we finished chatting.)

Unfortunately, my baby didn't get to log in this morning, but I had Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, Jessica Stevenson and Company to keep me occupied until 9:00 am.

So 9:00 am rolls around and I FINALLY GET MY REGION-FREE DVD PLAYER!!! Now Brian will be able to see SPACED in all it's glory!!!

I unplug the other dvd player, put it away, install the new one, pop in a few dvds to test it. I want to make sure it works, first, so I plug in a regular, store-bought dvd.

The player works!

Now I want to see if it plays burned dvds. The other player played a copy of Tron (I lost the original, sadly, several years ago when Brian and I had first moved into this apartment) so I popped that in. The dvd player says that it plays multiple formats in addition to regular dvds. It's supposed to be able to play DivX, wma, mpeg, video cds, dvd-rw, just about anything but QuickTime movies or Flash, it seems!

TRON worked, too!!!

Next I want to make sure I have my HQFS 3-D system hooked up properly, and make sure it works with this new player. So I pop in SPY KIDS 3-D: GAME OVER. (Hey, it's 3-D, okay?)

The 3-D works!!!

Now the second-to-last test: The other dvd player wouldn't play all (MOST really) burned dvds. Sometimes I'd be given a copy of a movie by a friend and bring it home to show Brian and it wouldn't work in the dvd player. I could watch these on my portable dvd player (which sits, immobile, in my room permanently, lol) or on one of the computers, just not in the living room, where Brian and I watch movies. So I pop in a burned dsc that didn't work in the other player to see if it works.

The burned dvd works!

So cool, now the last test. I figured the dvd player would pass all the previous tests because of the way its designed. And I wasn't really surprised when it passed each test. These are really a formality.

I pop the third disc of SPACED in. I chose this one because, for some reason, it doesn't play in the computer in Brian's room. (This computer that I'm typing on now.) I figured if one of the discs was going to be a problem, it would be Disc 3.

"Region Error".

"REGION Error?!!" I bought this dvd player for the sole purpose of by-pasing the region management system!!! To watch movies that I never could watch on a Region 1 player!!! I specifically typed "region-free dvd player" into Amazon.com and THIS player came up in a list of players equipped to watch dvds from multiple regions!!!

There must be something in the set-up, I figured. So I popped open a beer, opened up the plastic bag the manual came in, tossed aside several "Quick Start" instruction pages -- identical except for the fact that they were written in 3 or 4 different languages -- and began skimming every page.

(What can I say? I'm a guy; reading the instruction is a last resort for me. I was around when home videogame systems first started coming out, when home video recorders/players first came out, and I work at a TV station: I'm fluent in the manner in which home entertainment equipment hooks into each other and into my TV. In high school I even shot and edited stuff on VHS, which involves plugging your camcorder into your VHS so that you can record from one cassette to another. So I have some experience with home video systems. But I'm not a Guy guy, where I'm too proud to read directions. Input/output just feels intuitive to me.)

But I do skim every page, because I don't want to get to the next section of the manual, where everything is in Spanish or French, and have missed the one section I'm looking for. (I've done this a few times before.)

I get to the section on region encoding and I read the most disappointing words ever: Paraphrasing, "This player adheres to the Region Management System for diverse video discs, and will only play discs formatted for the appropriate region." Or something very similar to that.

I'm crushed.

I mean, I didn't spend a ton on it, and now Brian can easily watch every Region 1 dvd we own now -- which includes the second series of LITTLE BRITAIN, which is a coup -- but blast and damn! He still can't watch SPACED! (I mean, he can... He can watch it on the living room computer. But it would be awkward for us both to sit there and drink and laugh together. And sharing great Comedy with someone else who gets it is one of Life's very precious gifts!)

So my message to all: READ THE FINE PRINT. ALWAYS.

This particular failing of mine has popped up more than once to go "Boo!", and I suspect God or the Universe or Whomever is trying to really drill it into my head now, lol.

So, a bit dejected, I returned to Brian's room to continue watching the audio commentary for Series 1 of SPACED and get drunk.

On a much cheerier note, I woke up to Brian quoting bits from LITTLE BRITAIN to me, bits we previously couldn't watch together! So Life is good.

But I woke up late tonight. How late? So late that when I went into the kitchen to cook my breakfast pizza (it's sausage and pepperoni, but since I eat it when first wake up it's my "breakfast" pizza) and I notice and empty six-pack of MGD in the trash. This is the brand of beer that Tommy, without fail, always brings to share with us when we have our production meetings (bless him!) and this can only mean one thing: Tommy has been and gone, and I didn't wake up.

Now, Tommy and Brian are tight. They were roommates for a few years, and Tommy was close to my brother long before I grew up enough to realize what a cool guy he is. So I know they had fun. Brian even told me that they raced/crashed-into each other on the PS2 for a while. So it's not like my absence created this huge vacuum.

But still...

I woke up well too late to catch Gnomey online, too.

I was just kind of useless tonight!

How could I salvage this day?

Well... There is that screenplay I should have been working on...

And a few lines of dialogue actually popped into my head!!!

Here's the dirty little secret about writing: Writers don't do the actual creating.

It's been said by many other -- published, professional -- writers. I never wanted to believe it, but the more I write the more I discover it's true.

I mean, blogging is different. That's ALL us. But you may notice that in this case, we're not creating. We're observing. And transcribing those observations in our own, characteristic way.

Steven Pressfield's theory -- as expressed in his EXCELLENT book THE WAR OF ART -- is that we have a Muse who gives us "inspiration" as we work. Stephen King also believes in a Muse (who occasionally "shits" upon his head, lol) as he works.

Here's my personal take: I've noticed that every good idea I've ever come up with, has in fact been a gift from out of nowhere. A notion just pops into my head from out of the blue. Someone of a scientific (read: "not spiritual") bent will say that this is just two or more thoughts that we've already had before combining in a new way in our brains. Someone of a religious nature might attribute this to God or and angel giving us this thought. I believe it's something more like a Guide from the Other Side. You can think of it as an angel or God if that's more comfortable for you, but it sincerely feels like someone from somewhere dropping an idea into my head. And it doesn't feel like MY idea, although it inevitably pops into my head with notions and images and attitudes and so forth that are already lounging around in there. And when I explain it to others, ti always comes out in my language, expressed the way I express stuff.

But it's not MY idea, I believe. The reason i believe this is because when these ideas (a line of dialogue, a character, a dramatic/comedic/horrific situation) pop into my head I feel the same excitement as when someone else tells me a good idea. It's exactly the same as when Kelly or Brian or someone tells me their great idea, only it pops directly into MY mind.

I believe that all we -- writers -- do is craft these gifts of inspiration into a form that is enjoyable (or, at least not completely distasteful, lol) for others to read.

And I think I'm finally beginning to understand exactly what Pressfield and King are talking about when they say that what writers do is practice our craft until the Muse deigns to show up. If we just sit down and start writing, eventually something good will pop into our heads, and then we incorporate that into our story, then rewrite until it all fits together.

I just haven't gotten really good at the "sit down and start writing" part yet. :( I tend to run around and do other stuff until my Muse shows up with something that makes me WANT TO write. (Or, very frequently, HAVE TO write, lol.)

On the one hand, I'm told by professionals that I won't become a professional writer until I learn to start writing every day. On the other, there are so many things I enjoy doing that I'd rather not waste my time churning out crap until the Muse shows up. I can churn out crap all day after I'm a professional writer.

Blah.

So the point of all this:

I decided that if I wanted to make make myself useful this MonTue I should probably work on the script.

Which is when the aforementioned lines of dialog popped into my head! And I HAD TO write them!

CUT TO:

Several hours later I'm spell-checking my completed short screenplay before I save it and email it off to Brian and Tommy and a couple of my writer friends for their critiques!!!

YAY!!!

Still infected with the Writing Bug -- and many, many hours still to go before Gnomey will be waking up to get ready for work -- I plopped down and pounded out this excessively long entry.

Just for YOU. :D

Don't you feel special?

I can hear Wendy in my head going "That was a rather long one, wasn't it?" To which I would shamefully reply "Yeah. Sorry about that. Feel free to skip it; it's just me going on about my weekend so far."

And now I can hear YOU going "Well why didn't you tell ME that at the start of this thing?!!"



Sorry about that.