Ghost Whisperer: Season 2

One thing I really, really dig about Ghost Whisperer is the town of Grandview, NY! I've always been a sucker for fictitious small towns, particularly ones with quaint town squares! I don't know why, but I think I can trace it back to Back to the Future.

But Grandview is particularly cool to me because every day in Grandview feels like sometime around Halloween!

No idea why that is. Maybe it's the cinematography, maybe it's the art direction, or the color timing. No idea. But it's neat! :)

So I'm just getting into Season 2, which means I'm almost done with the series.

I've watched it kind of weird.

See, I rented the first 2 discs of Season 1 from Netflix some time ago, just to see if Brian & I liked the show. Brian never ended up watching them, but I watched those first two discs, and I dug the show.

But...

After the first 8 episodes, I was exhausted from crying, so I gave the show a long break. (Mock me if you must, but the nobler nature of Man moves me to tears, and I'm not ashamed of it. So nyah!) Plus, I think there was other stuff that I was more excited about at the time.

But this last 2 years, my paranormal research and investigation got me thinking about the show again. Particularly when I started working on my own fictitious paranormal story. Just how did Ghost Whisperer manage to tell believable, true-to-real-life-accounts stories week after week? I kept running into walls with my paranormal novel because real-life paranormal events might be scary for, like, 5 seconds, but not for 21 chapters! I have a great deal more sympathy for writers of Supernatural Horror, because real-life ghosts just aren't that scary. (Unless you've never experienced one before and/or firmly believe they don't exist; then they can be quite frightening, I'm told.)

Also, my paranormal studies have sort of given way to more metaphysical topics lately. You read everything out there about ghosts and paranormal investigation, and you're eventually going to run out of books for a while -- until they write some more. Plus, everything you learn in fact-based paranormal research is going to lead you to ask tons of questions that, currently, only faith-based research offers possible answers for.

So, when this desire to pick Ghost Whisperer hit me again, I had a little extra money, and Walmart had a (marginal) sale on Seasons 3 & 4. So I bought them.

And I dug them!!!

Well, I prefer Season 3 to 4 -- and if you've seen the show, you can probably guess why.

Btw, SPOILER ALERT!!!

I don't plan on giving away any specific spoilers, but I'm feeling lazy, so I'm going to write this as though you've already seen more of the show than I am.

So if you haven't seen the first 4 (of 5) seasons of Ghost Whisperer and intend to watch it, please turn away now for your own entertainment safety!

So anyway, Season 3 is a bit more Horror-y, kind of. And Season 4 is good, too, but I was a bit bugged by what they did to Jim (her husband).

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jay Mohr was a frickin' regular on the series by Season 3!!! How cool is THAT?!! I've always loved that guy and felt he was underrated as both and actor and a comedian! I mean, people who know who he is love him and give him credit, but many people don't know who he is.

After finishing Season 4, I went online to see how much it would cost to pick up the first 2 seasons, and saw that they cost more than what I got the 3rd & 4th seasons for! :(

So I took another Ghost Whisperer hiatus.

But this hiatus turned out to be blissfully brief! Maybe a month and a half after I finished season 4, Walmart had the first 2 seasons on sale for $20 each!!! :D YAY!!! I could own almost the entire series! (I don't know if 5 is out yet, but I haven't seen it.)

Also, Season 3 was a bit disappointing because it apparently went to air around the time of the Writer's Strike; it only had 18 episodes instead of 22. So the fact that Seasons 1 & 2 were both pre-strike (and each contained at least 22 episodes) AND were both before the Thing-That-The-Writers-Did-To-Jim was more cause for cheering!

But I didn't immediately hop back into the series. Not because I was adverse to going backwards, chronologically, but I've spent the past couple of weeks immersed in books. I tore through Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest by Christopher Balzano, Witness to Roswell, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up, The 30-Second Commute, Jay Mohr's memoir of his 2-years on Satyurday Night Live called Gasping for Airtime, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. At the moment, I'm only reading Messages: The World's Most Documented Extraterrestrial Contact Story by Stan Romanek, so I've got some free time to get back into the show.

I pretty much went through Discs 3 & 4 this week after work a couple of mornings. So I finished up Discs 5 & 6 yesterday and today.

Which puts me on Season 2.

I watched what I thought was the first 2 episodes of season 2 and was curious that the writers didn't do more with Season 1's cliff-hanger. They just breezed past it! Which was more realistic, I thought, but it seemed uncharacteristic: I tried to get Brian to watch Season 3 right after I bought it, thinking he would dig on the ghost-story like gangbusters, and would probably appreciate the spiritual aspect of the show; but he was immediately bored because the first episode of the 3rd season was a "clean-up" episode, where they untangled the continuity knots that Season 2's cliff-hanger had created. (Most of the show was a good, stand-alone episode, but Brian had had a long day at work, and the way the episode started just made him feel like there was tons he had missed out on. So he passed out. He still hasn't seen a full episode. Also, he may be a bit turned-off because I warned him that every episode made me cry, and I don't think my brother is quite as unabashed about crying as I am. We're Texas boys, after all.)

So anyway, I was a bit pleasantly surprised that the writers had simply glossed over a cliff-hanger maneuver that could so easily be turned into a high-drama episode or two. (Particularly after what they did to Jim in Season 4!)

THEN...Jay Mohr's character, Dr. Payne, walks into Melinda's shop and says "Remember me?" and I'm wondering if maybe he had shown up in one of the first 2 discs of season 1 (which I watched years ago)!

So I went to Wikipedia.org to read about his character, and discovered that he had, indeed, been introduced in Season 2. Introduced.

Also -- and this should have been a dead giveaway -- Camryn Manheim's character Delia was just part of the cast all of a sudden! I mean, there was a place for her character to fit into the cast -- one that had been made very apparent by the end of Season 1 -- but it it had sort of been implied that over the course of the summer, the character had slipped in and now she was there. I've watched enough TV and movies to fill in the blanks for myself, but writers usually make some sort of a deal out of the introduction of new characters. (Still, to my credit and the credit of the writers, the thing they changed about the show at the end of Season 1, they did with a great deal of skill and subtlety!!! They didn't spoon feed us, their audience, they gave us credit for being able to follow along! it was really impressive!!!)

But when Dr. Payne walked in -- for the first time in the series, I thought -- and started talking to Melinda as though he were referencing events in a previous episode, I had to wonder if I had somehow missed some episodes, or maybe I was watching...

I checked the DVD case...

The brain-trust that designed the DVD cases used an efficient, no-waste design in which both covers of the case held a single DVD. No wasted plastic, very "green". BUT, they chose to put Disc 1 where you expect the DVD to be on regular one-disc DVD cases (you open it up like a book, and the disc is on the right side, attached to the "inside back cover", if you will, because the "inside front cover" doesn't have a place to hold a disc) and they placed Disc 2 on the "inside front cover". But this is stupid, in my opinion, because Westerners read left-to-right. So we're going to assume that the disc that's on the left is the first disc in the series of 2!

In other words, I had popped in Disc 2.

So now I'm going to watch Disc 1, which means I'm probably going to have to sit through at least 45 minutes of untangling-the-cliffhanger-mess before they settle into the Season 2 normal-episode groove.

I mean, it will all be worth it. I know I like episodes 5 & 6, because I already watched them, lol. But that Episode 1 mess...blah.

The lesson: Don't do season-ender cliffhangers, kids! I know logic dictates that this will ensure your audience follows you to the next season, but it's really just a waste of story time! Check out Buffy Season 7: Joss had a 3-episode arch, with the 3rd- and 2nd-to-last episode BOTH being cliffhangers, and then the last episode just being one long Climax! THAT is how you do a fulfilling cliffhanger! Ratchet up the suspense within the season, and then send your audience off into the summer hiatus talking about how great your show is, not "what's going to happen next year?" Next year?!! Screw that noise! The Batman sitcom in the 1960s had a cool idea: The wrap-up to the cliffhanger occurred that same week! You didn't even have to wait 7 days to find out what happens next!

I know, I know: I watch TV shows on DVD so what the hell am I complaining about?

I dunno, really. I just have a long-standing grudge against season-ender cliffhangers, going all the way back to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It feels like insecure storytelling to me. It's not real storytelling, because -- as I said -- the first episode of next season is less about telling a great story and more about untangling the needless mess you created at the end of last season and getting the show back on track. It's a waste of my time. You could be telling me a GOOD story instead (rather than an obligatory story).

The-Thing-They-Did-With-Jim happened within the season, PLUS I felt like they were earning something. They made a very creative choice -- I didn't like it, but maybe the actor, David Conrad, was getting board with his character or something -- and then the writers eanred the right to keep the actor on the show. We wanted something to happen, story-wise, and it was something that shouldn't be allowed to happen by story logic. So the writers had to put the characters, the world, and us through a lot of emotional turmoil to make this story-thing happen, and that makes sense to me. In all the Indiana Jones movies, Indy fails; but the writers (and the characters) put up such a heroic fight that by the end of the flicks, we don't mind that Indy didn't achieve his goal: We're just happy he made it out alive!

But these season-enders are, I feel, just page-filling. Harve Bennett said that Star Trek III: The Search For Spock practically wrote itself, because Spock was dead, we wanted him back, the Klingons new about the destructive potential of the Genesis devise, so there ya go! The moment we, the fans, discovered that the Klingon's new about Genesis' destructive potential, we could have written Star Trek III. I think Bennet and Nimoy and company did a splendid job with the flick, so I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing out that if I hadn't been 13 when ST III came out, I might have been bored with the story.

I am now 39 (soon to be 40), have studied writing for 18 years, and "clean-up" episodes seem like a needless waste of time.

Stay in school, don't do drugs, and don't write season-ender cliffhangers, kids!

Okay, I have now bitched about season-ender cliffhangers for as long as it would have taken me to watch the damned Season 2 clean-up episode and get on with the good stuff, so I'm going to stop now.

SOME EXCITING NEWS:

I'm broke this week, but Brian is willing to take us to see Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D Sunday!!! :D WOO-HOO!!!

Also, my daughter turns 20 today!!! I don't get to celebrate it with her, but I know she's going to have a good time! (Hopefully not too good a time.) ;P

You know, if you asked me how old I am, I feel like maybe 29 or 30. So there's this real disconnect for me about the fact I have an adult daughter. I mean, every year she gets cooler and easier to relate to, but i don't feel proportionately older. I remember as a teen watching the original Planet of the Apes and that joke about "Don't trust anyone over 30," but now that I'm significantly older than 30, the joke seems pointless to me. (Plus, Heston was 45 when he delivered the line.)

Okay, so it's getting late, so I should stop rambling and get back to the clean-up episode so I can move on to the rest of Season 2. (I usually eat my vegetables before I even start on my steak, just to get them out of the way.)

I hope your weekend is FILLED WITH LAUGHTER!!!

:D

There is Something WRONG with Nathan Fillion!

I know, I know "You like him so much, why don't you just marry him?" right?

But Nathan Fillion fascinates me!

It's been WAY too long since my last dose of Catsle, and Hulu has been bombarding me with clips and teases for Season 3 (so close, yet so far away!), so I popped in Season 1 on DVD and watched the first 6 episodes, then I went back and listened to the audio commentary on episodes 1 and 5, and on Episode 5, at the end, Jon Huertas claims to be playing the guitar for that kickass theme music they have, and actress Molly Quinn picks up the joke and claims that she whistled on the track.

If you listen to enough DVD commentaries, you hear this type of thing: The artists doing the commentary jokingly claim to have performed other tasks, and it always gets a laugh out of me!

But just the split-second after Molly says "I whistled," Fillion declares "Through her nose."

WHY?!

If you've seen the show, you know that Molly C. Quinn (Castle's daughter) is a gorgeous young woman. And the way she plays Alexis Castle makes you either want to call your daughter and just tell her you miss her, or if you don't have a daughter you just want to go out and have one immediately! She's just smart and fun and funny, extremely lovable!

So Jon makes his joke, which catches you off guard and makes you chuckle; then Molly makes her joke, which is funnier because she's lying about having performed a lesser musical task; but then Nathan comes in and thrusts the mental image of this beautiful young redhead whistling through her nose into your mind!

Again, WHY?!

My brother is the same way: You make a joke, and then he immediately tops your joke with an entire run on the subject that create the most ghastly mental images, until you can't breath because you're laughing so hard!

There's this perverse part of me that wants to be envious and resentful of the man who is Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Caleb, Bill Pardy, Dr. Pomatter, Alex Tully, Captain Hammer, Steve Trevor, and now Richard Castle...enough, already! Shouldn't there be a ceiling on how many iconic characters an actor gets to play in a career?!

But it's that "Ferris Bueller" thing I mentioned in an earlier blog entry: How can you begrudge the seemingly unending fun of a guy who's life's mission seems to be to make sure you're having as much fun as he is?!

I think maybe Nathan Fillion figured out, as a young child, that this world is filled with unimaginable amounts of fun, but that most of us will never have the balls to go out there and enjoy most of it. So he made it his mission to have enough fun for the rest of the world (the entire planet!) and be sure to take every opportunity to share all that fun with us!

He's like the opposite of a sin-eater: Instead of taking away out sins by taking them into himself, Fillion takes as much pure joy into himself as possible, then spreads it out to as many of us as he can reach! He's a fun-spewer! That's what his is!

Nathion Fillion, Fun-Spewer! New, from HASBRO!

OMG, when is Castle gonna start up again?!! :P

Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow

I just finished my first Hidden Object Game -- Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow!!! :D It was cool!

I hadn't really played a Hidden Object Game before, so my closest frame of reference was the Where's Waldo? books from the late 1980s. Except that once you find an object in the game, the object disappears after you click on it, so you don't accidentally find it again.

(Note: Half a second of researched reminded me that Where's Waldo? was actually originally Where's Wally? as the creator/illustrator, Martin Handford, is British. Just in case my sweety's reading this, I want to give her -- and any other non-US readers -- a frame of reference.)

I really enjoyed the Where's Waldo? books, because they not only provided puzzles to be solved -- puzzles that always yielded to dogged, relentless perseverance (my favorite kind of puzzles) -- but also each image (which, itself, told a story) provided the viewer with any number of micro-stories within the macro story. Like those tiny illustrations in a Sergio Aragones did outside or in between the panels of Groo the Wanderer!

The Sleepy Hollow game wasn't as deft at storytelling as Arogones or Handford, but it was a lot of fun, none the less!!! Whoever composed those images was kind of genius (and kind of a bastard, too, cheating as they did from time to time), but the games has a system of "Hints" that you can collects, so that you can accrue Hints throughout the game that help you find some of those less-clever, more-diabolical hidden objects.

If I were trying to write a review for Amazon.com, I would be less honest and probably write something like this:

I gave the game five stars but it doesn't deserve them. It only took me nine and a half hours to finish the game what a jip! The artwork is amazing and the levels are challenging and that music really provides a cool atmosphere while your [sic] searching for the items and once or twice the voice of the headless horseman made me wet myself but I'm not going to admit that to you because I want you to think I'm cooler than I suspect I really am and did I mention that I solved the game fast? Grammar is for wimps.

Something like that. (I sometimes suspect that sites like IMDb and Amazon must have de-editors: persons who are employed to go through all reviews written and make sure they don't contain an overabundance of proper grammar, spelling or punctuation (which falls within the purview of grammar, I know, but punctuation on the Net sucks and I don't believe I can emphasize that quite enough).)

[I know: I like to use parenthesis a lot, but I believe you will find that my use of it is grammatically correct.]

This weekend I also watched The Losers with my brother, spent a day in bed, ill, and also watched Death Race! great fun! (Except the being ill part. Nothing to worry about, just a mild infection of the gum on one side of my mouth where I've had a root canal and crown. Never -- so far -- lasts longer that 24 hours, and I'm good now.) Brian just bought this HUGE big-screen TV (I believe he said it was 32 inches) and, luckily, Netflix had just sent us a few Action flicks! And they were both AWESOME!!! :D It was like seeing these movies in the cinema!!! :D

I also finished reading this book called Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government's Biggest Cover-Up, which firmly lifted me off the proverbial fence and set me down on the side of the certainty that extraterrestrials crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, and the United States government (or, parts of it) retrieved the craft and the bodies!

AWESOME book!

Skeptics of the paranormal decry that if there are these strange things going on in the world -- ghosts, UFOs, cryptids (cryptozoological animals), etc. -- where's the proof? Well, as far as the issue of extraterrestrials visiting our planet is concerned, Witness to Roswell is the proof! Using the same standards of proof that the United States Justice System uses to send a human to be executed (or not) for his/her alleged crime, the authors Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt provide a preponderance of evidence -- as well as a staggering amount of evidence -- intended to cast "a shadow of a doubt" upon the 4 official explanations that "debunk" the Roswell incident as mundane.

When I say this book floored me, please understand that I "hunt ghosts". I have recorded numerous inexplicable voices and sounds, and thrown them out as possible evidence because a skeptic could possibly concoct mundane "explanations" for them.

AUTHOR'S RANT:

No kidding, in the attic of an historical building, I recorded what sounded exactly like an old-time radio or TV news broadcast! I am a huge fan of OTR, and I have worked for TV stations that broadcast the local news since 1995, so I am uniquely versed in the speech patterns of news broadcasters from the 1940s-1960s and 1990s-2010s. Watch Good Night, and Good Luck and then watch Dateline and/or your local news, and you will see that there is a cadence that news anchors and reporters adopt or affect that is vastly different starting around or during the 1980s. This EVP -- and it is an EVP, even though we decided not to present it to the client -- was maybe 2 minutes long, in this droning male voice using the same cadence of speech as a 1960s newscaster reading a news story! There is no other sound like it, and no reporter or news anchor nowadays uses that same cadence (no one anywhere does; it's a wholly unnatural way of speaking)!

Then to top it off, there were no TVs in the building that the recorder could have picked up on. And if there were a radio in the building, we never once heard it turned on over the course of 2 investigations. AND, if it HAD been turned on, it would have had to been tuned to an OTR NEWS STATION to produce the sounds that this recorder recorded! (Because, as I have emphasized before, no newscaster uses that cadence anymore, not even NPR, or BBC News.)

So I remain convinced that I recorded the sounds of the Past on my RCA digital recorder. Maybe it was a radio news broadcast from the 1960s or earlier, maybe it was a TV news broadcast from the 1970s or earlier, but it wasn't mundane or natural.

AND YET...

And this is the important part...

When my fellow investigators voted to chuck it as evidence -- after I put up a minor fight, of course, explaining my reasoning as eloquently as possible -- I obliged. Because when a skeptic (read "cynic") can explain away your "evidence" it isn't really evidence.

END OF RANT.

My problem with the Roswell incident is in my ability to imagine the events of the 4th of July weekend and beyond.

Early on, I heard a theory, liked it, and bought into it. Aliens crashed at Roswell; cool!

But then I hear someone else speak -- someone who claimed to be a witness of some sort -- but they didn't fit into my understanding of the events. And after a while, there were so many "eye witnesses" and they were claiming all kinds of (seemingly) tangential events that my mental construct of the events couldn't hold them all.

"Okay, I can imagine a nurse at the base seeing the aliens, but who is this woman who claims to have been a girl who visited the site? I remember one boy and one girl, so how could this other girl have been there and gotten a piece of the memory metal? Wha--?!"

I have to admit: It became easier, after a while, to simply believe the skeptics. "The reports claim that a boy and a girl were at the site, so where did this other girl come from all of a sudden?"

My problem (and theirs) was one of scope.

My mental image of the Roswell incident was, I am embarrassed to admit, formed largely by movies and "dramatic recreations" of the events. My mental image was limited to the 5 to 15 minutes any given visual entertainment medium could allot it. I didn't pursue books on the subject, so if it didn't fit into a movie or a podcast, I wasn't exposed to it. And if it could be squeezed into a podcast, but it didn't fit into my pre-conceived timeline, then it was easier for me to take the skeptic's way out. "I dunno, maybe something happened there, but it might not have been an extraterrestrial crash."

So then Mr. Carey and Mr. Schmitt compile their decades of research into a coherent timeline that even I can follow and DAMN!!!

Seriously, if I weren't already a believer in the possibility of alien visitation, I would be now!

AWESOME book!

OH! And I watched this great documentary called What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery!!!

The documentary isn't really about the UFO phenomenon at all. It examines the circles themselves, asking more metaphysical questions presented by the appearance of inexplicable crop circles. For instance, if they are from any non-human means, why are they being left?

Now, first you have to get over the question of the apparent "debunk" back in the early 1990s that 2 English dudes created all the crop circles since the 1970s, but I believe the documentary handles that question nicely.

Once past that, you get to ponder the really cool questions and ramifications.

Wow, I guess I've had a pretty full weekend for someone who spend a whole day sleeping, lol.

So here's to an even cooler week! May yours surprise you with an embarrassment of abundance!!!

:D

IT'S BEEN 4 YEARS NOW!!!

On this day 4 years ago, Gnomey agreed to be my RL girlfriend!!! :D

What do I mean by "RL girlfriend"?

If you weren't reading my blog 4 years ago, you may not know that my brother Brian and I spent 2005 in SecondLife. Before that, I had spent my non-working time writing, playing videogames, and watching movies.

Actually, the writing-thang has been my main avocation since 1998. I chose a job that allows me time to think and daydream and imagine during my shift and pays me little enough to keep me motivated to switch careers as soon as I figure out how to get into writing as a career. But the downside of devoting my life to writing is that I developed an acute lack of any actual LIFE. I couldn't afford to go out with friends, and I certainly couldn't afford to date (chicks, apparently, prefer not to eat Jack in the Box or Taco Bell when they're on a date), so my social interaction consisted of email/phone conversations with my friends, workplace interactions and my relationship with my brother/roommate.

Then we learned about SecondLife, and that changed things! The interface is like a First-Person Shooter, but everyone in-world is a REAL PERSON somewhere on the planet! PLUS, if you owned land, you could CREATE YOUR OWN ENVIRONMENT! So imagine you could create your own videogame for yourself! You want to be in a haunted ghost town? Then you make it! You want to be in the jungle? Go make it! Wild West? Get busy!

Or, you could just wander around the hundreds of environments others have created, meeting people or hanging out with friends.

I've published too many posts on the wonders of SL already, and this entry isn't about that.

The most important person I ever met, however, (aside from my daughter, when she was born) I met in SL: MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! :D I met this smart, funny, kind, caring, fun-loving, adventurous woman in SL and got to know her, then developed a crush on her, and then one day she told me she had a crush on ME! Then very quickly we became bf/gf in-world, then very quickly after that we began talking on the phone and emailing and video-chatting as RL (or "Real Life") bf/gf, and when SecondLife stopped working on her computer and she couldn't go in-world anymore, I re-joined the "real world".

It's been an interesting ride, so far! For a year or so we video-chatted or voice IM-ed every day, but then my life got crazy, then her life, and we don't get to chat daily anymore. But I love her as much as I ever have, and seems to still tolerate me, lol. ;P

And today we've been a couple for 4 YEARS!!! :D

We don't get to do anything particularly splashy to celebrate because she's busy taking care of stuff that isn't my story to tell. But she wished me a happy early-anniversary yesterday and then wished me happy anniversary today! :)

And I just want to say, God bless you, sweety, for continuing to put up with me this long! ;P

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'll give you a quick update on what I've been up to.

Um...there's work.

And writing.

Brian's & my mom has been recommending this TV show for a few years now: Two and a Half Men. We finally Netflix-ed it, and we've spent this weekend watching it. I literally started Friday morning, after I got off work, and have been watching it since. (It's 4:02pm Saturday afternoon as I type this.) We had already seen Season 1, so I started with Season 2 and am almost done with the 1st disc of Season 3 at the moment. (I took a break to sleep, then do some writing.)

On the writing front, I may have discovered the first (and perhaps ONLY) FREE online screenwriting course!!!

I had reached a wall in the development of the novel I'm working on, so i was looking for inspiration, and I came across Steven Barnes Free Writing Class! It's a 9-week course that he encourages you to download all at once, and then do the work week by week.

I read through the first 2 lessons in 30 minutes (each lesson is 3 or 4 pages long) and I did the assigned homework for Week 1 when I woke up a couple of hours ago.

I really dig it so far!

The lessons are short, but packed with concepts! If you've never studied writing or screenwriting before, you may want to do some additional reading in order to fully appreciate many of these concepts. But it's a simple and direct method (from what I've read so far, anyway) so the additional reading may not be necessary at all. (I started studying writing in 1992, so I don't really remember the questions I had back then or how much I could have or could not have comprehended.) I'm sure that taking his UCLA course would be much more instructive since you would be hearing his explain each of these concepts in detail, but who knows: If I had access to this free online course in 1992 (before the World Wide Web existed) I might have been working as a writer for well over a decade by now!

So anyway, I'm sort of starting back up from scratch with my novel. I'm not ignoring the work I've done, but I using it and adding to it as the class dictates.

And once I sell my novel (and probably a screenplay or a couple more novels, realistically) I will buy a house, then go get Gnomey and drag her over here to the States! And with luck, maybe we can celebrate our 5th anniversary TOGETHER!!! :D

I hope you are enjoying your weekend, and that your week is delightful, too!!!

:D

P.S. Did anyone catch the meteor shower? Friday morning, between 5:00am and 5:30am I climbed up onto the roof of the TV station I work at (my shift was done and there wasn't anything for me to do but ride out the clock) and saw 3!!!

The first I saw was this really fast-moving flash of gold that streaked across the sky and then vanished.

The second was and intensely bright white ball that appeared to cork-screw into the Earth's atmosphere and then disappear. But it left a sort of com trail that faded slowly from vision.

Then the third was what you think of when you imagine a meteor, the tiny falling star.

It was AWESOME!!! :D

HAPPY 4th OF JULY!!!

I'm having the bestest, most awesomest 4th in years!!! :D

My bro' & I are watching a DVD of fireworks displays while listening to John Williams' Star Wars scores! (Specifically, we lined up the End Titles from each of the 6 movies and are listening to a sort of sampling of all the main themes from each movie, back-to-back. The way the music and the fireworks displays line up at times is profound!)

Brian got home from work around 9:30pm, and I was about halfway through The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (which is a magnificent flick!!!), so we watched the rest of that together, then went out on the porch and watch some of our neighbors perform their own fireworks shows.

This year, our neighbors weren't quite as enthusiastic as in previous years. And the ones that went all-out were obscured by trees. :(

But Brian pulled out some firecrackers he had left over, so we amused ourselves for an hour or so by hurling Blackcats and Cracker Balls off our balcony. It was pretty cool. :)

Then, after Brian waited a bit too long to throw one Cracker Ball -- resulting it in igniting in his hand, so that he had to throw it downward, so that it exploded as it passed the bottom two apartments, entirely too close for comfort.

After that, we came inside and started the fireworks DVD. ;)

But I'm having such an AMAZING time I just had to blog about it!

I hope your 4th was really, really awesome, too!!!

:D

MST3K ON HULU!!!

That's right: If you live in America and can watch streaming online video, LIFE JUST GOT BETTER!!!

The amazing and wonderful and hysterical Mystery Science Theater 3000 is NOW ON HULU!!!

The timing of this is a bit odd for me because I have been watching MST3K DVDs for a month or so lately. Netflix has a great selection of them, plus I own several of them already. And after several weekends of MST3K, my li'l bro' and I (naturally) moved onto Cinematic Titanic DVDs and RiffTrax (both the MP3s that you listen to while you watch your DVDs, and the DVDs they have available, too, because Netflix has some of them and because I bought some of them recently)!

So to log into Hulu and find that they are now carrying MST3K was AWESOME!!! So now I might be able to watch some of those flicks that weren't released in the DVD collections! (I'm still dying to see Time of the Apes! I have a bootleg from their KTMA days, but I never saw the Comedy Central version, and Netflix doesn't have it.)

Also, if you're a fan of Shawn of the Dead, you can watch the BBC series that first introduced us to the genius of Simon Pegg and Edgar Weight: Spaced!!! :D Edgar wasn't a writer on the show, it was written by Pegg and co-star Jessica Stevenson, but you can totally see how the comedic collaboration on Series 1 & 2 of Spaced evolved into the cinematic genius of and Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz! The TV show has that same irreverent, frenetic sensibility of the flicks that would come later. :D

Sad news for my Gnomey-Goddess, though: It appears that Hulu can only be accessed in the States. :(

I had mentioned it to her a couple of times, but she didn't seem to know what it was, then I recently read something (it may have been the Wikipedia entry) that said that Hulu was limited to the U.S., which is a bummer. There is so much GOODNESS on there, we should share it with the world!!!

But then, I supposed that would compromise distribution rights (or something boring like that).

And that's kind of a shame, because I would like nothing more than to maybe Skype my Gnomey and set up a date night where we both watched an MST3K together or something! (Nerd? Me?)

Still...my little world just got a bit brighter! :)

And I hope yours will, too!

MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, FTW!!!

Ray Jay's Vacation Blog!!!

Day 1:

Dear Vacation Diary,

My vacation is going ever so swell!!! :D

Actually, I started celebrating Sunday! I got a text from my Gnomey-Goddess!!! (She loves me, by the way.) Then Sunday night, after I had woken up a bit, I continued the celebration in earnest with some RiffTrax Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope and Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Very funny stuff!

Then I woke up tonight (Monday night) as late as I please, and started in on some RiffTrax Jaws!!!

Brian got home and I chatted with him a bit, and now I have the option of finishing Jaws, watching Rifftrax take on Tron or watching their take on Jurassic Park!

Seriously, RIFFTRAX!!!

Okay, one superwonderfulamazing thing about RiffTrax is that you get the MST3K experience with big-budget movies!

Which is cool enough!!!

But another fantasticalicious aspect of the RiffTrax experience is that it takes those DVDs you've watched over and over again (until every scene you watch simply reminds you what's going to happen 3 scenes from now) and turns them into a new viewing experience!!!

I don't think I would ever listen to RiffTrax in a cinema, because it would be impossible for me to stifle my laughter at wildly inappropriate moments for the rest of the audience (who paid their money to watch the film as the filmmakers intended)! (Plus, the first 15, or so, times I watch a movie, I prefer to have the experience the filmmaker intended.)

But I think RiffTrax is an AMAZING way to get more use out of the movies you've already watched a bazillion times!

For instance, I read Jurassic Park back in 1991, not long after it came out. The buzz for the movie started a year or so before the flick was released; people who hadn't even read the book were going "Stephen Spielberg and dinosaurs?!! I'm so there!!!"

Then I saw the movie in the cinemas 3 or 5 times, because I just couldn't get enough of it! (Plus, this was back when movies stayed in cinemas for months and months if they were making decent money.)

Then, when the flick came out on VHS, I (and everyone else) snapped it up and watched it dozens of times. They produced so many copies of the VHS that after a couple of years, you could get a free copy in your breakfast cereal.

Then we switched over to DVD, and I distinctly remember that the major impetus for my finally (begrudgingly) buying a DVD player -- and rebuilding my considerable film library from scratch again -- was this specific set of Jurassic Park and Lost World: Jurassic Park that included the CD soundtracks to both films! (I had only recently bought my first CD player because you couldn't get Delerium's Karma on cassette.)

So that was another couple dozen viewings of Jurassic Park.

I ended up having to pawn $500 worth of DVDs in the early 2000s to make rent one month, and I lost that set. But then a few years ago they released another set, this one including Jurassic Park III (which I had missed when it was in the cinemas)!

So there's another 5 or 6 viewings of JP!

Now, when I want the Jurassic Park experience, I'll pretty much replay the movie in my mind or reread the book. (Although, I've read that book so many times I have it more or less memorized, too. But I still re-read it every year or so because it has scenes that haven't made it into any of the 3 films, yet.)

HOWEVER...

For a mere $3.99, I can download an MP3 that makes the movie a brand new thing for me!!!

How wicked-awesome is THAT?!! :D

AND...

If you've taken a couple of days off from work to relax and enjoy yourself (but you're not rich enough fly somewhere, or even go meet your friends fro dinner or a movie or something) (and, you know... you keep vampire hours and your day begins when your friends are settling down to dinner, and continues on while they're asleep), you can enjoy enjoy a fun double- or triple-feature with some of your MST3K friends!!!

Hmm...

I fear that last paragraph made me sound the slightest bit pathetic...

Anyway...

Okay, so that's what I'm going to do now. I think I'll finish Jaws, then probably move on to the dinosaurs, then wrap it up with Tron.

Sounds like a plan.

PARTY!!!

:D

Cheese, Glorious CHEESE!!! :D

I don't know what it is, but I like me some B-Movies!!!

I think part of it is that since B-Movies can't rely on star power, they rely on genre. So people might not, say, watch a movie just because it stars Greg Evigan, but they might watch it because it's a Sci-Fi/Horror flick. (Or because it has a dinosaur on the movie poster/DVD cover, which means it's a Sci-Fi/Horror flick.)

Another aspect may be that since they don't have the money to give special effects or monsters much screen time, they have to fill those frames with character.

One more aspect: A major studio production wants to get as many people watching their films as possible, so they may "soften" or dilute any ideas that might prove too provocative or controversial for the mainstream. But low-budget flicks know they're not going to have many viewers, and their films cost so little to make that they don't need many; so they don't shy away from controversial or provocative ideas, and let their audiences find them.

Bottom Line: I think the well-meaning B-Movies have to try harder. And I guess that's part of what draws me to them from time to time.

Part.

The rest is... I don't know! Some of my fondest memories are of TV mini-series -- like the original V and it's sequel mini-series V: The Final Battle and Stephen King's IT and Stephen King's The Stand! Then there were these classic made-for-TV movies like Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Duel! I guess -- particularly when I was younger, and couldn't necessarily go to see every movie I wanted to -- I liked the fact that some "big events" were willing to come to me. And then, as I got older and fell in love with filmmaking, maybe I saw similar traits in some of these schlocky old B-Movies that (before the straight-to-VHS, and later straight-to-DVD markets) were made to go straight to the drive-ins, or before that -- during the days of doubles features in cinemas -- the movies that showed after the animated shorts, news reels and this week's installment of the current serials or chapter-plays, and before the Main Attraction (or the A-Movie). The low-budget films always seemed to be trying a little harder to surprise you and shock you.

But that's all retcon. I don't know, for sure, what my primal draw is to these red-headed stepchildren of the Hollywood hierarchy.

I just know that when they're done well -- when the filmmakers are really trying to do their job right -- these things can be a genuine pleasure to watch!

Now, not all low-budget movies are created equal, mind you.

There are the H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds out there, "knockbuster" hack jobs that seem to the viewer to be an exercise for the filmmakers in what it might be like if they really were filmmakers. These movies leave the audience feeling ripped-off, like someone tricked them into wasting their money/time. A viewer gets the impression that the filmmakers are either the victims of guileless incompetence, or are maliciously callous confidence "artists" (no pun intended there) who want to make money, regardless of who suffers.

The above category isn't just for knockbusters, either. there are films like American Nightmare that aren't trying to cash in on anyone else' viral buzz, they're just inexperienced and/or unskilled. But the effect is the same. You just feel ripped-off and disappointed.

Then there are the Troma-type lazy low-budgets. I have a deep, dark pit of rage that seethes for filmmakers like this. By "Troma-like" I mean films that are ostensibly Comedy films shot on a low budget, making Farce out of film genres. The reason I hate these so passionately and so thoroughly is that I believe the term "Farce" is really just a mask for creative laziness and/or incompetence. I have only seen a handful of Troma films, so I'm not really talking about that studio specifically. (The few films of theirs I have seen definitely fall into this category, but since I haven't seen a majority of their work, it would be unfair to claim all or most of the filmmakers who work for the studio are equally cynical or incompetent.)

What I'm talking about is filmmakers who are afraid to stick their creative necks out and/or put in the time and effort required to compensate for their low budgets, and just slap together 90 minutes or so of mediocre-to-poor footage and call it a movie. Then they cynically cover their story holes and gaps in logic by throwing in some ineffectual slapstick, and claim the movie is a Farce.

Real Farce is incredibly smart and subtle, and takes even more creative effort than the genre or subject you're spoofing. It also possesses the same emotional satisfaction as the genre being spoofed. Easy jokes that fail to actually make the audience laugh, slapped in a series of random scenes poorly conceived, poorly acted and poorly shot do not make a Farce.

I suspect this category of "filmmaker" (they do make films, in the technical sense, but they are not the artists that real filmmakers are) possesses the technical and business savvy to collect the pay check, but they hide their creative insecurities behind a facade of "Comedy" -- if you don't really try, you can't fail, can you?

So when I talk about B-Movies, I'm not referring to hacks collecting a paycheck. I'm not talking about filmmakers who don't really care if audience enjoy their work, but just want to make money off us.

When I talk about B-Movies, and my love for them, I'm talking about the filmmaking underdogs, those cats who just never caught the breaks Spielberg, Lucas, Bay, Scorsese, Soderberg, Hitchcock, Hawks, or any of the number of directors or writers whose names you know caught, and so they do the job and get none of the acclaim (and just a sliver of the money) of their famous counterparts.

I'm talking about folks who love their job and try their hardest to make movies that audiences will have fun watching! The work horses! Not the American Dream, but the American reality!

THESE CATS ROCK!!!

AND... I find that I enjoy the fruits of their labors!

Granted, I'm more likely to hit Walmart at 12:01am to picks up a copy of Iron Man 2 instead of 100 Million BC, but that's just because Iron Man 2 has better press.

Which brings me back to why I wrote this entry...

This weekend is another weekend dedicated to hard paranormal work. I have hours and hours of audio and video to review by Monday morning. HOWEVER... my mom is in town this weekend, and this was the night she dedicated to seeing her boys! :) So I'll be a diligent psuedo-scientist Saturday and Sunday, but TONIGHT is for FUN! :D

And, for whatever reason, tonight I'm in the mood for some B-Movie goodness!!!

My day started with me waking up un-goddly early (I set my alarm for 4:00pm, shudder) so that I could hose my rocks off and have clothes on by 5:00pm.

But then the day got immediately fun when Mom picked Brian & me up and we went for a couple of hours of conversation and culinary orgasm to Red Lobster. (Say what you will about chain restaurants, but I have never had a less-than-excellent meal at Red Lobster!) (Shrimp Fettucini... Mmmmmmmmmm...)

When Mom dropped us off, I made a run to Walmart to buy a few essentials (so I don't have to leave my cave at all over the weekend), and to browse their DVD isles.

I wasn't looking for a mainstream release. I was looking for a knockbuster.

What I found was -- so far -- GOLD! For $5.00, they had a double-feature of Journey to the Center of the Earth and 100 Million BC!!! IT HAD DINOSAURS ON THE COVER!!! :D And they both star Greg Evigan!!! (My last memory of him was in the made-for-syndicated-TV movies based on William Shatner's TrekWar novels, and they had that fun, cheesey B-Movie feel to them!)

And did I mention...? $5!!! :D

There was also another DVD that intrigued me: It was called Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, and it occurred to me that SFX might be far enough along by now that even a low-budget movie may be able to pull off this type of slick by now! :)

I mean, it's gonna be bad, sure. But maybe it will be bad in that Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack way, right?

But this flick was, like, $7.50.

So I can drop $12.50 for all 3 movies, pay $7.50 for just the 1 movie, or pay a mere $5.00 and get 2 movies.

No contest, right?

I also bought this 2-disc DVD set of 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoons. It's like a sampler set with full episodes of the Mr. T show, Chuck Norris's show, the Ed Grim show and the like! I HAD TO buy this, also, because I knew Brian would flip out over it!

Brian has to be at work early tomorrow, so I got home, popped the first disc of the 80s Toons in and watched the first few episodes until he crashed. Then I retired to my room with the Asylum Double-Feature disc (the one with the dinosaurs on the cover!) and started watching.

I started with Journey to the Center of the Earth and I'm diggin' it, but I keep wondering about this Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus!

And then an idea hits me! "I wonder if Netflix has the movie in their Watch Now selection."

THEY DO!!!

So here's my plan for tonight:

1. Drink a lot of beer as I
2. watch Mega Shark Versus giant Octopus on Netflix,
3. then finish Journey to the Center of the Earth,
4. then watch 100 Million BC!!!

It's BRILLIANT, right?!! I'm an entertainment GENIUS!!! I should be getting paid a bazillion dollars a year to tell cable channels what to air on their stations!

That's my Friday Night!

I hope yours is actually cooler (if that's possible), and if it's not, make the rest of your weekend THE AWESOME-EST!!! :D

HAPPY TOWEL DAY 2010!!!

Do you know where your towel is?

32 years ago, Douglas Noel Adams gave us a most eccentric look at life among the stars! And today, WE CELEBRATE!!! :D

I have to admit that this Towel Day sort of snuck up on me. I didn't bother to take the day off or anything.

By lone (admittedly weak) means of celebrating has been to go to sleep listening to BBC's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Quandary Phase this morning, then listening to Douglas read Life, the Universe and Everything upon waking and on my way to work.

Soon, I need to really do the day up right. Like maybe next year. I'll take the day-of and the day-after off work, then figure out some cool thing to do with my bro to celebrate. It'll be a bit hard to figure something out, though -- I've reread every book Adams wrote, re-watched and re-listened to every version of Hitchhiker's Guide and Dirk Gently that are available numerable times. I'll have to think of some new activity that can be combined with a viewing of the movie or a listening of the radio series, maybe. Like, watching the move on my laptop while attempting to hitchhike across Austin? Or listening to the radio show in a cave?

Or something. I've got a year to figure it out.

Anyway, whether you celebrated Towel Day or not, I hope your day has been AWESOME!

And if not, make tomorrow SUPER-COOL!!! :D

Dad-Blamed TV Writers!!! :(

BASTARD TV WRITERS!!!

I just watched the Season Finale of Castle and those cursed writers are leaving me dangling for the summer!!!

GGRRR!!!

I wanna be a little bitch here and name names:

First of all, from the quick online research I've done, the man to blame here is Andrew W. Marlowe. He's the guy credited with creating such lovable, fascinating character and placed them in such an addictive world. AND... that little bugger that wrote one of those heart-breaking, keep-you-squirming-until-next-fall-when-the-show-is-back-on-air Season Finales!!!

Heartless prick! :(

Do I realize I'm being petty and childish?

Yes, I do... And I realize that those of you with cable and TiVo and don't work at a TV station -- and thereby watch more TV than I do -- are saying, "Don't be such a wuss! Season Finales are always cliff-hangers!"

But dammit, the guy has created such an addictive world!!!

And, in particular, he has created one of those perfect and compelling Ross & Rachel/Tim & Dawn relationships -- dramatized by a couple of the most lovable actors in TV right now, no less -- that just makes you wanna see them together and happy!

And now he's given us ambiguity!!! :(

I mean, yeah, sure, most likely the first episode of Season 3 will resolve the ambiguity and we'll be right back on-course for another season of fun flirty and crime-solving, but still...

Call me a sissy, but I like a Season Finale that promises HOPE for the next season! Did you ever see the TV series of The Dresden Files? THAT gave you HOPE! The Mystery-of-the-Week was solved, and everything was okay, but then the coda for the episode hinted at the potential for even more fun romantic tension for the (theoretical) second season!

THAT is a GREAT Season Finale!

Cliff-hangers are weak sauce. They are insecure writing. They're like those Big Bosses at the end of some levels of video games that nigh-impossible to kill. The game creators are afraid that if the game is too easy you won't buy the next installment. But I don't buy Tomb Raider games for the challenge, I buy them for Lara Croft and the world of Tomb Raider! Same with TV series. I don't watch them because I 3 months of anxiety; I watch them because the stories and characters are awesome!

Seriously, if Castle hadn't ended with a cliff-hanger, would it really lose any viewers over the summer? For the reals?! Who watched Castle and thinks, "If only things were more tense and anxiety-giving"?

By the way, I don't want to let the Writer's Room slide here! Andrew W. Marlowe may be the creator and the guy credited with writing the script for "A Deadly Game" butTV shows aren't written in a vacuum. IMDb.com lists David Grae, Alexi Hawley, Will Beall, Elizabeth Davis, Terri Miller, Terence Paul Winter, René Echevarria, Moira Kirland, Jose Molina and Barry Schindel as writers for the show, and you know -- you know -- that all of them took devilish glee over how much they would make us squirm with this awful ending!!!

Bastards, one and all!

May they all feel guilt and shame for manipulating my emotions that way!

I mean "our". "Manipulating our emotions that way," is what I meant to type.

I'm not shaking my tiny fists at the heavens for on my own behalf... I'm standing up for all of us who love Detective Kate Beckett and Richard Castle and want to see them fall blissfully into bed together!

...

Okay, so maybe it's mostly about me... Say, 10% Me, 90% All Castle Fans.

Or maybe 40/60...

Maybe more 80/20, BUT STILL...

...it was mean of them, and I don't approve.

Will I stop watching the show out of principal?

NO FRAKKIN' WAY!!! I friggin' LOVE that show!!! I'm just bitter that I can't watch the next episode next week!

Castle is CLASSIC!!! (Did anyone else catch the fun little in-joke of Castle watching His Girl Friday on his laptop? GENIUS!) I mean, in a world of 24 and Battlestar Galactica how can you NOT love a frivolous little series wherein the mysteries get solved every week and the angst is kept to a minimum?!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the AMAZING writing of the above mentioned shows. But I'm just saying that life has plenty of drama in it, and I am thankful for folks who just want to entertain me for an hour or so! In my teens/20s, I really appreciated entertainment that dealt with Big Issues, and I still enjoy that in the 2-hour format of movies or the self-contained space of a novel. But if I want to be horrified by man's inhumanity to man, I'll watch a documentary or watch the news. Screw the news, actually --it doesn't really present a fraction of the entire story anymore -- if I want to deal with the Big Issues, I'll ask my friends what's going on in their lives! THERE lies the true drama of life on this physical plane!

And then there's the other extreme: Brainless sitcoms that don't make any sense unless you turn your mind off and just go with the less-than-logical story logic of the hack writers of the show. I hate those types of "entertainment".

So a show like Castle is just the right temperature for me: Smart, yet fun!

And if I'm honest, this season's finale could have been much worse. It's not like they killed Beckett or made Castle an outlaw or something.

Still...

I was having a wonderful time up until the very end of the episode.

And now I'm bitching about it.

And now I think I'm done.

Horror Flicks in Buffy-Town!!! :D

I just watched George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead in Sunnydale's Sun Cinema!!!

:D


How did I get into the fictitious town of Sunnydale? Why, SecondLife, of course! :)

Someone just a bit nerdier than I am (well, maybe not nerdier, per se, but they certainly have more money than I do) bought a sim and recreated Buffy's stomping grounds.

The did a pretty good job, too!

They built Sunnydale High -- including the quad, the lounge, the library and other areas seen in the TV show -- and the Magic Box and the Bronze (though it's a restricted area, which doesn't make sense since the fictional Bronze is a public meeting place), AND the built a working cinema, where you can go and watch actual movies FREE!!!

And you can guess what's showing now!

It's a really lucky break for me, too, because I'm a HUGE fan of Romero's Dead movies, and I've been waiting forever to see this one! I was excited a couple of years ago when Diary of the Dead came out, and even more excited when I read that Romero was going to keep making them! Rebooting the franchise -- by the guy who STARTED the franchise, no less -- was a stroke of genius to those of us who can't get enough Romero-zombie action!

AND, these newer movies are better than the first ones! Not to be blasphemous, but let's be honest: Romero was learning his craft for the first 30 years.

I mean, I love Night of the Living Dead, but I believe anyone who is honest with themselves will admit that its production fell a bit short of its potential. Great story, EXCELLENT concept, decent film.

Then there was the classic Dawn of the Dead, which is a much better movie! The pacing feels quite slow by today's standards, but that's because it was made in the 1970s. Film pacing didn't pick up to the fevered pitch it is now until the 1990s.

But seriously, I've never really been a fan of Day of the Dead. Great title, and I was excited to see it just because it was the long-awaited sequel to Dawn, but in the end it was pretty dull. There were some intriguing ideas but forth in it, but the action was well bland and the story was pretty laborious (it was pretty much people in a bunker, talking, until the huge zombie kill-fest at the end).

In my opinion, the Dead series REALLY came alive (please pardon the pun) with Land of the Dead!!! Finally, the production matched the vision, and the film was brilliant!!!

The only problem with Land was the question of where the hell does Romero go from there?!

His answer? Sheer brilliance! Go back to the beginning! Start from Zero Hour and continue forward again.

AND, Romero decided to make the new batch of Dead films as an independent, like he did with Night! Dead flicks are about characters dealing with the loss of Society, so you really don't need a huge budget. Talented "no-names" can deliver their roles just as well as expensive stars! And the cost of special effects and special makeup effects have come way, way down in the last 2 decades! Back during Night and Dawn, Romero and Tom Savini and everyone were creating the Special Effects field! Now it's just another department, like wardrobe or props, on a production. And though there used to only be one Tom Savini, now there are generations who grew up learning from him! AND, they're entering the field with newer, easier and more effective (not to mention cost-effective) methods than what Savini had at his disposal! :D

So I thought Diary of the Dead was an awesome restart, and I was dying to see how Survival of the Dead would follow up...

My verdict? SUPERIOR!!! It's a great flick! Never boring! Fascinating! Scary, natch! :D

AND I GOT TO SEE IT IN SUNNYDALE!!! lol

That is, in my opinion, a really cool way to spend a couple of hours! It fed my freak-fix in so many ways! :D

May 2010 Is Starting Out GROOVY!

This has been an AWESOME weekend!!!

First of all, my Gnomey Goddess has been a bit chattier this past week that she's been able to be recently. So the work week went by particularly pleasantly! (It's indescribably what getting a text from her in the middle of a shift is like! But it's a bit like Santa interrupting your work so he can deliver a huge, shiny package!!!) So it's not like I was miserable before this weekend arrived, lol. I was doing quite well! :D

And then my weekend started with a Payday Friday -- which is always just a little extra cool for me because I work 10-hour days, so at 6:00 am Friday morning, when everyone else is getting up to begin their last day of work, I'm beginning my weekend! And on paydays, that means I get off work and have money!

Now, that's night as glorious at it might at first sound, because I live a sort of Peter-Parker existence... I grew up on Spider-Man, and one of the things that drew me into the book was the fact that when he wasn't fighting super villains, the poor guy was just trying to pay his rent, lol. When you're 12 or 14 years old, that seems a great deal more romantic than it does when you're 39. ;P So on paydays, I don't really have money to blow; but when I'm lucky, I can pay most of what needs to be paid (like, say, rent, gas and food) and then maybe buy myself a treat.

I was lucky this week!!!

Filled up the car, bought enough food to last me until next paycheck... and then...

First, I bought AVATAR on DVD!

I got to see this in 3-D in the cinemas, but my poor brother did not. So it was super-exciting to be able to get Avatar so Brian could share the joy, too!!!

Next order of business: the A Nightmare On Elm Street remake!

When we were growing up, Brian & I were Horror movie fans. (We still are, but back then we were quite a bit more obsessive about it.) I was a huge Jason Voorhees fan, and Brian's guy was Freddy Krueger. One of my proudest moments as a brother was when I was able to score Brian a Special Edition Nightmare DVD Box Set (the one where the spines of all the movies make up a picture) as a present for Christmas or his birthday. (I don't recall now which.)

Brian, naturally, learned about this remake way before I did. He and I are much more open to the prospect of remakes than most guys our age. (We grew up in the 1970s & 1980s, when the term "remake" usually meant that someone took a great older movie, stripped out everything that made it a great film, then slapped it on screen with better effects and a lot less substance. But in this new millennium, anyone who is honest with themselves has to admit that the term "remake" often means "quality" in every way, including writing.) But when he discovered that Rorschach from Watchmen was the new Freddy, he got really excited about it. It's produced by Michael Bay (whose work I love with a passion and who, you may have noticed, produces BADASS Horror movie remakes)! Now, neither of us got to see the Friday the 13th remake in the theaters: we had to wait for DVD. So I was bound and determined to take my li'l bro to see this new Nightmare Opening Weekend -- Opening Night, if possible.

And why not? I'm off on weekends now, and when Brian works Fridays, it's usually early. So, conceivably, the only thing standing in the way is the money. (Believe it or not -- nowadays there are probably more who can believe it than who can't -- $20 can be a deal-breaker.)

But the Universe smiled upon us, and after paying for rent, food, gas and Avatar, this paycheck bought me 2 adult tickets to the 9:50 pm showing of Nightmare Friday night!!!

:D

And the flick was good!!!

It was largely a jump-scare movie (with loud noises forcing you unexpectedly out of your seat every 10 minutes), but the writing and acting and cinematography and everything was excellent! And even though us old folks have seen Robert Englund in the makeup for so long that the original Fred Krueger seem irreplaceable, Jackie Earle Haley (who has a bit of a serial-killer name himself, doesn't he?) masterfully steps in and reminds us that truly great actors can make a role their own. And the writing helped him out: This Fred Krueger is a little different than Mr. Englund's Krueger -- this guy is a dead-serious monster!

Now, the anti-remake movie nerds may argue, "Yeah, but Freddy is supposed to be funny, too!" But I don't believe they understood the character... In the first 2 or 3 movies -- and I was the age range the studio was marketing to when those movie first came out -- Freddy's humor was more disturbing: The fact that he was cracking jokes and enjoying what he was doing made him a deeply unsettling killer! This was a guy who, by all accounts, you just didn't want in your life! He killed kids for fun, and now he tortures you when you're most vulnerable -- in sleep -- AND if he hurts you in your dreams, it becomes reality in your waking life, too! AND THEN, he's enjoying himself!!!

I think the "humor" element in the later Nightmare films (I put "humor" in quotes because the gags never once made me laugh) was a result of unskilled filmmakers who misunderstood the character. (Robert Englund, I should note, can't be blamed because his job was to play whatever the writers gave him straight, and hope that the directors and editors knew what they were doing -- which they, increasingly, didn't.)

When filmmakers undertake to remake a classic, their job -- as I see it -- is to take all the elements that made the original a classic, remove the "cheese" factor of now-dated writing and special effects and acting (stuff that worked back-in-the-day but doesn't work for current audiences) and then try to take those elements that work a little farther. The folks who made this new Nightmare (particularly the writers), I feel, accomplished that in spades! They didn't muck around with any of the elements, just for the sake of "making it their own", but they did alter the character of Freddy just a hair, so that he can never again be mistaken for a Comic character. And I think that was genius! You want to make a Comedy about a serial killer? Go make a sequel to Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. (That flick is dying for a franchise! It's brilliant!) But unless something goes horribly wrong, people will never again go see a Nightmare sequel with the expectation of giggles. (Unless, you know... they are, themselves, seriously disturbed.)

I so did not intend this blog entry to be a movie review, lol.

So my point was this: BRIAN & I GOT TO SEE THE NEW NIGHTMARE FRIDAY!!! :D

WOO-HOO!!!

It was awesome!

Then we came home and unwound with some Avatar. (The movie is just as good with repeated viewings!)

Then, Saturday was always going to be great for me: Texas Spirits had an investigation scheduled!

That was cool, too!

The folks we investigated for were really nice people. You couldn't call their house small, lol, but there were fewer rooms than we've been investigating recently. So we had an intimate team of 3 of us, which made this investigation unique. (Doing anything in larger and smaller groups always changes the way an activity flows, so it was really neat experiencing how a group of 3 works! Typically, we are 4-6, but we're done investigations where all of Texas Spirits are with us, then we've got up to 20 guest investigators.)

The only thing particularly paranormal that happened last night was that my stomach became very chatty during the 2nd phase of our investigation, lol. (I woke up unusually early (for me) and so breakfast came around 4:00 pm (instead of around 8:00 pm, which is my norm) and so I got hungry a couple of hours into the investigation. Lesson learned.)

There was one room, in particular, that was interesting. I look forward to reviewing the video and audio we captured.

So Night 2 of my weekend: AWESOME! :)

Now I'm onto the last night of my weekend...

I woke up around 3:00 pm again, hungry. So I made some delicious food. I'm hoping Brian & I can see Iron Man 2 next Friday, so I watched the Behind-the-Scenes stuff on the Iron Man Bonus Disc again while I ate. And while I cooked, I listened to a Ghost Chronicles podcast (episode 89) featuring Frank Joseph, author of a ton of books exploring the history of Atlantis, including a book which just came in the mail Friday: The Atlantis Encyclopedia -- if you've ever read a book about Atlantis and thought that some of the archeological evidence was interesting but that the theories the author came up with seemed far-fetched, The Atlantis Encyclopedia is for you! It is an astoundingly comprehensive examination of the evidence, and simply offers the theories as just that: theories. It's not trying to sway you, just show you (in great detail) the data that is out there.

I was hoping to stay awake until at least 6:00 am, to get my sleep schedule back on track for tomorrow, but I crashed around 6:30 pm and didn't wake up until after midnight. :(

So getting up (and then STAYING up) tomorrow may be interesting, lol.

Still, in the time between now and the time I force myself to go to sleep...

I've got some evidence I can review, naturally. And I'm excited about what might turn up there!

Then I've got this book I'm enjoying: Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and Paranormal in the Freetown Sate Forest by Christopher Balzano (excellent writer, formidable mind, and always fun to listen to when he pops up on Spooky Southcoast). I've been listening to him talk about the paranormal on podcasts for years now, and his book on investigating was the first one Brian & I read when we finally decided to get our hands dirty, so to speak; but I had never read his first book, the one that put him on the paranormal map. The book was so popular, and he continued receiving so many new reports, that he eventually followed Dark Woods up with a second book about the area: Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle, which I now own, too. So I'm eager to finish up Dark Woods so I can get to Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle, AND THEN I can read Brad Steiger's groundbreaking Worlds Before Our Own.

So my paranormal non-fiction plate is spilling over with tasty treats!

However...

I logged into Audible.com, hoping to find some non-fiction audiobooks on Atlantis (I'm becoming a bit obsessed, it seems), and I was pleasantly surprised to discover I have a credit!

...I joined this club-thingy they offer where you pay a monthly fee and you get a significant discount on every audiobook you buy from them, but you also get a credit that equals the price of any book every month, so even if you don't have any disposable income, you still get at least one "free" audiobook every month. With my aural fixation, this really does save me some money. But more than that, they now have ALL the Dresden Files novels!!! (In fact, that's how they finally got me to subscribe: I was about to buy book #5, and it was cheaper if I signed up right then (even paying the initial subscription fee) than if I were to buy the book without the subscription.) There are plenty of books I can buy for cheap with my discount, but many of the Dresden Files books (since they're still new to the audiobook format) are kind of expensive. I've read 6 out of 13 so far. And Butcher keeps putting them out. He has said that he plans to write 20 books in the "series proper" (if you will) and then finish the series with "an Apocalyptic Trilogy". So now that all the books so far are audiobooks (my favorite, favorite, FAVORITE way to enjoy these masterful adventures), I hope to catch up to all the die-hard and maybe enjoy book 14 or book 15 (and on) as they are released! I doubt I'll sign up to any of the forums and to debate and discuss the exciting new directions Butcher has thrown the series into... but it would be neat to be able to.

Anyway, so I subscribed to Audible's club-thingy, pretty much, so I can catch up on the Dresden Files series. (And, as a side benefit, I don't pay so much for Nick Pope's Summer of the Saucers or one of Doreen Virtue's books.)

But TONIGHT... I logged into Audible and discovered that I had a credit!!!

And there are a couple of fundamental shifts in poor Harry Dresden's fortunes in Blood Rites that had me bursting at the seams to see what happens next!!!

AND NOW I CAN!!! :D

So there's a good possibility that that's how I'll spend the rest of my last day off. ;)

I have to say, what Jim Butcher has created with The Dresden Files is amazing! It's this world that I just REALLY enjoy hangin' out in!!! I listened to the first 4 books in the series maybe 4 times each, because Buzzy Multimedia only produced audiobooks for the first 4, and then they released, like, Small Favor or White Night -- one of the ones that was being released in hard-back at the time, but was way ahead in the chronology of the events of the series. So I kept returning to the first 4, just to get my Dresden fix. BUT NOW...!!! I'm moving forward in Dresden's adventures!!! And though Butcher is the type of writer who is willing to change his hero's circumstances irreparably, the world itself -- Harry Dresden's Chicago -- continues to feel like a beloved vacation spot, someplace I always enjoy returning to! Honestly, reading the Dresden Files novels gives me very much the sensation I used to enjoy catching the new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer each week, back in the 1990s!!! I probably can't describe it better than that. And watching Buffy reminded me of the feeling of a new Friday the 13th or Star Wars or Star Trek movie being released when I was a kid! You know that you're going to have a great time, no matter what!

So, put that way... I guess I know what I'm going to do next...

I believe it's time Jim Butcher, James Marsters (who reads the audiobooks) and I take a walk around north Austin and see what trouble Harry Dresden gets himself into (and out of) this time!!!

:D

The Edwards Boys Conquered the 2010 FRENZY!!!

It was a bitch this year, but WE DID IT!!!

Valuable lessons were learned...

First off, I thought going in that the script we completed would represent a Rough Draft of a script we would later rewrite and sell.

That's not quite how it happened.

What this script -- the one with which we won the Frenzy -- represents is actually a road we don't want to go down with this concept.

WHICH IS VALUABLE INFORMATION!

Indeed, the reason Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio (of Pirate of the Caribbean fame) got out of the Writing-For-Animation game (they wrote Disney's Aladdin, The Road to El Dorado and, of course, Dreamworks' Shrek) is because of this sort of thing...

They reported that writing for an animated feature was about exploring every road possible before settling down on the road actually taken by the animators.

Apparently, live-action filmmakers aren't quite this comprehensive when they ask for rewrites on a script.

Stephen King, in On Writing talks about "writing in cold blood" and how hard it can be. (Ironically, he's talking about how he prefers to write without an outline, because he prefers to discover each scene as it unfolds in his imagination. I am talking about writing a story that I already know is uninteresting to read because I am, myself, bored to tears with it.) This was excruciating because halfway through it I knew that this version of the story wasn't the best one.

But that's not what this blog entry is about.

WE FRIGGIN' DID IT!!! :D

My li'l bro and I took a story from concept to (a sort of) completion in 30 days!!! :D

I had my Frenzy beard goin', too. I shaved it off an hour ago, without taking the Before & After pictures, but I figure you aren't really interested in seeing me all scraggly and then clean-shaven, lol. ;P I think I did the Frenzy-Beard-Progression blog a couple of years ago.

This happened late Saturday/early Sunday morning, but I'm only blogging about it now because right after I had our pages validated, I told Brian, then disappeared into the rest of Chuck: Season 2, then slipped right into Medium: Season 5. I let someone entertain me for the last 31 hours or so, lol.

I should be asleep -- so I can get to work on time tonight -- but I'm still sort of in Celebration mode, lol.

I look forward to a week with minimal obligations. I hope yours is SMOOTH and RELAXING, too!!!

:D

Rick Castle is Ferris Bueller!

I just came to this realization.

I just bought the DVD for Ferris Bueller's Day Off (one of my all-time favorite movies, ever, but one I bought on VHS and saw multiple times in the theaters when it first came out) and one of the Bonus feature featuretts was about the character. They were describing this amazingly charming character who seems to be wish-fulfillment for the audience, while at the same time being portrayed by an actor who, somehow, seemed to be as beloved as the character.

And I thought of Castle/Fillion!

The character of Rick Castle simply has too much going for him: He's handsome, has an adorable family, is ridiculously successful in his career and, because of his career, can fulfill every whimsy he might invent. But he's played by an actor who, one could argue, is just as over-privileged: Nathan Fillion is handsome, funny, fun, smart, is one of Whedon's go-to stars (a fact that, in and of itself, should make all of us fan-boys hate his guts in envy) and seems to be having a genuinely good time being Nathan Fillion.

But it's impossible to dislike the guy. And thus, when we watch Castle, it is equally impossible to hate Castle.

Okay, sure, he has his pick of the hottest women on the planet, including the indescribably tasty Det. Kate Beckett played by the indescribably tasty (and talented) Stana Katic. And, sure, he has more money than God and can get away with anything anywhere with anyone.

But, somehow, we sense that he deserves what he gets. Why? I really don't know. Maybe it's because he appreciates these breaks the way we would like to appreciate them if we had the chance. Maybe it's because we would really like to believe that -- deep down -- we are Castle -- smart, attractive, fun, and talented.

But part of it must surely believe that we just plain LIKE the guy who is playing the role, and we can't begrudge him an ounce of his success, even if we wanted to.

I have never met or interacted with Nathan Fillion, but I came close once...

In 2005, I flew to L.A. to attend the Creative Screenwriting Magazine Expo, where Joss Whedon was a featured guest and Nathan Fillion presented Whedon with an award as a Sci-Fi writer. (This was just after Serenity had been released in theaters.)

I had gone there, mainly, to see The Master talk about his craft. But I had fallen in love with Fillion from his performance on Buffy as a REALLY evil guy, and then (via DVD) his performance as Capt. Mal.

It is, in retrospect, noteworthy to comment on hos Fillion graciously introduced and honored the amazing Whedon -- feeding into all our fan-boy worship of Whedon and not taking an ounce away from it -- and then disappeared into the background as soon as it was Joss's time to take the stage. Then, after the talk, when everyone was standing in line to get Joss's autograph and ask him the questions we couldn't think of during his lecture, Fillion was nowhere to be found.

But then...

...and this was a world-changer for me...

...during the break between lectures, some buddies and I were out in front of the building, taking a smoke break before Robert McKee, or whomever we were going to listen to next, we see Whedon, Fillion and their handler (a little hotty I had never seen before or since) exiting the building.

RIGHT NEAR WHERE WE WERE STANDING!

It was SO COOL! We were about to be mere feet away from Captain Malcom Reynolds and the man who brought him -- and Buffy and Angel and Willow and all those amazing characters -- to life!!!

As they passed, they trio didn't slow for autographs or to make acquaintances or anything. Which was only to be expected. (If they had, they would NEVER have made whatever appointment waited for them next.)

I was an extra for 4 days on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I played one of the hundreds of Vulcans you see in the out-of-focus background at the Khitomer Conference at the climax of the movie.

One day, I'm walking onto the set after lunch, and just as I'm about to cross the threshold from off-set to on-set I can't see the red light -- the device used to let everyone know if a scene is being shot -- so I stop abruptly to get a better look.

I feel someone bump into me from behind.

I turn around, and there is Captain James Tiberius Kirk, in full costume and makeup!!! William Shatner has bumped into me because I stopped shot before entering the stage!!! reflexively (being a Texas, born and raised) I say "Sorry." But Mr. Shatner doesn't acknowledge the apology, or even make eye contact.

But I'm not disappointed by this. See, I have been a film flunky for a large part of my life, even in 1990. I TOTALLY get Mr. Shanter's position: He is an actor doing a job, and he needs to focus on that job entirely. He's on a set with, literally, hundreds of extras, some of whom are pros and many of whom are newbies. If he stops and connects with any one of them (us), he could be sidetracked for hours!

William Shatner isn't just a movie star, he's a living legend! He has spent DECADES of his life being recognized (probably in the most inopportune moments any of us can imagine) and having to figure out what to do in those situations.

So I'm guessing that he has probably been forced to develop some sort of "no eye contact, no acknowledgment" policy JUST TO MOVE AROUND IN THE WORLD. I can walk down the street and smile at everyone I see, because I am (as far as they know, anyway) nobody. But when William Shatner makes eye contact with a stranger, they may try to talk him up for half an hour!

So I didn't feel the least bit slighted or anything when I cause Mr. Shatner to bump into me, and he didn't acknowledge my apology. (We were, after all, there to do a job, right?) I still adore and respect and hero-worship this amazing artist!
BUT...

I tell that story as a preface to why Nathan Fillion is so amazing!

So it's 2005 again, and I'm polluting the air with some of my closest friends outside the Creative Screenwriting Magazine Exposition, and Nathan Fillion, Joss Whedon, and an unknown hotty (presumably a handler for Mrs. Whedon and Mr. Fillion) are exiting the building...

Joss and the hotty exit the front doors in the expected fashion: heads down, eyes averted. (Mind you, even at this point -- well after Buffy, Angel and Firefly, Joss Whedon is a living icon.) But Mr. Fillion...

This may sound homo-erotic, but it felt more spiritual at the time...

I swear to God that Nathan Fillion locked eyes on each of us as he exited the door! But more than that, I could swear that he was trying to communicate telepathically to us! The expression in his eyes seemed to say "I SO appreciate your support of Firefly and Serenity and you guys are SO important to me!"

Now, granted, this memory is 5 years old, and is thereby could is probably distorted by the sand of time. I mean, there is no way he could have known that we are die-hard fans of the work he was a part of, much less his work, specifically.

But allow me to point out that I've been telling this story since that very day. Even if it has grown in its significance to me, it's based on an actual event, which is the eye contact that Nathan Fillion made with us -- a group of wannabe screenwriters -- and the odd, seemingly grateful expression in his eyes as he (and Joss and the hotty) walked past us that day.

How could you NOT want the best for that guy?!!

And to back up my claim, listen to any interview with him! Watch him in the bonus material on the Buffy, Firelfy, Serenity or Doctor Horrible DVDs! He has yet to appear in public in any way that contradicts what I thought I saw in his eyes in that brief 2005 encounter.

So Rick Castle gets to sleep with swimsuit models, makes millions as a Mystery novelist, is best buds with the mayor of New York City and will (eventually) get to see Detective Beckett naked. He also plays with RC helicopters and plays paintball with his daughter and gets distracted when pretty girls appear near him. HE'S US! He's a Fantasy-Fulfillment character!

And the fact that he seems to be played by an actor who ACTUALLY IS US (just, you know, maybe better looking and supremely talented as an actor) just makes it all so much more fun living in his shoes for an hour each week!

To Nathan Fillion, the Ferris Beuller of our day: YOU RULE, SIR!!! THANK YOU!!! :D

Script Frenzy: Day 15

Okay, so Script Frenzy is halfway finished, I'm 20 pages behind-schedule, I have a lull in my work shift...

And I'm blogging.

I've hit a bit of a brick wall. Brian & I never finished outlining the script, and I figured I would be able to sort of outline as I go, but at the moment that's not how it's working out. :( I wrote the pages for what we outlined, and now I'm stuck with that age-old writer's question: "What happens next?!" I've got maybe 2 hours that I can write before my shift gets busy again, but I don't know what to write!

I mean, as a Buddhist I feel like I should simply take this as it comes, that what will happen will happen, and when it's supposed to happen. I should simply enjoy the free time and maybe listen to some more Insomnia and just take it easy.

But my writer's guilt keep screaming at me that I'm 20 pages behind schedule, I have 40 pages I need to write before next week (60 pages, total, due by this coming Monday), and I have time to write available to me that's going to waste!

It's hard to be serene and simply follow the flow of the Tao with that writer guy making so much racket in my head.

There's a small (very small) part of me that's thinking "Just write; don't worry about if it's crap; the goal of Script Frenzy is to write 100 pages."

And I guess I could do that.

But there's this perfectionist part of me that can't stomach the idea of writing crap. (Actually, depending on which philosophy of writing you take, this perfectionist bloke could be my biggest problem as a writer.)

...

My buddy Pete just gave me a fortune cookie. I kid you not: My fortune is as follows:

"The greatest danger could be your stupidity."

I would assume this was a prank, except for the fact that Pete read his fortune and it sounded perfectly normal.

Prank fortune cookies could be a cool idea. I'm sure they exist, but I wonder how funny the fortunes are.

Okay, so it seems like the best choice I have for the moment -- with 20 pages to complete before tomorrow, then 10 pages a day to complete over the next 4 days -- is probably to just start writing, good, bad or ugly. (I predict very, very ugly.)

Thanks for the chat.

:)

SCRIPT FRENZY: Day 1

April 1st, the first day of Script Frenzy!!! :D

I'm stoked!

Brian & I have a loose schedule, and we're going to start in earnest tomorrow, Friday.

I've done a bit of work tonight (at work), and I hope to do a bit more before my shift is over. I want to bring some stuff to the table when Brian & I get started. (I know that he has been filling pages of one of his notebooks with notes about this.)

If all goes well, Saturday or Sunday we'll have what I call a Combat Outline with every scene in its place, and next weekend I'll write the first 40 pages.

Although...

It looks like TSPI may have a new case. So I may spend next Saturday investigating. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

But for the time being, I'll assume nothing and move forward with the Frenzy as planned.

I'M SO EXCITED!!!

Know how I spent the hours leading up to April 1st? Watching The Phantom of the Opera!!! My friend Nicole got us THE MOST AMAZING SEATS!!! We were SO CLOSED!!! It was AWESOME!!!

AND... It was the best production I have seen! I've seen the show at least 3 times now (I think I've seen it 4, but I can only definitively remember 3) and last night was clearly the best performance! VERY cool!!! :D

Oh... :(

Our Internet isn't working at home. :( For the foreseeable future (which, hopefully, will only be another week or two) I will only have Net access at work.

That may put a kink in our Script Frenzy experience... You update your progress by uploading the pages you've written to the Script Frenzy site. But if we can keep our schedule, we should be finished with the script on Sunday, April 25th. So I'll be able to upload the final pages from work on Monday, April 26th.

If, however, we fall behind with our pages, things could get complicated -- assuming we don't have Net access at home by the end of the month. The last day of the frenzy is Friday, April 30th. If I don't finish the pages until then, I'll need to find access to the Net before midnight.

Still... The schedule has what My Genius Friend Dave calls "slop time", meaning that I designed it with the assumption that some days I'll fall behind schedule and some days I'll get ahead. So, hopefully, we'll finish up days before the competition is over.

We'll see. :)

Okay, I should probably do some work, then see if maybe inspiration shows up allows me to get a bit more outlining done tonight.

Hope you have an EXCELLENT week!!! :D