REVIEW

As I write this I am on what I like to call DAVECATION. It’s like a vacation, but with more Dave than usual. It’s not spring break in my District yet, but it’s as good a week as any to take off. I digging out from this mountain of trash that accumulated in the Dave Cave and then this Wednesday I’m off to my favorite retreat, a cottage stuck in time (the 1930s to be exact) in Crystal Cove. Four days in Crystal Cove feels like a month in the real world. The cottage is right on the beach. No street lights, no TV or radio, no screens of any kind unless you are stupid enough to bring them. It’s just you and the rhythm of the surf. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams…

Last Monday I had a conference call with Amazon Studios and I haven’t said much about it because I don’t really know what the hell to say. Amazon would like the show to appeal to younger kids. I wrote the show specifically for older kids and Tweens. We are not at an impasse, but there are…wrinkles. The terrain is now a bit trickier to negotiate. I’m not sure how much of which direction we are going. I was honestly caught off guard and, embarrassingly, there was much awkward silence on the phone from my end. What can I say — I just didn’t know what to say. Follow up phone calls will happen soon. I may not be certain of the road ahead until after I return from my getaway. It’s been a rough week.

While Gortimer is in limbo (at least until the next call) I’ve jumped back into my one-hour TV pilot and it’s really taken off. I was just going to hash out a breakdown but I’m more in full treatment mode as the muse is overfeeding me with details right now and I’d be a fool not to take furious dictation. I’m happy with it so far, and even found a new wrinkle that will become an important part of the show I think so well done, me.

PREVIEW

Gonna keep hammering at the new TV pilot until I leave for the beach cottage. I return on Saturday. Just in time to sleep and then enjoy a pagan-fertility-festival-co-opted-by-Christianity feast and new Doctor Who and new Game of Thrones. Next weekend I might just explode.

Featured Image: Kwong Yee Cheng via photopin cc

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Review

Last week was one of those weeks that blasted by like a freight train from hell on fire with bat wings and jet engines.

Day job stuff pretty much dominated everything. We had open house at the preschool this Thursday and it wiped me out. I’ve also been practicing my photography and have gotten good enough at it that people come to me when they want pictures taken. I find this amusing. I have not real ambition to make art as a photographer, and yet I have to run and hide lest the demand for my photography eat up all my time. If my writing had taken off as fast, I’d be typing this from Malibu right now while Mel Gibson gave me a foot massage^[1]. So long story somewhat shorter – most of this week I’ve been dog tired from running around shooting photos from work, and then spending more time than I estimated processing them.

No writing got done. No weight got lost.

Good news, though. Heard from Amazon Studios and we have a conference call set up for Monday night at 5:30 pm. The status as of now is that I’ve been in a holding pattern while AS launched the preschool pilots. Now that those are done, they are ready to start their “second wave” of pilots. My guess is that Amazon will want a polish on my pilot script and soon after that I hope they’ll officially decide to greenlight the pilot.

I revamped the Contact page and now you can Ask Me Anything. You don’t even have to give your name or email unless you prefer a private response. Otherwise I’ll answer questions on the blog.

I noticed that my Photoshop skills quickly atrophy if I don’t use them, and I only need them sparingly but I do need them. So I’ve begun a regular project of modifying vintage ads with new words, the first of which I posted last week. It’s about the last pair of pajamas your child might ever wear. And yes, it’s another experiment in constructing a narrative obliquely and cumulatively. Stay tuned for more.

Read a friend’s screenplay and it’s good and I gave some notes. I’m terrible at reading things I promise to read and I’ve had to turn down people asking me to read their stuff and I fell like a total dick, but I’ve said yes too many times only to set things aside and forget them and that is a horrible thing to do to someone. So I beg your forgiveness if I have to decline reading anything for the time being. I’m just at one of those overwhelmingly busy periods of my life. I don’t even read for money right now.

Preview

This next week I have no idea what to expect. Everything will depend on the Amazon call Monday night. I figure whatever happens on that call will be my top priority, so I’m planning on planning around any tasks that arise out of the call. Most likely I’ll be revising the Gortimer pilot episode.

The following week I’m on vacation and will be spending four days in a cozy restored 1930s beach cottage directly on the shore of the Pacific. No street lights. No TV. No WiFi. Just the sound of the big damned ocean. I cannot wait.

photo credit: rintakumpu via photopin cc

1. That’s not actually something I’d enjoy, but something I’d do just to show how rich and awesome I was.

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Advertising says so much about our culture and what we value, and even what we embrace enthusiastically as normal. It’s worth taking another look back, don’t you think?

Scannie Jammies make choosing a dream.

If you’ve had any personal experience with Scannie Jammies, please leave me a comment. Come to think of it, this would explain those early memories of a little brother no one ever talks about…

Scannie Jammies by David Anaxagoras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Warning: the following information is not meant to be helpful or interesting in any way and is offered without any warranty, express or implied. Void in Canada. 

Looking Back

After many rounds of not being here to sign in person for a $30 part from Microsoft, I finally picked up my replacement Xbox power brick from the FedEx store, which called and, sounding very annoyed, told me that I only had three days left to get it.

Thursday I stayed home from the day job with a whopping headache which I never get and worried me that it would lead to something worse, like a fever or full-blown flu. Perhaps unrelated, I did have some tummy trouble later that night so stayed home another day. I wish I didn’t feel so guilty about it.

My writing pal and long-suffering Beta reader, Jason Nutt, finished a draft of his latest screenplay and warned me of its imminent arrival in my inbox. I have it now and it will be the first script I read and give notes on using the iPad. I’m using PDF Expert and it’s beautiful and elegant.

Found out in an email from the Nicholl people that they raised their eligibility limit this year to $25,000 in professional earnings, which means I am once again eligible to submit to the fellowship. I hope I can count on Amazon Studios to ruin that opportunity like they did last year by pulling the trigger on my option.

Read my first full-length novel on the Kindle app for iPad. Not a terrible experience, but he iPad is just a bit too heavy to be really comfortable, and I kept accidentally turning pages by touching the edges of the screen. They really need to give me an option to turn that off, and only turn pages with a clear swipe gesture. eReaders still have a long way to fullfil their potential. Kindle wouldn’t sync my reading across platforms, particularly to my iMac, because it was a book I downloaded from Project Gutenberg, not an Amazon purchase. Nothing enrages me more than those kind of games. Also, the Kindle app is appalling bad at helping you to categorize and organize your books. These are pixels and bits — nothing could be easier to organize, and yet Kindle could care less apparently.

The book in question, by the way, was research for my new TV pilot, a drama, which I began in earnest this week while Gortimer is still in a holding pattern. It was slow going but I’m picking up steam. Most of the research is behind me and I’m breaking down the story now. I bought Alex Epstein’s Crafty TV Writing since all my training and education is in movies, and I was just very lucky to pull off my Amazon pilot without really knowing what I was doing. Crafty TV Writing was about 1/3 brilliant and interesting, and about 2/3 on the edge of dated and uninteresting. Needs an update.

I backed THE MACHINE OF DEATH card game on Kickstarter. I’m a sucker for any kind of game in which the object is to construct a narrative. I’m fascinated by unconventional ways of telling stories. On that note, I also backed STORY WAR. I hope someday I have someone to play games with…

Received beautifully crafted books from the Folio Society. Expensive but worth it. Stunning editions of The Little White Horse, The Olive Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, and the most awesomely designed of the bunch, The Once and Future King.

 The Week Ahead

It’s Open House this Thursday at the preschool (my day job) so that means extra work and prep and a late Thursday night.  Which means I have to be extra vigilant with my time and stay organized this week. My big project is just that: clean out/up the Dave Cave and have things ready for when I need them. That means, among other things, laundry done and folded tonight before the work week starts. Such a glamorous life, writing is.

And on the writing front, I want to have the new drama pilot solidly outlined by week’s end, which will be a challenge given the day job is encroaching on writing time this week. Also, at least two new blog posts during the week. I think I can pre-write one this afternoon.

I also want to begin losing weight again. I’ve lost a little this month, but I really need to start buckling down if I’m going to make any useful headway. And I’m already making an exception for my annual Shamrock Shake. By the way, please do not offer weight-loss advice in the comments. Just don’t.

Featured image | photo credit: >Rooners via photopin cc

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I’ve ditched the complicated magazine format. It took too much effort to maintain and negated the whole point of buying a theme instead of coding it myself. Also, now that I’ve made some headway with screenwriting my writing focus has shifted and I’m doing less feature-article writing anyway.

The new blog is deliberately minimalistic and, I hope, easy to navigate. Don’t overlook the asterisk in the upper right – it activates a drawer that shows recent and popular posts and other goodies. In the sidebar on the left, click on the boy with a frog in his head to visit my Amazon Studios project page.

Posting will be more frequent, but posts will be more casual – more like when I first started blogging way back in 2004.

- Dave

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