Get ready for lots of exciting blog posts from places like: My Desk and The Couch. I’ll be sharing lots of beautiful images of my adventures. For example:

Also, prepare yourselves for mesmerizing tales with titillating titles like: “How Hard This Scene Was To Edit”, “What It’s Like To Sleep At Night For Once”, and “I Spoke With My Wife Today For Five Whole Minutes”.

That’s right: I’m really just taking a week off at home, and my goal will be to finish the rough cut of this movie. I did this once before, in December, but instead of accomplishing my goal, I got sick. So this is Try #2.

I’ll let you know how it goes. There may be blogging, but only if I’m making fantastically speedy progress. Otherwise you folks and your endless need for entertainment based on my life are going to lose pretty severely to the competitive powerhouse that is Me Accomplishing Things.

I always do a quick tour of the vendors first, though, and this time I met Samuel from Thread & Film, a Ft. Wayne-based wedding cinematography company. Notice the careful use of the word “cinematography” as opposed to “videography”. Thread & Film creates wedding movies, not wedding videos, complete with trailers and shot at 24 frames per second.

They have a very beautiful, useful website, and I particularly love their explanation of the philosophy behind the services they provide and the artful way they seem to occupy the space between documentary and narrative production. Watch some of their trailers if you want to see what I’m talking about. UPDATE: Apparently these aren’t live yet, but make sure to check back later.

Browsing their website got me thinking about what it is people are hiring them to do, and I don’t think the answer is: “make a visual record of the events of their wedding day”. Certainly that’s part of what they offer, but it’s almost incidental to their actual product, which is the experience of hyper-reality—the near-tangible feeling that your wedding (and by extension, your very existence) is a larger-than-life event.

I’m definitely expressing my opinion here; the fine people of Thread & Film might disagree with me, and I don’t want to put words in their mouths. I feel like this is an interesting concept to explore, though, as being indicative of a larger overall trend.

People understand the world in terms of narrative, and the best communication leverages this. The prevalence of black-and-white thinking in politics, for example, illustrates the fact that people like a story with a hero and a villain, because that kind of story is easier to process than one in which all the characters have mixed motivations and do both good and bad things, often at the same time, for reasons that aren’t always entirely consistent.

Because we process in terms of story and serially consume so many different types and lengths of stories as part of the inescapable over-abundance of media in Western culture, our mental paradigms have evolved. We’ve grown to expect life to have that heightened, epic, near-mythical quality so frequently present in depictions of normal life on both the big and small screens.

How we deal with the perpetual disappointment of discovering that life almost never resembles our over-hyped mental image is a subject for a different day. Every now and then, though, the opportunity comes along to participate in something that will give us a taste, if only for a few moments, of that longed-for adventure we imagine life to be. People with abundant resources are naturally better positioned to take advantage of these opportunities, but not all of them are life-shattering or expensive. In fact, Donald Miller argues that the best kind of life is one that consistently makes the decision to seize small moments and build them into a larger, better story.

Thread & Film does the same thing I do, but targeted at specific individuals. Whereas writing and filmmaking provide escapism to a large audience from their life into a fantasy life, Thread & Film provides escapism to one couple from their life into a better, more idealized version of their life. I’d love to learn about the psychological impact of having a piece of your life adapted to the screen. If you watch the movie of your wedding once every few months, will it inspire you to idealize other parts of your life, then make those ideals reality? That kind of thing could prove addicting.

Far-fetched, maybe, but I firmly believe that telling a good narrative about yourself affects your self-image, which in turn can effect life change. While not everyone can afford to have a movie made about their wedding, the concept is adatable and extensible, and it’s worth thinking about how we can re-tell our own story to ourselves in a way that inspires self-idealization.

For brides-to-be, this involves a single, magical day that will live on in their memories. For the rest of us, the process may look more prosaic and mundane. Build a good habit of self-narrative, though, and we might see long-term change in reality, not merely in our imagination.

Obviously it’s too bright (this scene takes place at night, in the dark), but that’s easy to correct. Going darker is not a problem; in fact, we shot it this way on purpose. I’m not going to comment about the blue tint. That’s not the point.

Now, here is another, also un-corrected still, from the same scene, and in fact the same moment in time, but from our B Camera:

In case I wasn’t clear above, these shots were simultaneous; we were shooting multi-camera. The compression on this image makes it look a tiny bit worse than it really is, but you get the point.

Now, the two cameras we used were different models—similar, even down to the sensor inside them, but not the same. One of them had a few stops more latitude than the other, which probably explains the difference. This is a limitation we just had to deal with. The proper way to deal with it in this situation would have been to throw more light at the scene and lower the ISO on Camera A.

But we didn’t do that. Why?

Because I didn’t realize what was happening. You’ll hear me singing that song a lot (here, for example) about this movie, because everyone was doing too much, including me, and we were all exhausted most of the time. I lost track of hundreds of tiny problems that should have been noticed and resolved. This one isn’t quite as tiny.

See, I can fix this, but the B-Camera shots will get grainier. It’s way harder to go lighter on digital footage than darker. So when you eventually watch this movie, look for the disparity, because unless I discover some sort of magic previously unknown to me, there will certainly be disparity.

If I’d had a monitor with us on set I would have looked at it, and I would have noticed. In fact, we did have a monitor on the show, but making sure it followed the cameras around and got hooked up every time we moved so that I could look at it to check on what my camera ops were doing was another one of those tiny things that didn’t get done because it wasn’t anyone’s job, in particular. Welcome to no-budget indie production.

My friend Greg would probably favor me with a regretful shake of his head right now if I was talking to him about this, and David O’Donnell would graciously refrain from pointing out that he warned me I’d need an AD on set, because he’s a classy guy. But their point would essentially be made: you’re going to make mistakes like this, and they’re going to bite you later, and hopefully if you’re smart, you’ll not make the same ones again.

If you’re smart.

We didn’t have much time to shoot our scenes, so we shot two cameras at once as often as we could and tended to cover dialogue-based scenes in the “master-over-over” style. Besides being fast, it fit with the overall style and tone of the film.

I must have been tired on this particular day. We were shooting in a very small space, the office of Westminster Hall at Grace College. Our master was already a little weird because it was being shot from the end of a desk, which filled the foreground with furniture and desk accessories instead of the actors. I’m not a huge fan of masters anyway; when I cut I tend to use them very little.

So you’d think this would be an ideal situation to make the over-the-shoulder shots really good so I could rely heavily on them in the editing room. What I decided to do, though (and for the life of me, I can’t remember how this conversation went), was put a 50mm lens on the OTS camera and shoot everything handheld.

If you’re not familiar with these sorts of concepts, a 50mm is not a very wide angle lens, and on the APS-sensor cameras we were using, it was realistically more like a 75mm lens. When shooting with lenses like this, the kind of shake you get from shooting handheld is exaggerated. I don’t know what possessed me to let the camera operator go handheld instead of putting the camera on sticks, but this is what happened. Consequently, all the OTS takes are shaky, and the focus comes and goes sometimes because the depth of field was relatively shallow, so every time the operator moves the camera even a little bit closer to or farther away from the subject the shot goes soft.

Grrrr.

This is only the most recent in a long list of things I’d do differently if I shot this movie now instead of last year. Of course, I wouldn’t know to do those things differently if I hadn’t already made the mistakes that taught me those lessons. So there’s no use whimpering over it. As Edward Burns recently tweeted:

“Best advise i got when i was trying to make Brothers McMullen. ‘there are two types of pain. The pain of regret and the pain of hard work’ [sic]”

So I guess I’m experiencing a little of both right now, but I’d definitely rather be regretting my mistakes in production than not making the movie at all.

You can read about its new features at… well, pretty much everywhere. Despite that, to me the announcement of Mountain Lion, apart from its earliness, is not that huge a story. The story about the story is actually bigger than the story.

Yes, I used my title in my post. You’re free to leave if you don’t like how I run things around here.

You can read over at Daring Fireball how John Gruber and an undisclosed number of other Apple/Tech journalists were invited to individual presentations by Phil Schiller showing off the features of the new OS. This is pretty strange because I can’t ever remember Apple introducing a new product in this manner. They either do a quiet website update with a press release or throw a big event in Cupertino and invite everyone in advance.

But from Gruber’s description, they essentially replicated the format and tone of one of their big events, just for one person at a time. No one knows how many of these mini-keynotes they did, although I suppose you could walk around on the web and count the number of tech writers telling the same story. So far I’ve only seen it from Gruber and Andy Ihnatko. UPDATE: It turns out Andy Ihnatko was not included. He’s apparently just really quick on the draw, because he had that article up like lightning.

Anyway, check out this quote from Gruber’s story:

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion—or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

“Now” presumably being delicate shorthand for “now that Steve’s gone”.

Interesting things afoot at the company I love.

• Dresden Codak
• The Meek
• Kiwiblitz
• Bad Machinery/Scary Go Round
• Gunnerkrigg Court
• Rice Boy
• Lackadaisy

And these aren’t even all the comics I read—just the ones I love the most and spend the most time on.

Later in the day I decided that the answer is: No, I don’t spend too much time on these. It seems like a lot in the aggregate, but really it only takes a few seconds to read a comic page, so even the ones that update daily don’t usurp too much of my attention.

(I’m going to conveniently ignore the time I spend re-reading the same ones over and over. Scary Go Round, I’m looking at you, you sexy, addictive beast.)

Anyway, even the comics that suck up a significant portion of my time are ultimately still “literature”, and they provide most, if not all, the same benefits that reading narrative fiction or watching movies provide.

For exmple, I’ve been puzzling over why the characters in Scary Go Round are so very delightful and endearing. You’ll have to go read it yourself or just take my word for it, but the majority of the characters are selfish, blindly-inconsiderate people with no real ethics of any kind. You should really hate them, and you would if you knew them in real life, so why do I actually love them so very much? I finally figured it out (I think): because they’re all just big kids.

John Allison, the writer of Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, gets away with writing alarmingly near-sociopathic characters because he writes them like 5th-graders—non-empathetic beings full of life and cheeriness and curiosity. They can be thoughtlessly cruel one moment and overwhelmingly affectionate the next, then throw relationship out the window to wander off on some vain and quixotic adventure.

This may have significance for me because I struggle with giving my characters flaws. Maybe my way into creating people who have actual bad qualities lies somewhere in this notion of turning them into pre-adolescents, who can be forgiven because they’re just so damned cute.

Urgh. Don’t judge that last sentence too harshly; I’m still following up this train of thought.

Anyway, Shut Up! I’ll keep reading comics if I want, and you should, too. Start with the ones I listed; if you like one of them, move on to other comics they recommend.

For example, Gunnerkrigg Court is a particularly wonderful blend of sci-fi and fantasy and British boarding schools.

Anyway, here is a piece by one of them, Sakimichan, on deviantART (I can’t find a real name for this person). She/he does amazing things with hair:

That is all; my clients are getting up soon.

Yes. Yes, I can.

I designed this website myself. It runs on the well-regarded Movable Type platform, which is basically the same kind of thing as the much-more-popular WordPress. Movable Type is written in Perl, which I know almost nothing about except that its syntax is difficult to follow and that it used to be referred to as “the duct tape of the internet”.

I’ve already lost 80% of you by this point.

This week I decided that I wanted my blog to auto-post to Twitter, like some other popular blogging platforms. I figured (correctly) that this would probably just involve some googling and the subsequent download and installation of a Movable Type plugin.

Boy, that word “just” does a lot of heavy lifting, doesn’t it?

I did find the plugin, Twitter Tools, by MT-Hacks, a well-known Movable Type plugin developer. His installation instructions were pretty clear, so I whipped through them, navigated to the Movable Type Content Management System interface, and instead of seeing the login screen, received a mangled error message something like this:

can't use string ("TwitterShortEntryURL") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use

Fantastic.

Lest I lose the remaining 2% of you still reading by this point, I will not chronicle all the steps I went through to solve this issue. I’m only pretty sure what ultimately ended up working, anyway. I’ll just mention two things:

1) Installing a Movable Type plugin is not like installing desktop software; it’s basically just copying a bunch of text files to various locations in your web host. While doing this, I took a couple of shortcuts by replacing entire folders instead of replacing the individual files in them one by one. I ended up having to manually revert to previous versions of all those folders before redoing it the way I should have done it in the first place. Lesson learned: when doing things you only barely understand, follow the instructions slavishly; do not interpret.

2) The thing that I think fixed the issue was updating to the newest version of the LWP Perl module (oh my goodness, seriously… no one’s reading this now). I decided to do this because the plugin author said, right there on the Twitter Tools web page, that this was something you might have to do. I feel like this is the same lesson as Lesson One, above.

Anyway, good web-dev times. When you have more time than money, you end up doing things like this (or whatever the equivalent is for you)—chores that you would almost certainly be better off paying a professional person to do, were it not for that pesking time-money imbalance.

This is the first post I’ve made since installing Twitter Tools; now to see if it works!

Update: It does.

Earlier this week I was listening to the most recent episode of Back to Work, and Merlin Mann seemed to be talking directly to me. Specifically, his larger point (although you should really listen to it yourself) is that even if you’re in a less-than-ideal work situation you should still act like you’re the one in charge of your own destiny. Because you are. (Feel free to keep your Calvinist-based comments on this concept to yourself, fellow Christians.)

(P.S. If you’re going to listen to that episode, you should probably skip to about the 35:00-ish mark, because Merlin spends the first chunk of the podcast talking about super-nerdy stuff like TextMate Bundles.)

Anyway: No, I have not been using alcohol for self-medication, as the title of this post might suggest, but I have been acting like someone without agency, so no more of that.

I’m actually pretty lucky in quite a few ways. One of those ways is that I currently get to edit a movie. That I wrote. And produced. And directed. No, no one’s paying me to do it. Yes, it was still a pretty fantastic thing that I got (and get) to do, even if it never results in money. How many other people got to make a movie this year? Probably only about 10,000 in the entire U.S., and that is not very many, proportionally.

If you’re curious, I’m about 40% of the way through the rough cut of the movie. A little bit that’s because it just takes a long time to edit movies, and even more it’s because I don’t have as much spare time as I used to have at work (I work a third-shift gig with some dead hours in it for accomplishing personal tasks). But it’s also a little because I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted and pulled in multiple directions, and that’s where we circle back to that concept of agency.

I am not naturally good at multitasking in a macro kind of way. I’m pretty decent at micro-multitasking, such as when three of my clients at work ask me to do things for them all at once and I have to prioritize those requests and get them all done before the next thing comes up. I am not good at the kind of multitasking where I have to manage three or more different projects for several weeks or months and give each of them exactly the right attention at exactly the time they need it.

Recently, this has meant that I’ve ignored a lot of emails or answered them late, not finished blog posts in a timely manner (or at all), let personal chores slide while I worked on other things that ultimately turned out not to matter very much, and heavily used the internet for procrastinating because I felt overwhelmed by all the other tasks clamoring for my attention.

On the plus side, I discovered Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery by John Allison, which you should totally go read right now if you like funny and endearing comics.

So henceforth I will be focusing on two (2) things: editing this movie, and another thing. Which I won’t tell you about. It’s a secret, and you can wait along with everyone else for the official announcement. Builds character.

In other news, there’s a new Dresden Codak page coming soon! Look at this preview from Aaron Diaz’s blog:

We had already shot most of episode 01, and production went well, but we needed to come up with a cohesive story for the six episodes we plan to shoot this fall. Here are some reasons this is important:

1. Shot lists are good. Since I’m also the AD for this project, I need to know how much we have to shoot every day so I can actually get everything done on schedule. This doesn’t work when you just waltz into each shoot day without a clear idea how many shots you have to get and how difficult they are.

2. Pre-production is better when you only do it once. The script for episode 01 changed several times right before we shot it, so that much of the pre-production work had to be done multiple times. When you’re shooting on a tight schedule with no budget and limited access to talent, you can only get away with this for so long.

3. The best stories are ones you don’t make up as you go along. After we shot episode 01 it turned out that it was really episode 02. This is fine, as we were able to outline the other episodes to fit around it, but you can imagine the kind of wreck the story would be if we did this sort of thing every time.

The meeting went very well, and I really like the story outline we have now. Myles is going to go off and write it, and I’m sure it will evolve and grow as he does, but it was a great start that gives some structure to our planning.

We also talked through some issues of tone, style and character, which helped Ryan get a feel for exactly what he was getting himself into. Since he’s relatively new to acting, I think starting to take ownership in this meeting will build some confidence in his own ability to pull this off.

On a more “meta”, career-oriented note, I continue to learn about all the different ways making movies (or web series) is awesome.

If you’re someone who follows this blog (what’s up, Jeff?) but doesn’t follow The Murder! A Love Story site (nearly everyone), you might not be aware of it, but in the time since I last posted the film went from being “in pre-production” to being “in post-production”, and it brought along its own set of arguably unnecessary quotation marks.

Either way, I’m now editing the feature film I wrote and directed.

OK, actually I’m syncing audio for the film. Which isn’t quite editing.

And I’m not really doing that right now. I’m organizing a film festival. Which starts tomorrow.

So NEXT WEEK I’ll be working away like mad on turning video clips into an actual movie, but right now I’m finalizing film festival programming, planning Q&A questions to ask filmmakers, going to the venue to set up equipment, and hoping really hard that people actually come to this thing so we can do it again next year, only better. And with more money.

But enough about me. Look at this preview of the new Dark Science by Dresden Codak!

For those who’ve never checked out Kickstarter, here’s how it works: You decide to back a project by pledging money to it. If the project reaches its pledging goal, hurray! The project receives your money and moves forward. The project also gives you a pre-decided reward, based on the amount you pledged. If the project doesn’t reach its goal, it gets no money at all. That’s right: you’re out a whopping $0.

So please consider supporting Murder! A Love Story on Kickstarter. All of our budget is going to hard costs like food and equipment and travel; we promise we won’t spend your money frivolously.

And if you want to go the extra mile for us, spread the word! We need all the help we can get.

Thanks! Hopefully you’ll hear soon about our success in raising the funds to complete the film.

We had four “scenes” to get. Three of them were single shots. One was about 10 shots, but they were all of the same thing and handheld, so they were easy. Easiest part of the day, actually.

First shot: an overhead pan, camera looking directly at the floor. I’ve done this before sans jib using a technique I won’t describe because you’d really just have to see a picture to get it. But it doesn’t matter, because this time, it didn’t work.

Apparently turning 30 makes you old and shaky or something, because I could not get a smooth shot. We ended up just taking a still shot from farther away, which we’ll pan in editing using keyframes.

Second shot: dolly of a still life. I actually knew this would be tricky, because I don’t have a dolly. I have a rolling mechanic’s stool I borrowed from a friend, on which I managed to mount the camera, but that’s not the same thing.

For one thing, dollies have tracks. Tracks keep you rolling straight. Rolling straight keeps your very carefully- and shallowly-focused shot from going out of focus.

I think you know where I’m going.

The solution was what I knew it would be: run the shot 20 or so times until it comes out right. So I’m pretty sure I got something usable.

The third shot is an effects shot, and since I’m not going to be rotoscoping anything on my schedule, the camera was locked. And it’s a shot of a wall. So that was easy.

The scene with 10 shots was great. Knocked it out in 20 minutes. Watch footage, wrap set, go home.

We’ll see how it comes out in post.

P.S. Special thanks to Chris and Evie Jones for the loan of their Nikon D7000, on which we shot all this footage.

Today I had coffee with a producer-friend so he could ruthlessly slash the proposed budget for Murder! and tear apart the synopsis I’d written for the one-sheet.

And I let him.

Back when I was but a young wart hog I probably would have bridled and argued and resisted change. Thankfully, subsequent years of critiques from my good friends and fellow writers have softened me.

So I took his notes (where by “take his notes” I mean that I typed out verbatim what he suggested). And you know what? The synopsis was better for it.

So don’t be precious with your words. Or art. Or whatever it is you do as your creative outlet. Do you want to be better and more successful as an artist, or do you just want praise?

Here is a rough list of things I have to do right now, in no particular order:

1. Send several emails
2. Fill out insurance applications
3. Build a website for the film
4. Post things on the website
5. Record a video podcast. Every week.
6. Draw stick-figure storyboards for the entire film.
7. Do an inventory of the gear we have at our disposal
8. Get bios and photographs of the crew
9. Write sides to hand out at auditions
10. Make the production schedule
11. Read two books on directing actors
12. Watch several movies for inspiration
13. This blog post
14. About 20 more things I can’t remember right now.

Figuring out which of those things to spend my time on is probably the biggest challenge. Nearly all of them are easy to do, or at least close. That’s not the problem.

Cheap, fast or good. You can have any two of those three.

I’m trying to leave out “fast,” but even that is turning out to be hard.

He wants to meet with me next week to go over my proposed schedule with a view to seeing whether he can accommodate me. He wants to see it in detail, by room, because he frequently rents the space piecemeal, so he needs to know exactly which days I need which rooms.

Thing is … I don’t have a schedule.

See, the whole movie takes place in this location. I figured I would lock the location first, then make the schedule for how I use the location. Silly me; that’s not how things work.

So I have to do a script breakdown this week. For any non-entertainment-biz visitors, this is a document that tells you all the different resources you need to produce a particular script—props, locations, talent, costumes, etc.—and which days you need those things.

I’ve never done one of these. So that’s fun.

They have software to do this for you. And I love software. So I downloaded Celtx, which is a free scriptwriting/pre-production software application. I’ve never used it to write because I was lucky enough to start screenwriting when I could still use a student discount to purchase Final Draft, but Final Draft doesn’t do all the same things.

So here goes. I hope I don’t butcher it horribly.

P.S. I feel like I’ve finally come up with a good title for this script, so I’m going to share it here, and it is: Murder! A Love Story. I hope you like it.

We were showing three films in a row, all by Indiana-based filmmakers. Since you should check them all out, they were:

Finding Xanadu: The Life and Films of Samuel W. Truss by Benjamin Lancaster

Ghost Stories 4 by Dan T. Hall

Trippin’ by Devi Snively

A good time was had by all. Or most. We even had some people attend who were actually involved in the making of these films, and they were gracious enough to do short Q&As with us after the screenings.

This was in important event to me and The Saint Regis Club because we’re also planning on organizing a full-fledged, multi-day Film Festival with two capital Fs later this year. This was a microcosm of that, so it was good to see what the challenges and requirements would be. And among other things, I learned two primary lessons:

Lesson one: advertising. What I did for the Showcase failed miserably. Literally not a single person came because of advertising; it was all word of mouth. So I’ll have to regroup and rethink my strategies.

Lesson two: doing everything myself. Don’t. I felt like I was going to die from exhaustion, and this was just a short, one-day event.

But my next step is a grant application, due later this month. That I can do by myself.

But back to me. I’m finally done with my three weeks of training during the day and can start to have a normal sleep schedule. Meanwhile, I realized that those three weeks of relative non-productivity have set me behind where I was hoping to be with one of my projects, the Saint Regis Indiana Film Showcase.

Tonight at work I wrote a press release, and tomorrow morning I’m going to be on the phone with all the local newspapers and radio stations attempting to promote the films we’ll be showing the first week in March.

All are by Indiana filmmakers, but I can’t come out and say what they are yet because I’m still a day (and hopefully no more) away from finalizing the program.

Then I have to design posters and figure out where to hang them. There should hopefully be other advertising as well, but I’m not sure how that’s going to look yet.

I really miss those three weeks.

For one thing, my buddy Shawn is back in town after a month-long absence, so we’re getting together this weekend to work on our web series. Not sure where he is with the writing of his half of the episodes, but let’s hope … done.

On the other side of the page (as it were), the date of the Saint Regis Indiana Film Celebration (or whatever we end up calling it) is fast approaching, and I’ve finally managed to solicit more than one film to be in it. Even as I write this (hopefully), screener DVDs are making their way through the mail system to me. I’m hoping to have watched several more Indiana-based films by the end of next week and be very close to locking the program for the event.

This will mean it’s time to start publicity for the event, and not a second too early. I haven’t quite figured out how we’re going to advertise, but I’m going to start by calling the local paper to see if they want to do a story. This may involve writing a press release, which I haven’t done in a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bite on the concept of an interview with me and Dave Gustafson.

I really want this event to go well, as I think that would give us more confidence in planning our much more extensive (and frightening) film festival in September.

And for other reasons upon which I will not elaborate at present.

More as it happens.

He’s got a great cast and crew, and a fantastic script—I know because I read and gave notes on it. But he needs a little more money to pay for some of the unavoidable costs of film production—and possibly festival submission. So he’s started a Kickstarter project to try to raise $2500 to finish the film.

Worth a look. Follow the link below to support Greg and Wicked.

But I’m back this week, devouring feminist books and possibly starting to make notes about my next script. I just finished Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf, a book I’m convinced every parent of a female child in Northern America should read. It provided much raw fuel for the process of developing a story based around female sexuality, so I’m excited to butcher the topic as only a half-educated American male can.

Not that it matters to anyone but me and my wife, but I’m also super-psyched to finally be on what will (theoretically) be my regular schedule at work—four nights on and three off, a straight-up third-shift schedule all the way through the week—no more of this switching back and forth between day and night. I’m definitely getting to the age where regular sleep matters to my ability to think.

One is The Chalice and the Blade, which from what I can tell by the synopsis is about male-female sexual dynamics throughout history. The other is Promiscuities, which follows the sexual coming of age of several young women across the world.

If you know me personally but don’t talk to me much about my writing career you might find this pretty odd, but it makes sense for two reasons. One is that I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing over here on the subject of female sexuality, and I’m starting to reach the limits of my ignorance.

But more importantly, since I’ve found that what I primarily write is romantic comedy, I, a man, need to learn a lot more about women fast. So I’m pretty excited about all this women’s studies reading I have coming at me.

This is how publishing your own website is. It takes you fifteen minutes to make some minor changes to your reel, then another two hours to figure out how to do HTML5 video while also supporting certain backward browsers built by companies who disdain plebeian things like innovation.

And don’t get me started on Ogg Theora.

Anyway, the reel is up; I hope you love it.