I just added another story to my ISP website. It's my infamous shitty first draft of a screenplay, "Playing Catch with Dad". I didn't inlcude the whole thing since it's 120 pages, but just my personal favorite scenes and other scenes my reviewers have liked.

I really just had one favorite scene in the whole thing, which is when my baseball player dude is walking around Pac Bell Park. I don't know, something about this scene is so great. I still remember my first thrill of walking around Pac Bell Park and how cool it was to see the Bay and downtown scenes from the park. I love that south of market view of downtown and looking out into McCovey Cove and seeing the people in their boats and the occassional ship that floats by.

The best way to see the park is get a seat on the bottom where they serve you food in your seats. Talk about couch potatoing it at the baseball stadium. With that ticket, you have an all access pass to all the levels. You also run into all the sports announcers in the hallway or the bar, if you're into that sort of thing. And there's no line for the bathroom. How hot is that!!! Then there are those freaks at the bar, who just sit in the bar and watch the game all night. What freaks! They can't even be bothered to go outside to see the game. I mean, what's to the point of being at the game? Plus, depending on your seat you'll see Larry Baer or maybe even Peter Magowan walking around, not to mention whatever famous and local celebs are watching the game. Sitting on the field level seats are the only way to go!

I added two more stories to my ISP web page, which can be found at the "My Stories" link at your left.

The first new story is an introduction to a seven volume story I'm planning to write one day called "The Elf Girl Chronicles". I posted the story in my blog sometime last year, but I decided it needed to be on its own web page.

The second story is one I wrote for a writing class assignment in 2001. It's called "Rodeo Spurs on My Heart". I know, stupid title but it's sort of a silly story anyway. We had to look through the paper and find an article that caught our attention and I picked one about rodeo cowboys. I think the rodeo was in town at the time. We then had to write a story using the article as inspiration. My story ended up being about a former cowboy from Texas now living in Cali. His childhood best friend is in town for the rodeo and my cowboy guy takes his family to see him. The two guys have always been friendly, and sometimes mean rivals. This story is a continuation of their childhood rivalry, only cowboy dude's best friend takes the rivalry a little too far. I think sometimes people do that, do things for silly reasons and then end up wrecking friendships and lives in the aftermath. But that's life isn't it?

I have another cowboy story brewing which I will finish one day. It's about an aging cowboy rodeo star who falls in love with a cowgirl horse trainer from Cali. He's about to retire when he falls in love and he has to decide whether to leave his ranch in Texas or to move to Cali. He's a 7th generation Texan native who loves his ranch and his state and she's a new age Cali bred horse trainer. It's like a clash of cultures story because I think Texas culture is like a foreign country. All that land, all that heat, all that history makes for a very different breed of man.

The story is still knocking around in my head and it's been about 2 years now since I came up with the idea and if a story sticks with me this long then I feel obligated to write it. When, I don't know. I'm writing a screenplay and a short story at the same time and both projects are taking up all of my writing time. I have two more short stories scheduled to be completed in the next two months and then there's the novel I started last November that I would really like to finish. But the aging rodeo cowboy story is definitely next in line.

I am having such a strange month. Things that I've wanted for a very long time, I'm finding and at decent prices too. It's like having buying fantasies come true and it's a strange feeling.

First, I finally bought the bag that I've been wanting since January. I wanted a messenger style bag in leather, in any colour but black. I wanted a messenger bag to carry my baby laptop and a tablet when I go on my writing forays. The strap had to be long enough so I could wear it across my body, but I didn't want a boring breifcase bag. The bag also had to be stylish and not boring.

My first choice was a Coach large duffle sack bag, but I was unwilling to pay the $300 price. I started searching through tons of stores and websites for similar type bag, but I couldn't find anything that wasn't black and under $300. And believe me, I've looked everywhere.

Then last week, I went to the Coach store factory outlet in Petaluma and there was my large duffle sack in beautiful dark brown nubby leatherfor $199. I coudn't believe it. I had to buy it. And it's so damned perfect. It fulfills everything I've wanted in a bag and it was at price that was pretty darn decent, considering the bag is all leather.

Then today, I found this children's book that I've been searching the Net for since last July. I read the book as a child and I fell in love with the drawings and for whatever reason, I've been wanting to have the book. There are no pictures of the book anywhere and all I remember about the book is it had drawings of a japanese scarecrow named Joji. Well, today I struck gold and I found the book. It's called "Joji and the Dragon" by Betty Jean Lifton. The drawings of the scarecrow are so cute and I loved the story of the japanese scarecrow who was too nice and couldn't scare the crows away. In fact the crows would torture Joji and take the straw out of him and every night, at least this is what I remember, he had restuff himself with straw. Something about this scarecrow story has stayed with me all these years, although I'm not sure why.

I loved that scarecrow and I think a part of me totally relates to his story, which is an interesting thought. I felt so sorry for Joji the japanese scarecrow, but at the end of the book things always worked out for him. Maybe a part of me thinks that my life is like the poor scarecrow and that in the end, I hope it will all turn out and I'll have my happy ending. In the meantime, I have to put up with the crows, the people who torture me in my life and every night, I have to pick myself up and restuff myself with straw and love.

I'm not sure about the nice part though, since I don't think I'm all that nice, but maybe it's Joji's incompetence that I relate too. I mean, he was built to scare off the crows and he obviously can't do his job, so you could the scarecrow is incompetent, although the author of the book wrote that Joji was just too nice to do his job.

So I found the fantasy bag and bought it and I found my favorite child book and I bought it. Two buying fantasies fulfilled in two weeks. How cool is that?

I'm wondering if I need to start writing with pen and paper again. I redid my interview with the main character in my baseball story screenplay and I came out with a totally different interview. I was thinking of changing my story, thinking I needed to make my baseball player a minor league player instead of a major league player. My baseball guy wasn't coming across as a very likable character. He was too brash, too arrogant and I wasn't sure if a regular person would relate to my spoiled baseball millionaire character.

But if made my baseball guy play in the minor leagues, I would have had to take Pac Bell park out of the story and I don't want to do that. Pac Bell park was such an inspiration for my screenplay that I can't bear to take it out. I need Pac Bell park to be in the story to be a symbol for renewal, old fashioned values and that simply all baseball players started out with a parent playing catch with them in the backyard.

So, I decided to make my baseball player less brash, more of a utility player, a journeyman type of player, who has good numbers but was never a star. He's still 38 years old and he's still on the last leg of of his career, but he's batting .250 maybe .200 and he's seriously thinking about retirement. I made him more resigned, tired and older. He wants to give up the game, but baseball is the only thing he knows and if he quits at 38, what the hell else is he going to do with his life. I made him more ordinary, but I think this new characterization makes him more sympathetic to an audience.

I want him to be an everyman in a sport like baseball, which is becoming full of players who are increasingly removed from ordinary people with their arrogant attitudes and their multimillion dollar salaries. I see my baseball player as a hold out from a different era. He's never been on a team that's won a world series. He's played the sport because he was good at it, he loved it and it was better than becoming a construction worker or painter like his dad and brother.

He still has a troubled relationship with his father, which became exacerbated when he left home at 18 with his college baseball scholarship. His father supported him, pushed him into baseball early on and then when he became successful, the father started to resent his success because of his own failure in the sport. My baseball guy feels that he would have been a better player if his father had behaved differently. Doesn't every child think this? And now that his father is dying, my baseball guy has tried to make up with him, but can't cross the chasm of time and bitterness that's developed between him and his dad.

I think this story is better, closer to my original short story idea. I think in the first draft of my screenplay I got caught up in the fact that my main character played baseball. But really, the story is about a father and son struggling to resolve their differences before time runs out for them. The fact that my main character plays baseball is incidental to the story, I think. I liked the idea of my main character being a baseball player only because I see sports as one of the few ways that men and their sons bond together from a very young age. Sometimes, I think sports is the only way men bond.

I think I have to interview all the other characters in my screenplay and then I'll be ready to write. I'm still debating about writing by hand versus computer. For the interviews, writing by hand is definitely the way to go beacause I can't sensor my thoughts when I write by hand. By the time I write the screenplay, I will be following my new outline so I'm hoping writing by computer doesn't make that much of a difference. I hate writing by hand because I have really unreadable handwriting and transcribing my own work is such a pain in the wazoo. But, I'll guess I'll to wait and see what comes out when I finally sit down and start writing.