Having fun hijacking images from websites. Check out my book collection on the side bar.

I saw the movie "The Road to Perdition" over the weekend. In the screenwriting seminar I took last fall, the visiting UCLA professor told the class that the screenplay was written by someone who he knew and who had taken classes at the screenwriting school where he was lecturing and had worked on the screenplay there.

The local San Francisco screenwriter received $125K from the studio for the rights to the screenplay, which is the standard Writer's Guild fee, and then when the script was made into a movie, the screenwriter received $350K, which is again the standard fee. The local screenwriter had since supposedly moved down to LA, and was hired a movie studio and was working on another screenplay.

It was quite a good movie, and I'm surprised it didn't get nominated for an oscar. It did however, lack a certain amount of emotional punch that I think you need to have be a really great movie and get nominated. The whole tone of the movie was very understated, but still quite dramatic.

I love that some schlub in a screenwriting seminar somehwere in downtown San Francisco was working on this script, and it became a movie that was well received. That's pretty cool.

I went to the local library tonight to write. It's amazing how time just zips buy when I'm writing. I arrived at the library at around 7 pm, and the next thing I knew it was close to 9 pm and the workers were dimming the lights.

I brought my crazy eddie story with me and edited what I had already written. Then I decided I needed to outline the story again, since I'm doing another second draft totally new rewrite. I thought by doing the second rewrite, the structure of the story would change, but it's essentially stayed intact. The second rewrite basically just cuts away all the backstory and dead wood from the story.

Since doing character interviews really helped with my screenplay, I decided to do them for my crazy eddie story. I interviewed my main character, her mother and crazy eddie's friend Charlie, who tries to strangle her near the end.

My Crazy Eddie story is just so strange that at this point, I just want to finish it, and then have my writing group read it, and then be done with it. It's a story that came from a freewrite, which just needed to be written down as a complete story.

My character Jessie, during the interview, told me she hoped I would finish her story. She said she'd been waiting a very long time for me to finish it. Jessie said she just wants her story told and on paper, and then she could rest and be happy.

It's very odd when your characters address you directly and say, "please finish my story". It's like they have more of a vested interest in seeing it finished than I do.

I'm not sure I'll be able to bring my laptop to the library and write. I may have to go to a coffeeshop to do that. I'm almost tempted to take my work laptop with me, but I probably shouldn't do that. I could take my baby laptop, but I really like staring at a big screen when I write.

The library is open late from Monday through Wednesday. The library is a great place to edit, write outlines, write out character interviews, and do freewrites by hand. I'm not sure it's the best place to actually write a story, unless I'm writing it by hand.

I don't mind writing by hand, except then I have to read my own horrid handwriting and type it all up. It's much more efficient for me to write directly to a computer, but it's been so hard for to just sit down and write, that I'm almost tempted to write out everything by hand until I get in the mood to sit at my computer and write.

The thing about writing by hand is you can do another rewrite and edit as you type, which is kind of nice sometimes. I know I tend to edit more if I write by computer, than when I write by hand, but not by much.

At this point I'm willing to do anything to get to write again, even doing writing by hand and making very, very structured outlines, so I can just concentrate on writing sections of the outline instead of trying to write the whole story in one session. Many writers write this way, other try to spit it all out.

The Crazy Eddie story is all written, so maybe all I have to do is a combination of both techniques to get to a complete second and hopefully final draft. I have fantasies of submitting it somewhere, but I don't know. I don't think I'm ready for that yet. I might just submit it just to see what's involved in submitting something for publication, but I would be submitting just to go through the process and would have absolutely no expectations about crazy eddie ever seeing the publishing light of day.

I think to write well takes practice, tons and tons of it, and who knows how many stories I'd have to write just to get one good one. Writing a story is probably like take the right photo for a fashion magazine. A photographer takes hundreds and hundreds of shots before choosing one photo for the cover. Writing a damned good story is probably akin to getting the absolutely perfect photo for Vogue or the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.

The photo or story has to be the one that makes the buyer or editor want to purchase the magazine or in a story's case, buy the story for publication. And Crazy Eddie is definitely not cover material. I like the story well enough, and I know I'm only finishing it because I've had comments from people that it's my best work.

It's a story where the character is so unlike me and goes through something I've never gone through before. It's a totally fictional, yet on a certain level, a very personal story. I've taken experiences that have happened to me, and molded them to fit this story. I suppose it's the personal stuff from my own life, although vastly diferent in the fictional story, that makes the story so close to me, yet not. It's hard to explain.

Anyway, it feel good to be writing again. When I don't write, I totally and truly forget how interesting the whole experience is, how lost I get in it, and how I get so caught up so totally in what I'm doing. Writing is like watching a really good movie or tv show. I am spellbound for however long I do it. I am so transported into this other world, and I guess that makes sense because I'm in the mind of the character speaking or in the mind of the storyteller recounting the story.

Writing is really like an escape for me, and it feels like a good and necessary escape as well.

I was feeling a little down this morning, because when it's that time of the month as it now, I sometimes get a little depressed. I don't know. I was feeling really, really lonely, even though I spent a lovely day at my church picnic on Sunday afternoon.

Then an hour ago, my froggie french friend Francois sent me a message inviting me to chat with him on MSN messenger, and now we're chatting ahd having lunch on Friday. Thank god for friends, especially when they're french and read, speak and write fluent hebrew, greek, japanese as well as their native froggie tongue.