Author: d f mamea

Posted on

Schedules and Deadlines

The Mamea household1, for the sake of the adults’ sanity and convenience (and the prevention of corporal beatings), gets through each week with the help of a dinner schedule.  The schedule for Term 1 of 2007 is:

  • Monday – macaroni cheese
  • Tuesday – baked potatoes (courtesy of The Boy)
  • Wednesday – vegetarian surprise
  • Thursday – nachos (courtesy of The Girl)
  • Friday – pizza
  • Saturday – semi-planned surprise
  • Sunday – last-minute surprise

The children’s daily demands of What’s for dinner? are already answered, our (mostly) fixed shopping list ensures we get our core nutrients, and there are no more moments of standing in the kitchen wondering what the hell to stuff the kids’ mouths with.

Adults’ sanity – check.  Overall convenience – check.  (And no corporal beatings in three years, two months, two weeks, one day and counting2.)

Schedules, like lists, provide certainty.  Y’know: something to look forward to, or work through, or work towards.  Like goals.

Or deadlines.

And schedules and deadlines ensure Things Happen.

Besides being handy for things like moving house (don’t forget the pets or children, in that order) or going on holiday (ensure the selection of travelling music is equal between adults), my writing time is rarely without a deadline – I shall write ten pages of something/anything/everything until noon or I must write ten pages before I am worthy to watch an episode of Law & Order, Season 3.

Some days, the ten pages write themselves….  Well, the pain of typing text onto the blank screen is manageable.

Most days, I stave off the urge to do (long avoided) housework and/or try not to panic as noon approaches at double-speed and/or fight off any number of other procrastinating techniques, and I write and I write and I write.

As long as I’ve done a day’s writing, I don’t get restless, guilty or cranky with family members.  Well.  Okay.  It doesn’t stop me being restless from being pulled out of The Zone (I was in the middle of a great set piece!), or guilty that I didn’t spend more time with family, or cranky (because Who wrote this shit? or It’s so haaard and I hate it and why can’t producers just feel the craftsmanship?”).

Yeah.  The writing journey has its moments.

But on any given day, I know what I’m having for dinner.

1 – I hope my family forgives my possessory credit here.  But they’ll understand.

2 – Which, incidentally, is the length of time our entire blended family has been together.

Share
Posted on

Post-partum Blues

Another deadline met and yet I feel glum.  I think it’s the intensity of throwing everything at it over a short space of time (sometimes due to having skulked around it for so long previously), tossing it off (so to speak), and then collapsing in a steaming, exhausted heap (until the kids come home and ask what’s for Dinner).

It’s not like I haven’t got work to fall back on.  I recently secured a television concept I developed a few years back – I’m looking forward to significantly retooling that.  My iCal keeps reminding me that my 2007 spec script is ready to commence – I’ve been itching to get into that for over a year now. And I’m looking to nail some paid writing work in the next week or so.

Those should keep me out of trouble for the coming second quarter.

And to ensure I meet my quota of having five projects on the boil at any one time, let’s not forget that Break is teeeasing close whilst Mr T‘s 5 (MR T is the beaver to my sloth) is hip-deep in the rough-cut stage.  (I think his shaved head helps with cutting through things like air, water and bullshit.)

You’re right:  projects in post don’t really count ’cause, like, they’re virtually done, right?

Bugger.

Share
Posted on

Life on Mars

Life on Mars premiered on TVOne the other night.  It’s from the gang who gave us Spooks and Hu$tle, so I had to try it.  The Goddess found it all a bit laddish but I enjoyed it immensely despite the broadcaster squeezing in ad-breaks every eight minutes or so.

It’s a typical cop show – the Gruff Old-Style Copper partnered with an Enlightened New Policing Detective, who butt heads with each other as they solve crimes with a mix of street-smarts and technical nous – except there’s three decades of policing between them.  Aficionados of police procedurals – like myself – who remember 1970s-style t.v.-policing (The Sweeney‘s swashbuckling crime fighting, anyone?) should get a kick out of this.

As always, the Vidiots gave me the heads-up here.

Share
Posted on

Open-Source Love

I write my scripts with Word.

Yes, I do.  But let me explain.

I learnt on WordPerfect way back when.  I knew no better: its WYSIWYG was non-existent and its interface was spartan if not downright ugly.  But I managed to publish a newsletter with it, complete with pictures and two- and three-column layouts, all courtesy of the wonderful and powerful ShowCodes feature.  In pre-mouse days, that kind of stuff needed DTP-capable Macs.

Then I changed jobs and had to learn Micro$oft Word.  It was a painful transition.  It wasn’t just the different way of doing the same things, it was the range of inconsistencies in one package (one package!) that made me want to toss the CPU out the window.  In those early years when I wrestled with The Transition, it took a long time for Word to catch up to the capabilities of WordPerfect.

I still use Word.  Fifteen years of contemptuous familiarity will do that.  I’ve survived each of Micro$oft’s updates with cascades of epithets.  But I’ll allow this much for it: now it’s a powerful flagship wordprocessor and if you know what you’re doing, you can be pretty shit-hot with it.

A few years back, I migrated from the Blue Screens of Death and onto some Apple goodness.  And lo, having coughed up for Office for Mac out of necessity, I discovered that WordPerfect for Mac was not only downloadable, it was free, too.

Of course I downloaded it.  And upon installation it looked so… Eighties.  Call me shallow but its optimised-for-640×480 look clashed too much with the 1280×854 resolution of everything else on the desktop.  Any thoughts of full-migration were dashed by a complete lack of forward compatibility.  And so it sat patiently on my dock for a couple of years, a gesture to the good ol’ days and nothing more.

Some work-avoidance surfing last year put me onto OpenOffice.org and its cousin NeoOffice.  The idea of a free, open-source productivity suite seemed too good to be true.  The time and effort required to retrain both my fingers and whatever options it offered seemed wasteful since I was already using Micro$oft Office.  But… I wondered what it might have in store for me.  In a lull between shooting anything that moved, I gave NeoOffice a go.

I was quietly impressed.  It will do almost everything Office for Mac does, most of the time the same way, it’s compatible with at least twice as many programs out there (as opposed to, say, Word and its ability to open… Word documents), and best of all, it’s free.

Yeah, it’s crashed.  Once.  A damned nuisance but heck – c’est la vie for a free program.  (And who’s Micro$oft to snigger?  Of all the apps I use, it’s the Micro$oft apps that fall over the most often.)  After the crash, I upgraded and updated appropriately and NeoOffice has been the suite of first choice since last December.

I may have taken a backward step by migrating from the devil-I-know Word to an open-source app.  But it feels good – I exercised choice, something almost forgotten on this Micro$oft-infested planet.

And as for the scriptwriting – will I plunk down for a professional program like stalwarts Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter, or upstarts Celtx and Sophocles?  Why should I?  I can generate industry-standard scripts with both NeoOffice and Word already.

I’ll migrate to a professional program eventually.  But until then, it’ll be me and my new bud, NeoOffice.

Share
Posted on

‘S a Dog’s Life

Visitors to our abode have to be vetted by The Dog, a mongrel big of heart, if not stature. (There’s The Cat somewhere on the property as well, whom, should The Dog fail, be our insurgency force.)

Summer – summer-proper, rather than the summer-in-name-only we had earlier – has arrived. As I hunch over the keyboard in the study, The Dog roams the house and surrounds, cycling through: the kids’ rooms where she moults furiously; the lounge where various breezes meet and cool her down; and the deck where she slow-bakes herself.

Sometimes I look up from the inevitably blank screen and envy her simple Dog Life. Of course, it’s not that simple, really – she has her responsibilities: she protects both home and family from visitors, strangers and hedgehogs; she’s a great receptacle for dinner scraps; and she gets us out of the house for exercise or play.

Sure, The Dog needs regular exercise (or she’ll be overzealous in her protection of home and hearth [which is not good in Auckland]) and is a social animal through and through (it’s us owners who suffer separation anxiety when we leave her alone for more than a few hours). But when the children are at school and The Goddess is out doing Godly Work, it’s nice to have her around – panting in the heat, spread out on the floor for heat dissipation, or sitting and hoping that I’ve forgotten that I’ve already fed her.

Yeah. Good dog.

Share
Posted on

Hoo-Ha

Oookay.  That’s one deadline out of the way.  A painful experience but character-building and one of those things.

Normal transmission shall resume.

Share
Posted on

Point and Click

  • Mr T over at Unkreative has finished – well, 98% finished – principal photography on 5. Onwards with post it is. Don’t forget to cruise some nice pics here.
Share
Posted on

It’s a New Year, Blah-blah-blah

Having enjoyed Christmas day with family of choice (aah, nothing like the silly season to bring familypolitik to the fore), s(l)ee(p)ing in the New Year with a ten-ish bedtime on New Year’s Eve (the kids being with their other biological parents, The Goddess and I can do what we bloody well like, thank you), and relaxing on the days in between, it’s now time to gird the loins for work. Getting up early in the morning for a run and then some writing is quite a struggle, but it’s the only way to Get Things Done.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve rediscovered the joy of reading. I mean, I’ve always read – but I’m kinda devouring books, scripts and comics at the moment. And believe it or not – I’m reading non-fiction as well. Non-fiction! And enjoying it!

On the viewing front, The Goddess and I have settled on a viewing arrangement: the half of the rental DVDs I select on her behalf I safely watch with her, and the other half – yes, replete with wall-to-wall gratuitous action/tits-and-ass/profanity/narrative-black-holes/subtitles – I squeeze in during the day. It’s terrible, I tell you, working from home, having to find time to watch DVDs, but I manage it, by crikey, I do.

Share
Posted on

I Heart “The Shield”

I’d spent almost half of my life in thrall of Dick Wolf‘s Law & Order (at least, as much as the local broadcasters allowed) before Shawn Ryan‘s The Shield arrived and pissed and shit all over the television police procedural genre. Cop shows haven’t been the same since then.

Described as a James Ellroy-infused procedural, The Shield shows cops as flawed human beings, most of them driven by some core need to do The Right Thing, each with their own methods and morals, each looking out for their own interests, and each leaving a trail of emotional, psychological, emotional, sexual and physical destruction. I’m a dirty little voyeur for enjoying their mis/adventures for those reasons. (It’s those same reasons why The Goddess won’t watch it with me.)

The fourth season ended recently. Glenn Close‘s Captain Rawlings gets shafted but good by her superiors; I’ll miss her. An Internal Affairs investigation into the Strike Team appears about to change up a gear. And to see the Strike Team end a season with beers and esprit de corps aplenty was a discomfiting sight indeed.

Shows like The Shield and David Simon‘s The Wire have reinvigorated the genre, elevating it above mere ‘procedural’ to give us true ‘police drama’.

And about bloody time.

Share