Indelible Freckles

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Contrary to popular belief, when energy, motivation, and/or creativity is low in the Writing Cave Keep, I do not resort to singing along with Ms Krall ad infinitum.

If it’s a technical challenge, I turn to the writing library, top most being William Goldman‘s Which Lie Did I Tell?, Alex Epstein‘s Crafty Screenwriting and Stephen King‘s On Writing.

If a project has certain constraints or is more long-form, there’s these classics to crib from:

  • Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer — not just a scantily-clad teen-girl who can kick serious demon ass1;
  • Jed Mercurio‘s Bodies — a visceral and heartbreaking look at just how little separates life and death in a maternity ward; and
  • David Simon‘s The Wire — its novelistic approach to presenting a criminal investigation, showing us every shade of grey between the police and their adversaries, as well as the world in which both operate, is something to which I can only dare aspire.

The words "The Wire" in white lettering on a black background. Below it a waveform spectrum in blue.
And if it’s all too much and/or I want to procrastinate for hours I just need a little kick, I never go wrong with any of these:

  • James Cameron‘s Aliens — a war movie in space;
  • Quentin Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown — a small-time crook’s One Final Score;
  • and David Mamet‘s Spartan — a rogue agent’s attempt to Do The Right Thing.

Spartan movie.jpg
It’s not necessarily the story I worry about — it’s how I’m going to make it interesting. I want to grab and hold the reader’s — and, eventually, the paying audience’s — attention, take ’em for a ride, and then afterwards, drop ’em back in their seat, exhilarated, exhausted, and begging for more.

All of the above touchstones do exactly that.

Most times, soon after referring to any of the above, I’m back at the keyboard, writing.

 

1   But oh how The Goddess rolls her eyes when I talk about superior subtextual story-telling amidst well-choreographed ass-kicking.

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Tight Spot

Now that the cavalry element have settled on the same property as The Goddess, they’ve been finding ways to make mischief. The Exmoor Mini in particular has provided entertainment (for me, at least; The Goddess, not so much) by having her own ideas about how things should be done. One of those things is the paddock to which she is allocated at any given time.

I totally understand her modus operandi:

  1. arrive in new paddock with quiet excitement;
  2. hoover up all easily grazeable (?) grass;
  3. do a second, slower, pass of the paddock to eat remaining grass;
  4. patiently find opportunities to look meaningfully at human captors;
  5. when captors don’t bend to one’s will, wait for dark to make alternate arrangements;
  6. greet captors from outside allocated paddock the following morning.

Most times, her alternate arrangements are awesomely worth it. (Luckily, there are enough fences and gates on the new Fortress Mamea lands that she can’t hurt herself.)

Some times, things don’t quite work out.

The Exmoor Pony in a bit of a tight spot.
The Exmoor Mini on the edge: those luscious dark green leaves behind her hide a sharp two-metre drop into the stream.

Same thing with my projects: some take off; some don’t.

I’m in the process of mothballing a project I’ve poured 250 hours* and a good amount of money into since late last year. I’m consoling myself that I’m mothballing it rather than scrubbing it: I’ll learn what I can from the circumstances of its being mothballed, and try again next year.

Meantime, I’ve got a couple of other projects — including Kingswood which has attracted some interest** — that I’ve been itching to get on with.

I can’t help thinking that if this had happened a few years back, all writing would have sulkily ceased, this blog would have gone black be very quiet (yet again), and The Goddess would be girding herself to smack some sense (yet again) into the sighing hairy blob in a corner of the keep***.

I daren’t suggest that I might be maturing in this writing gig. But tight spots like this are no longer the catastrophic failures they used to feel like. They’re 1). a learning opportunity, and 2). time to spend elsewhere.

 

* Damn straight I keep a worksheet of how I spend my time.

** I know! Actual outside-family-and-friends interest!

*** The Goddess doesn’t smack me about, not even figuratively. She’s pretty good like that.

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Box Watch: The Good Wife

The Good Wife Logo.png
By Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21898254

I was looking forward to the week’s viewing when I realised that The Good Wife ended last week.

Hard to believe it’s been seven years since housewife Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) stood by her husband, disgraced and jail-bound state’s attorney Peter Florrick (Law & Order alum Chris Noth). At first I was rather leery of Ridley Scott and Tony Scott‘s involvement as executive producers: purveyors of loud and unsubtle big screen epics and extravaganzas, I assumed they would overwhelm creators Robert and Michelle King‘s kickarse pilot script with Sturm und Drang — but no. They provided awesome production values and produced consistently entertaining television for 156 episodes.

While reviews of the series finale ranged from “contorted” (Variety) and C+ (AV Club), to “single-minded” (Hollywood Reporter) and “the right note” (Salon), I thought it did an okay job of closing the show. Sure it felt a bit like a slave to its pilot but it made sense, it was true to character, and left an opening for a sequel, The Good Lawyer was sufficiently satisfying while still leaving the audience wanting more. Not so sure about the creators’ farewell letter to fans — I’m a believer in if you’re explaining, you’re losing — but it’s their show.

So. That’s that, then.

What do I watch now?

 

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Crawl

The other week I was in the Auckland CBD and I thought, Aw, it’s early in the day — I should be able to hop on to the motorway and get to where I’m going in a jiffy.

Nah-ah: I quickly found myself in a queue of traffic crawling uphill, doing hill-start after hill-start after hill-start (damn straight I drive a manual).

Auckland traffic
Auckland motorway traffic, early afternoon, weekday, at between 0–5kph.

Sometimes a project goes like that: for days/weeks/months I’m going hard out, warp speed, all engines, etcetera, and then suddenly — but it’s not really suddenly, it’s just the sharp contrast in busy-ness — I have days/weeks/months ahead in which little more can be done, pending external factors.

I’m tempted to reinstall some first-person shooters on the Macbook.

I have other projects, but.

And I need to be mindful that with each passing day — just like with each hill-start and -climb of five or so metres of asphalt — I’m that much closer to my destination.

 

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Box Watch: Marvel’s Jessica Jones

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47431125

Ten episodes in and I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel where:

  • our heroine, Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter)  catches her nemesis, Kilgrave (David Tennant);
  • Jones’ Greek chorus of friends, family and/or acquaintances sing, Kill Kilgrave else he will continue to murder people;
  • Jones counterpoints with, No, I must not kill him yet somehow he must still pay — wait one while I ponder…;
  • Kilgrave escapes — trimming Jones’ chorus by one enroute — and continues his murdering ways;
  • Jones catches Kilgrave…

Do this catch-and-release routine once and if the heroine learns from the experience, it’s a learning experience.

Do it twice, and if the heroine prevails in the end, it’s one of those rule-of-three narrative devices.

Do it three times and there’s still three goddamned eps to go in the season, one begins to wonder: are the writers undercover wingnuts highlighting the inherent weakness of liberals in this harsh, harsh world? or have I just been inured by decades of Old Testament-moral-style action films in which all manner of personal, societal and political problems can be resolved in a hail of lead?

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Dog Cuts

Back in the Big Smoke, The Dog and I had a basic three-mile running route that I called, with writerly flair, the fleur-de-lis.

Fleur-de-lis: ‘X’ marks the start and finish point.

(I’ve just remembered I usually referred to it as the cloverleaf route but fleur-de-lis has a certain ring, yes?)

The first iteration of Fortress Mamea being in suburbia, the route followed roads and was all asphalt, so the dog ran on a lead. (We had another couple of routes, five and seven miles respectively, in the Waitakere Ranges where she could run off-lead.) The routes and distances were fixed, and for over a decade we ran those three, five and seven mile distances together.

The current Fortress Mamea is on a piece of land large enough to allow the dog — and The Puppy, now — to run off-lead without worrying about automobiles or newly-relocated townies who think all dogs should be on leads with muzzles. After a few months of getting to know the property, we have a running route that I have dubbed the corazón.

Corazón: I know the heart-shape only really applies to the loop-de-loop on the left there but most of my running time is spent in The Wood.

The corazón runs through two wooded areas (The Wood and The Copse) that are separated by paddocks, meadows, and the fortress itself. The running surface includes long grass (that can obscure uneven terrain), half-hidden tree roots (that can still catch a foot or toe), and loose sticks (that can stick, stab or trip you up). The wooded areas are pretty cool to run through (they make me flash on the opening minutes of Silence of the Lambs) — check it:

The Wood: from within.

At first, The Dog ran the full route with The Puppy and I.

Lately, she has taken to running more efficiently:

Corazon: with dog cuts.

For me, my fitness regime of, in effect, running around in circles, is more of a journey-rather-than-the-destination kind of thing.

For her, it’s a social thing: she still gets to run (mostly) (kind of) with the pack. Since she has twelve years and several thousand kilometres under her collar, I think she’s entitled to conserve her energy for other pursuits.

Photo1281 - Version 2

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Box Watch: The Flash (2014 onwards)

The Flash Intertitle.png
By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50741037

… a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues

— Saga of the Swamp Thing, 24 May 1984, Roots, Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben

Alan Moore‘s description of the Flash has always stuck with me, capturing both the speed at which the character lived as well as the loneliness that his powers burdened him with.

The current television show approaches those notions very differently and I really enjoy what the writers are doing.

It’s not my typical small screen fare — it’s got men with six-pack abs and women with stick figures — but it has an infectious charm and a lightness of touch that makes me look forward to each episode. I can obviously suspend disbelief with the whole fastest-man-alive, sharing the screen with super-heroes and -villains aplenty, in a world where everyone is under thirty (unless they’re a victim) and the maximum permissible body size for women is 8.

But my suspension goes only so far when:

See all those moments of time when he’s gawping when he could be rescuing? Really? Aren’t you the fastest goddamned man alive?

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KINGSWOOD: post-reading

1971-74 HQ Kingswood Patina Gold==.JPG
By Sicbird – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39196356

After a two-day workshop under the direction of Katie Wolfe and Ahi Karunaharan, with dramaturg Jo Smith providing overwatch, Kingswood was read by Jason Te Kare, Louise Tu’u, Joy Vaele, and Jason Wu on a warm Wednesday evening in Balmoral, Auckland.

The audience laughed in the right places, their applause was gratifying, and the Q-and-A that followed was enlightening for all present. Afterwards, it was nice to chat with individual audience members like: Auckland Theatre Company artistic director Colin McColl; Bright Star and Pasefika playwright and Playmarket respresentative Stuart Hoar; the indomitable Webmistresse (retired) and her husband; Luncheon and Officer 27 playwright Aroha Awarau; screenwriter Kathryn Burnett; and Titirangi Theatre stalwart and early supporter of the work Duncan Milne.

During the two-day workshop, these four words were used to describe "Kingswood" — and upon hearing them I felt inordinately proud.
During the two-day workshop, these four words were used to describe “Kingswood” — and upon hearing them I felt inordinately proud.

Where to from here?

I have no idea.

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KINGSWOOD: a reading

By Richard Lewis - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3977365
Holden Kingswood (1971-1974 HQ series)

What’s the connection between film director Katie Wolfe, writer Jo Smith, Radio New Zealand producer Jason Te Kare, theatre practitioner Louise Tu’u, and thespians Joy Vaele and Jason Wu?

They’re all pitching in for a reading of Kingswood later this month!

If you’re curious, in the neighbourhood, or at a loose end on the (almost) eve of Easter Weekend:

  • Wednesday 23 March 2016 at 6:30pm
  • Auckland Theatre Company
    Mt Eden War Memorial Hall
    Lower Ground Floor
    487 Dominion Road
    Auckland    .

Chur.

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