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By Tgreen, August 5, 2010 12:45 am

The summer of ’87. Not my happiest summer ever. That summer I’d finished my first year of college, but because I was in a program that would allow me to alternate one semester of school with one semester of work in my field of study (aerospace engineering, if you can believe it), I had to complete 3 semesters of school in a row to get enough credits under my belt to qualify. So, summer of ’87, after two of the most intense academic semesters I’d endured to that point, I had to do a third. Not the smartest thing I could have done, but I was 19 and what did I know?

I think I took 4 classes that summer. Two engineering classes in the back half of the summer, and Calculus 3 and a humanities class in the front half. I don’t remember what the humanities class was, but it was probably the easiest of the four classes. It would almost have to be.

I have a couple of clear memories of that summer. I read a lot of articles about the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the 10th anniversary of Elvis’ death. I inhaled several pounds of dust working my job in the ancient stacks of my school’s library. I damn near wore out the cassettes of Steve Earle’s Exit 0, Dwight Yoakam’s Hillbilly Deluxe and Rosanne Cash’s King’s Record Shop. Exit 0 in particular got tons of play that summer. If I started playing it when I got on the B41 at night, it would finish up as I walked up to my front door. I also wasted some time chasing after a girl in one of my engineering classes, but I was one broke, burned out, miserable bastard that summer, so not surprisingly my main companion during those months was my Walkman.

And there’s one other thing I remember from that summer. My humanities class, whatever it was called, assigned Catch-22 as one of the books to read. I’d heard of, and probably used, the phrase “Catch-22″ at that point, but had no idea what the book was about. Turns out it’s a book about World War II, among other things. Also turns out this book would become one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Catch-22 doesn’t follow a linear timeline. It jumps around quite a bit, and you have to pay attention but that doesn’t mean it’s really hard to follow. One of my library bosses took the same class a year later and hated the book because it wasn’t linear, which I found amusing since that was one of the things I liked best about it. And I’m pretty sure that at least one person on the writing staff for the first 3 seasons of M*A*S*H (the only seasons worth watching, by the way) was a fan, because I remember reading several scenes that were mighty familiar and were only missing Hawkeye and Radar to be practically an episode transcript.

Ultimately, I liked the book enough to drag out my battered old copy every couple of years, until it was lost sometime during the great Tgreen’s Farewell Tour of 2003 (and the less said about that, the better). I thought about replacing it, but always decided that if I was going to read it again, I’d want to read the copy that had taken all those trips on the B41, survived multiple lunches and dinners scarfed down out front of the school building, and then joined me on the commutes to at least 2 jobs upon graduation. No new copy of the book was going to be an acceptable replacement.

A couple of weeks ago I was digging around my storage space looking for a photo album that continues to elude me when I suddenly found myself face to face with my 1987 vintage copy of Catch-22, looking about the same as I remembered it. Pretty soon it’ll be joining me on yet another commute, and I’ll probably use this space to bore you with the details as I take a crack at this book for the first time in at least a decade.

Could be worse, though. I could use this space to share more memories of the summer of ’87. Trust me, you’re way better off reading about me reading Catch-22.

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By Tgreen, June 18, 2010 1:52 am

So after spending a month lost in a writing frenzy, all I had to show for it was a pile of words that may or may not have all fit together and a little picture I added to a blog post to show that I “won”. And that was pretty much it, except for one other cool thing. I could also get a free copy of my book from CreateSpace. An actual, honest-to-God, you can hold it in your hands printed book. I got one one before, when I won NaNoWriMo 2005, and even though I won in 2006 too by writing more than 50,000 words, I never finished the story so I never got my book. This time around, since the free book offer was good until July 2, I figured I’d edit the book, make something presentable out of it, and then get a free copy of that. And so during the week after Christmas, when I was off from work, I went to Staples, got some paper and a binder, printed the whole mess out and set to editing.

Cut to June and I have a binder full of paper I haven’t even finished reading yet, much less started marking it up with red pen. Though honestly I think I’m gonna need a box of red pens to get through this one. But the point is, July 2 is roaring down the tracks, aimed straight at me, and I’ve got nothing but the same pile of words I had at the end of November. So this week I formatted them, slapped together a cover, and sent the whole thing to CreateSpace to turn it into a book. I finished that process tonight, so in a couple of weeks I’ll open my mailbox and find a 122-page pile of words that may or may not fit together, but at least they’ll look like something real. It should be cool, and I’m hoping that reading through this book will finally get me working on this story that at one point I’m sure I thought could turn into something decent. I’ll probably post a picture of the book when it shows up, and maybe I’ll post one of the 2005 book as well. For now, here’s a quick look at the artwork I submitted for the cover:

And you know what the scary part is? With one simple click of a button, I could have this thing on sale at Amazon.com tomorrow. I won’t, because it’s a steaming pile of bad words right now. But I could. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The thing is, now that I’ve spent all this time learning how to design and format a book, I feel like I should find something profitable to do with that knowledge. Hmmm, if only I had a backlog of material that could be slapped together into some kind of book. If I had something like that, like a bunch of emails and blog posts from the last 15 years, I could do something. If only.

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By Tgreen, May 13, 2010 11:52 pm

Somehow I knew, even if I didn’t want to admit it, that everything was gonna go off the rails the minute I hit all my writing goals in April. And sure enough, I finished my 100 script pages, submitted my story to The First Line, picked up an iPad while traveling through New Jersey to get a sandwich, and my work ethic fell off the face of the earth. Partly this was because of the iPad, a crazy fun time sink that I’ll be writing about in more detail shortly, and partly because that final scramble to hit deadlines kind of kicked my ass. I still have about 30 or so script pages to write, of which I’ve finished maybe 4, and several stories to edit, but how can that compete with getting Apps and videos on my iPad?

The slow return of late work hours isn’t helping, of course. I have it on good authority that tomorrow will be one of those days where the only way to survive will be to do the work of 2 people as quickly and gracefully as possible. It’s been a few months since one of those days, so I don’t know for sure if I can still do it, but I’ll give it a shot.

Before work got bad again, I was trying to figure out how to format my NANOWRIMO novel to get my free proof copy. Back in December I dutifully bought a binder and printed out a copy so I could do a first pass edit on the thing before I had it made into a book just so the book would be better than first draft quality. I had all the time in the world, too, because the free proof copy offer is good until the end of June. And yet my editing never got past reading about 3/4ths of the book before petering out. Which is why I’m now trying to format that first draft to get my free proof. First draft proof is better than no proof at all.

The editing didn’t die out so much because the writing sucked or the story was a nightmare. Maybe it was only a little of that. A major issue was that after writing the thing in a mad rush in November, a story title lurked in the back of my head. I didn’t know why, or what it meant, but the name lingered and came to the forefront every now and then and eventually I had to fire up the Google and see what the deal was. What I learned wasn’t pretty.

You see, the title, which I will not be sharing here, was of a pretty famous short story that was turned into a big movie starring a huge Hollywood star. And this story shared a couple of not-minor concepts with the book I wrote last year. I never read the story, but I did see the movie. My book more resembled the story than the movie, because they changed a lot for the movie. But still, troubling and it made me wonder if it was worth doing anything more with this thing. I still wanted my free book, but I figured that might be it.

Then, this week, I was reading something on a message board and someone wrote how life would be so cool if only “idea X” existed. And guess what? “Idea X” was what my book is about. “Idea X” is nowhere to be found in this short story or movie, but it’s all over my book. So maybe the thing isn’t a lost cause. Who knows? I’ll have to figure it out after I get the proof book.

And what does this have to do with anything? Not much, but at this point I’ll do almost anything to avoid going to sleep right now, because to go to sleep means I’ll have to wake up and go to work Friday, and I sure as he’ll don’t want to do that.

But for now, all the writing has gone completely off the rails. Now it’s time to grab hold and get things working again, before I get sucked into that Netflix app. Stupid sexy iPad.

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By Tgreen, April 30, 2010 12:12 am

Need I say more?

Probably not, but I will anyway. Script stands at 101 pages right now. I probably need 30 more to wrap it up. Then I get to cut a lot of crap to get it back down to about 100, which is really all this story should need.

I know I’d promised a soundtrack list for this one, and I’ll get to that, but not until next week. There was just never enough time to figure out exactly what songs belong to this script. But the minute I figure it all out, I’ll post a list of some songs you’ve probably never heard of, but if you hunt them down and listen they might inspire you enough to demand I let you read a copy of the script. And you know what? I just might. Someone besides me has gotta see this thing at some point under some circumstances. Why not you?

And why, if I just managed to bang out 101 script pages in 30 days (or much less given my vacation) am I entitling my little celebratory blog post “Halfway Home”? Because I’ve still got a short story to finish before the end of April 30. That one still needs work, but I think I’ve got a handle on it and it should be no problem. And then? If there’s an iPad to be found in NYC, it just might end up coming home with me. If I can finish the story, that is.

More later. Sleep now. Thanks for reading.

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By Tgreen, April 28, 2010 11:16 pm

Script = 90 pages.

Short story = 1486 words.

Countdown = T-minus 2 days.

Chances of Friday turning into iPad Friday = 80-or-so %

Chances of any of the words written the last couple of days actually belonging within four miles of each other = 30-or-so %

Chances that I’m going to worry about that before the weekend = 0-or-so %

I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. And very, very tired.

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By Tgreen, April 26, 2010 11:45 pm

When I started this Script Frenzy business on April 1, I had a couple of assumptions. One of them was (though I guess technically this assumption came along a day or so later once I settled on my script) that I knew I wasn’t wrapping this script in 100 pages. I expected I’d need 120-130, and I’d edit down from there. The other assumption was that because of my vacation and the randomness of my work schedule, I wasn’t making it to 100 pages in 30 days anyway. So I packed up these assumptions, stuck them in the back of my brain, and wrote whenever I could.

I wrote on my laptop at night after work. I wrote on my iPhone on the express bus, on the couch, in my hotel room bed at Disney, while waiting around in at least 2 of the Disney parks, and, I’m not ashamed to admit it, on the can. And after 26 days, I find myself at 76 pages. Approximately 3 days behind schedule.

Is this good? I’m not sure. It’s probably better than I thought I’d be when I saw how little time or interest I had in writing while on vacation. But still, I’ve been writing from behind since the first week of this thing, and since I don’t know what the next 4 days will bring at work, 76 pages might be all I get to do. Who knows. But I think tentatively I have to say that 76 pages is probably pretty good for Day 26. It’s 76 more pages than most people will write in a month, for what that’s worth.

And there’s another obstacle, too. While April 30 is the Script Frenzy deadline, May 1 is the deadline for the latest issue of The First Line, and I’m trying real hard to submit something to them too. I’m just over 1000 words on that story, and need at least 1000 more, and possibly more than that. I’m writing this story exclusively on the iPhone, and that’s working out well so far.

So, 24 more pages of script and 1000-2000 more words of short story in 4 days? I don’t think I can pull it off. I’m gonna give it a try, though. It’s too early to give up. That’s what Thursday night is for.

Of course, I did make a deal with myself as kind of an incentive. If I get them both done on time, I might just head on out and reward myself with an iPad. Let’s see if that helps. For now, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!

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By Tgreen, April 14, 2010 10:28 pm

I’m late. Soooo late. But I’m on vacation, so it’s understandable. And expected. I knew I’d fall behind this week. I also knew this week would be the one to bounce me from this ridiculous idea completely. And I was okay with all this. I could live with all this, no problem. So why did I spend my few minutes of downtime today working on my script for the first time in nearly a week?

Because I foolishly let the characters get in my head, that’s why. I didn’t know if that would happen, since it’s never happened before when I’ve tried to write a screenplay. But this idea’s been cooking for a year or so, and maybe that’s the difference. Maybe that’s what’s keeping my interest higher than usual.

Basically where I find myself now is wrapping Act 1 and preparing to swing into Act 2, and even though it’s taking me a few pages more than I’d planned, the characters are starting to feel real to me. And I’m really gonna need that to happen if I’m gonna pull off that scene near the end of Act 3 that gets the audience up on its feet cheering. Or, sunk into it’s seat weeping. I don’t wanna let slip what goes on in this story just yet.

But I’m writing toward a particular scene, and if the characters are real to me I’ve got a better chance of actually getting there. And I’ve also got a better chance of writing a scene as good as the scene I’ve been thinking about the last few months. Because the stuff I think about writing almost always kicks the entire ass of what I actually write. Which is why I think about writing a lot more than I write.

And I figure, I’m writing a script. The point of a script is that it’s going to be performed somewhere. So even if I don’t hit the ball out of the park on this one, a halfway decent director and a couple of actors, along with the song the scene revolves around, could all make it work anyway. Unlike when I write a story, all of the pressure’s not on me.

Unfortunately, this deadline’s all me. I’m the only one who can get there, and if I don’t, that director and those actors will have to work on Transformers 3 or something, and I’m not sure I want to be held responsible for that. For now, back to my vacation. But when I get home, I’ve got a lot of writing to do. No wonder they call this thing a script frenzy.

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By Tgreen, April 4, 2010 12:21 am

Okay, so against my better judgement I did in fact start up my script for Script Frenzy. It was not a trouble-free process. If you recall back in November when I started up Nanowrimo, my main point, other than the fact that it was a bad idea, was that I went in with nothing. No idea as to what I was going to write. No characters, no setting, no plot, no nothing. And this did not worry me, because I’ve been writing fiction for years and feel that if nothing else, I know how to work my way into a story even when I’m starting on fumes.

Turns out script writing is different, at least for me. Probably because I’m not used to the format, when I sat down on the night of April 1st to write, it was awkward. Maybe not quite “oh crap, I think I’m accidentally writing an episode of According to Jim” awkward, but it was pretty awkward. I dutifully banged out my 4 pages of script, powered down the computer for the night, and went to sleep. The thing is, though, I wasn’t itching to start working on page 5, and one thing I’ve learned from my several attempts at Nanowrimo, once I get started I can usually at least keep myself interested for the first few days or longer. If my script was boring me on day 1, how was I going to get through something like day 20, when no doubt I’d be several pages behind with a half dozen work deadlines kicking my ass?

Now, if you’ll hang on for just a second — a side trip. I mentioned the other day that I knew going into this thing that there was no way I’d be able to write 100 script pages in April. This is because I’ll be headed down to Disney World for a week, and I don’t expect to get a whole lot of writing done while I’m down there. But since I wasn’t going to let 4 lame script pages sink my month before it had even started, I looked for a way to get some writing done while on vacation. Since I wrote some of my Nanowrimo story on my iPhone, I went looking for a script-writing app and sure enough, I found several. One of them offered a free trial version, so on Friday I downloaded it and gave it a try. I didn’t pick up on page 5 of the script I was working on. Instead, I just started a second script and wrote about a page or so. It was no better than the other 4 pages, with no big prospects to get better.

If you’re keeping score at home, by day 2 of Script Frenzy I had 2 different scripts that I didn’t like, with barely a plot between them. What could I do? Would I have to give up on the 2nd day? I thought about it, sure. But then while I was at work another idea came to me. I did have one particular story kicking around the back of my head the last 2 years or so. It’s heavily music-based and most of the climax involves a singing performance, and from back when I first thought of it I knew that if the story were ever going to survive outside the confines of my brain, it would only work if people could hear the song, watch it being sung, and experience what the characters experience as it happens. This meant screenplay, which explains why the story got exiled to the back of my brain, called forward only when I played a particular sequence of songs on my iPod.

But I was thinking, maybe I’m not good enough to try and crank out a script by starting from zero. Maybe if I’m writing a script, I need the comfort of some pre-considered ideas to get me over the unfamiliar terrain of script writing. So I went home the second day of Script Frenzy, planted ass in seat, and instead of picking up the script from the night before, or the script on my iPhone, I decided to start my 3rd script in less than 48 hours and I wrote this:

INT. HOLLY’S WORLD STORE #8, NIGHT
BRIAN JONES, late 20s and dressed in business casual attire gone wrinkled and sloppy after a 12+ hour day, walks the empty floor of the store one last time, scanning up and down aisles for any activity as he heads for the bank of light switches past the checkout counters near the front door. NEIL, mid-20s and dressed in shabby jeans and a Holly’s World smock, slouches by the front door waiting for Brian. Brian hits switches in sequence as he passes, and a click is audible as a bank of lights goes out each time. When no light remains but the emergency lights pooled near the front door, he shoos Neil out the door and follows him.

CUT TO:

EXT. HOLLY’S WORLD PARKING LOT, SECONDS LATER
Brian and Neil walk to opposite sides of the wide entrance area and wrestle down the metal security grating. Brian closes the padlock on his end, then walks to Neil’s end and closes the padlock there as well. He blows a small cloud of steam into the cool night air as he and Neil survey the parking lot, empty except for Brian’s car and a minivan that just finished pulling up several spots away from them.

NEIL:
Oh Jesus, this isn’t a customer, is it? It’s like 2 in the morning.

BRIAN:
This is what happens when you cut back from 24 hours. People forget but they still need stuff.

NEIL:
It’s not our problem this dumb bastard showed up after the store closed. C’mon, let’s go.

BRIAN:
Let’s at least wait until we find out what he wants. We can point him toward the 24-hour store by the Interstate.

NEIL:
If we don’t freeze to death first.

Nothing Oscar-worthy, to be sure. But all of a sudden, I was writing a script for a story I’d thought up maybe 2 years ago. I’m on page 14 or 15 right now, and while I’m not even up to the first scene I’d imagined for this story, I’ve already introduced a character I never imagined lived in this story and who turns out to be pretty cool. And I’m looking forward to sitting down and writing this one every day, to see if I can make it to that last scene with that last song. I’m going all in on this one, and I hope it pays off.

Expect to see more script excerpts throughout the month, and also soundtrack listings, since for once I’ll be completely justified in making a soundtrack for a story. Thanks to my vacation I doubt I’ll make it to page 100 before April 30. But if it all works out, I’ll find a way to get this whole story down. Thanks for stopping by and indulging a more-than-slightly-burned-out writer wannabe.

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By Tgreen, April 1, 2010 1:06 am

In theory, it should work like this — you want to write, so you write. Simple. Believable. Like the song says, it oughtta be easy, oughtta be simple enough. And yet, after banging my brain against the inside of my skull for at least 8 hours a day at work, most nights the best I can do is crank out an email or two, perhaps a Yelp review, and maybe a tweet. Certainly nothing more than that. It’s not to say I don’t have the best of intentions. But those intentions seem to melt away once ass hits couch after the long trip home on the D train.

So in the absence of the easy way, what’s left? Why, a stunt, of course. Last November I wrote a novel in a month, and if you scroll down a bit you can read all about it. This month? Well, this month I’m trying something different, if no less ridiculous. This month I’m writing a 100-page script while participating in Script Frenzy. I’ve never written much in the way of scripts, and don’t have a whole lot of interest in it, but for the month of April, Script Frenzy gives me a goal, a deadline, and hopefully the right amount of motivation to write something more substantial than a Waffle House review.

When I sit down this evening to start my script, I have a few options. I can write a movie script, or a TV show, or a play, or even a graphic novel (high-class-speak for comic book). As I write this, I’ve got no idea which one I’ll choose. I wrote a TV episode script once. It sucked. I wrote 3/4ths of a movie script once. It sucked. I wrote about half of a script that was either an animated movie or a hybrid of live action and animation. It sucked. And while I’ve never bothered to sit down and write a comic book script, I’ve sure created many comics in my day. Some of them didn’t suck.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that I haven’t exactly set the bar terribly high as far as script writing is concerned, so assuming I make it to 100 pages in a month, whatever I write is bound to be at least as bad as all the other crap I’ve done, and maybe it might be a little better. Of course, the dirty little secret in all this is I know going into it that it will be almost impossible for me to get to 100 pages in this particular month. But we’ll get to that later. For now, there’s nothing but good times ahead. Hey kids, let’s put on a show!

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By Tgreen, November 30, 2009 11:39 pm

When you’re participating in the NaNoWriMo event, there are two major milestones you always have in mind. One, of course, is 50,000 words. You have to get there or you don’t win. The other one is the end of your story. Ideally, the end and the 50,000 words will show up at around the same time, but it doesn’t always work that way. The first year I won, I needed around 82,000 words to wrap things up. The second time I won, I believe I blew past 60K without ever finding the ending. This year, given how much trouble I was having keeping to my writing schedule, I couldn’t afford to let the story go on for too long because there was no way I could keep up the pace once the 30-day deadline was though.

This is why I worked on a 2,000 words per day schedule. I’d get 60,000 words in November with that schedule, and if I couldn’t wrap the story in 60,000 words then maybe I wasn’t focused enough. When I fell 2 days behind and was never able to completely catch up, I was worried that I’d hit 50K but not “The End”, and this worrying caused me to focus in on plot more than I ever have before. And when I hit 50K on Day 27, I knew that at best I had 6,000 more words to work with, and possibly more like 4,000. The pressure was on.

Long story short (as if), I finished the story on Day 29 with a shade over 56,000 words. Hit the end with an entire day left to go, which is something I would’ve thought impossible way back on Day 1. Of course, on Day 1 the entire project felt mostly impossible because, as I’ve mentioned before, I had nothing back on Day 1. Not even a single idea. And yet here I sit on Day 30 with a 56,000 word story sitting on my hard drive waiting for a rewrite. On Days 1 through 29 I battled with my work schedule and my personal life to bang out approximately 2,000 words a day. On Day 30, I rested, except for rewriting 2 scenes right near the end that I had to fix because they bugged me all day.

Just for the hell of it, here’s how things started late the night of Day 1:

I grew up in an apartment building that I hated every minute I lived there.

I can almost guarantee that sentence will not appear in any future drafts of this story in whatever form it ultimately takes. And here’s how things wrapped on Day 29:

“Ah, well, no big deal. Memory’s a flaky thing anyway.”

I actually started to write one last paragraph after that, but that line seemed a good stopping point after all that had come before. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t appear in any future drafts either, but you never know.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, Happy Friday will be returning to this space, either this Friday or next, depending on how fast I can recover from the sleep-deprivation of the past month. Also coming back to this space will be updates on whatever creative project I take on next, because I had fun documenting this and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I’m not sure what that next creative project will be, but I’m hoping it won’t take too long to figure out.

After I do the initial read of this book, I might be looking for a couple of impartial readers to give it a look. If you’re interested in being one of them, shoot me an email or comment to this post and I’ll consider it. I may end up bypassing that step entirely, so please don’t be offended if you are interested and in the end I say no. I appreciate the interest, believe me. Hell, I appreciate the time any of you spent reading all these posts this month. I hope I didn’t cure too many cases of insomnia while documenting my crazy quest to write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. See you all in Happy Friday soon, and see you all back here next November for my next crack at NaNoWriMo (well, maybe).

T “step away from the keyboard, sir,” green