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Dakini ACTION Late Shift

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05:40 / 28.07.07

Something that's part sympathy and part admiration goes out to you for that.

It also reminds me to eat! I can't believe I've been piecing on little coffee cookies, stomach grumbling, when I've got a kitchen twelve feet away.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

05:51 / 28.07.07

Happy eating! The exhaustion has just hit me and I'm going to go pass out. Sweet dreams, when you get to them.

21:06 / 29.07.07

Hello Barbelith.

It's been a while since we shifted. How is the old electronic rainbow tonight?

21:22 / 29.07.07

*The Doctor casts his line back in, watching it bob lazily on the surface, waiting, hoping for a bite*

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:30 / 29.07.07

Yello, Doc.

Just in from picking up some groceries. Going to tidy up the apartment and try to find some focus for the writing of things.

21:35 / 29.07.07

Heeeeey, Papers! How's the writing coming along these days?

I'm shut up for the night in an unfamiliar city, on my tod in a room that's not mine with nothing but a laptop and a single grass joint.

(I do have a portable tea tray and required accoutrements for making proper chinese tea, but I'm a bit too feart to go boil up the kettle, having not being introduced to any of my friend's flatmates).

21:36 / 29.07.07

(Said friend having to abandon me on the first night here due to extenuating circumstances).

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:37 / 29.07.07

Writing's well-- I'm in the middle of the naturally atroctious first draft of a detective story, which is suitably surrealist. I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of the mystery's plot in this draft and then I can actually put more focus on characters & setting in rounds two and three...

I could, of course, do with a joint myself...I'm in the headspace. I'll settle for a bowl of salad, though, and a good think.

21:37 / 29.07.07

Might as well get a little early lateshifting in. Packing up to visit my brother and his family, which means I'll be on minimal internet for a few days.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:37 / 29.07.07

...that's awkward. You haven't met any of the flatmates? At all? Are you even allowed to use the bathroom?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:38 / 29.07.07

Nightfalling!

21:40 / 29.07.07

I've drafted the first issue of a six-part comic I'll be doing, which I'm quite pleased with but is obviously still a good ways from being proper.

Also hello to Nightfalling. Because it is, you know.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:41 / 29.07.07

What's the comic about?

It's very weird, working on early drafts, knowing that what you're producing now is terrible and underdeveloped. It's hard to keep sight of the *potential*.

21:41 / 29.07.07

The bathroom's just across the landing so that's not a problem. My pal's away for the night and not coming back till after work tomorrow.

I'll probably go meet him for lunch tomorrow, but it's looking like a night of modest means tonight.

21:44 / 29.07.07

Papers, just keep asking yourself if you can make it suck less. That's about as optimistic as I usually can get, and it seems to do the job; moving towards potential.

And, Doctor, yes, tell us of comic. I'm always slightly happier when comics bleed over to other parts of the board.

21:46 / 29.07.07

The comic's a fairly simple old-meets-young, coming-of-age story set in a shitty newbuild mountain mining town and punctuated with FANTASTICAL ACROBATIC PERFORMANCES.

It's my attempt to actually learn how to tell a small story without it spiraling wildy out of my control and ending up as something I'll never finish.

21:51 / 29.07.07

For me, it's pretty much a stepping stone to The Bastard Movie Screenplay I've Needed To Get Out My Head For Seven Years..... which is a bit more of thorny tangle and needs a bit more experience.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:51 / 29.07.07

Ah well, a forced night in can be good for the creative juices.

Yeah, I'm working toward the story not being "bad."

21:52 / 29.07.07

That's a noble aim for a writer.

Lot of people don't give that one the attention they should.

21:55 / 29.07.07

Always good to get into something new for a bit, especially something new and somehow artificially limited or structured. Keeps your focus.

Not that I don't tend to monopolize my nieces when I see them, anyway, but as a side benefit, I'm going to run my recent girl's adventure fiction rewrites by them, Figure little girls might actually have a better idea what little girls want to read (or have read to them), than, y'know, me and a roomfull of thirty-somethings.

21:57 / 29.07.07

I'm at the point now where the world and characters are staring to crackle and spark off each other and form a nice emotional whole in my head. Which is the best part of writing. It's a lovely thing.

21:59 / 29.07.07

That actually sounds fun, Nightfalling.

Do we have a basic premise you'd be allowed to divulge?

22:17 / 29.07.07

Basic gist is a toy maker and a klepto eight year old girl having adventures in a future gone wrong, with child slave markets, youth rebellions afoot (directed and funded by adults with teh bad intentionz, of course), and some strange force messing with people's minds to keep everybody sedate and technology levels awkwardly low and high in different areas. I'm playing it as fear of the future and trying to apply a lot of the tricks we got from eighty's childrens movies and stuff. The recent complaint on the rewrites is that I don't have enough whimsy. Which is probably because I haven't got much if any whimsy in me.

22:23 / 29.07.07

Sounds like somebody needs some Gaiman love.

CROW IN A TOP HAT! FROG IN A DRESS!

Seriously though, that sounds pretty awesome. What kind of tone are you going for with it? Lemony Snicketty?

22:26 / 29.07.07

If it makes the billions of dollars every production company it ends up with seems to think it can, I believe I might just write a tell-all book of the inane arguments over the property.

Like why it's creepy when all the male characters can age, but forty years down the line, the young girls are... young, still. Why it's important in a book for kids that the kid be competent, if not moreso than adults. Or, as mentioned before, having to prove that in our world, today, one can have a poncho in Germany, despite the story not taking place 'today' or in 'our world' really.

22:33 / 29.07.07

When I worked on it back in the day, with Disney, I really wasn't motivated by anything but keeping a job. Having come back to it, I've been looking at children's entertainment of the today, versus the 80s, and I'm finding 'Labyrinth', 'The Worst Witch', 'Neverending Story' and such to have much more empowering messages, these are good-looking, intelligent, witty kids who learn very quickly not to take shit off anybody. Or something like that. Harry Potter seems much more de-powering, with Harry continually returning to his abusive out-of-school life with the incredibly cruelty and neglect, or the unwillingness to just let emotions run amok for a bit.

So, anti-Potter style, where Susan gets to come out on top, not despite being good at war and discovering boys, but perhaps, because. I'm also trying to get them to market it towards YA, instead of children's, for reasons of the pre-existing plot. Children's books ought not have so much being arrested and threatened with horrible physical violence.

22:42 / 29.07.07

How long have you been working on it now.

I suppose you could have a point regarding Harry Potter, but it's not the whole case. His Dark Materials is pretty similar in tone to those older stories and themes. Where the two of them do their own thing to save the world amongst the machinations of adults and agendas. I'd reckon An Unfortunate Series of Events is in there too, but I've not read or seen to really comment.

22:50 / 29.07.07

Actually, yeah, Dark Materials/Lemony Snicket is pretty close. Hadn't thought of that, but I might be able to use it for leverage. Unfortunately for me, most of those involved are very gung-ho just doing something cute, and I'm all for cute moments if they come out of the story naturally, but in general, I just like having a 'fuck yeah!' moment every few pages. A major plot point involves children on death row, which is hard to get whimsical with.

I've been working on it, too long (you can tell by the unintentionally defensive big paragraphs even bringing it up gets out of me), taking into account long breaks in between. Late nineties or so, with a break of several years when it fell through at its original home and I quit having a regular paycheck from it (they even set me up with a secretary for all of five minutes). There are a variety of reasons why it's been picked up excitedly and then dropped down the line, more than once, but they keep coming back to the same people funnily enough. Only the celebrities and the production company shift.

22:59 / 29.07.07

I'll probably regret venting on this by tomorrow. Though maybe, secretly, I'd like to get fired. Who knows.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:00 / 29.07.07

Nightfalling, your discussions of this project, and the other hints you leave around, always strike me pretty strongly -- glimpses into a difficult industry to operate in.

I'm curious where the project will go.

I don't seem to be getting my writing done yet, but it's still early in my evening - the barest outer edge of afternoon, really - so I have time.

23:14 / 29.07.07

Most of the people I know on my side of the fence are able to just shut off parts of themselves and be guns for hire. I just bottle it all up and get pissy, slip petty things into scripts, that sort of thing. I'd like to think if I were just a really good writer, I wouldn't have the troubles, but, talking to enough writers of identifiable quality, no, I think entertainment's just screwy.

With cripplingly bad segue, someone had Joyce Carol Oates kill my favorite myth about her, yesterday. Apparently, when asked to complete a three book deal at a house she wasn't interested in maintaining relations with, she did not actually go downstairs to her car and retrieve two whole manuscripts and drop them off upstairs. She said that was, and I quote, 'absurd.' But I like to pretend writers of some notable quality or selling capacity have these freedoms. Byronic writer-heroes or something, wading the length of an ocean without getting wet past their ankles.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:20 / 29.07.07

None of us get away without water in our shorts.

I need to get my brain going for this story tonight. Grr. I hate when I know I should be writing, and that I'd enjoy working on the story, but I can't quite get myself going...

23:23 / 29.07.07

Is Templechurch shaping up for you?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:29 / 29.07.07

She is a little bit. In this one, she's a secondary character, but she might be the protagonist for something else, later.

23:34 / 29.07.07

I think it'd be nice if there's an identifying element to her appearances, so when another story or film or whatever has a similar moment, we can all call it 'templechurching.'

Actually, I just think some good detective fiction - yours is detective fiction, right? - is a welcome thing at this stage. So long as you don't walk us through the reveals of the mystery right off the bat.

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