Happy 2012!

I’m a few days late with this, but I hope you all wrapped up 2011 with a safe-ish bang and have hit the ground running in 2012. I’ve said before, I don’t generally make resolutions, but for some reason I’m coming into this year unusually full of the proverbial piss and vinegar to make 2012 a great and productive year.

Maybe because this could be the last year before the world is destroyed by a rogue planet or whatever Americans think the Mayans believed but didn’t at all. Or maybe because I’m closer to 30 than I am to 20 and I’m having a pre-mid-life crisis. Whatever the reason, I’m focused.

Along with adjustments to my personal and professional goals, I’m going to make it my goal to post to the blog as often as possible this year — daily, if I can maintain the discipline. I’ve tried the quality over quantity thing and neither wound up happening. So I’m going to do the quantity thing and you can let me know if the quality becomes too abysmal. New year, new strategy.

And I know, I know: I’ve said this before too. Many times. But This Time, I Mean It™.

Because really, I don’t have excuses for not posting. I tweet constantly, I participate in discussions on forums and email — I write a lot on any given day, I have no good reason I can’t put some of it here. And I wrote many of the posts from the second half of 2011 (few as they were) on my iPad, on the go. So I know that works. No more excuses.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (probably all of you reading this, at least at the time of writing) will probably be seeing some overlap in what I tweet about and what I blog about. To date I’ve avoided blogging about anything I’ve tweeted, but I’m coming to realize that might be silly. For one thing, it leaves me with very little to blog about and therefore very little blogging done. Not only can I express my opinion at more length here than on Twitter, but a lot of the stuff I tweet is stuff I find interesting and would prefer to be able to find again without scouring my extensive Twitter feed. So, moving forward, I’ll be using the blog on a fairly regular basis to give interesting stuff a permanent home.

The My Week in Movies posts were pretty successful and well-received — by a mostly silent readership, but the posts announced on Twitter always saw a solid spike in site visits — and they also compelled me to see more movies when I got the chance, to have something to write about. I still need to write a post to wrap up the end of 2011, which I’ll be putting up in the next few days.

Moving into 2012, I’m not only subscribed to Netflix streaming and Blockbuster for disc-by-mail — Netflix lost my money on that service after their misguided Quixter announcement, and failed to regain my confidence by withdrawing it — but being fortunate enough to live in Los Angeles I’m also in a beta market for MoviePass — something rather like Netflix for films still in (participating) theaters. So I expect to see even more films this year than last. Fans of the MWIM posts, stay tuned.

I’ve read a lot of books in the last year for which I should have written reviews as I went, but didn’t. So I’ve got a My Year in Books series of posts coming next week to cover them. Throughout 2012 I intend to post reviews as I go, rather than in bulk.

I also plan to once more revive Skeptical Sunday posts. To keep them on a regular schedule, I’ll be sharing and highlighting videos or news stories from the skeptical, scientific, and/or atheist community on the occasions I can’t write a substantial post of my own.

I’m also — Flying Spaghetti Monster help me — planning to return to my essays on The Case for a Creator, which I left off dissecting almost three years ago. Creationism seems to have gone on the wane in those three years, certainly in terms of its political power, but I said I’d do the whole book and by golly I intend to.

2012 is also, of course, an election year here in ’Murrica, so expect some politics, and expect it to reach something of a fever pitch in the autumn. I apologize in advance to non-American readers who couldn’t give a tin shit about our country’s politics.

So, anyway. Noses to grindstones, boots to asses, whatever your idiom of choice. Let’s do this 2012 thing.

The Translated Man (and Other Stories)

So, a couple weeks ago, I said something funny on the internet. Which, you know, I try. But this time I touched a nerve, my tweet was retweeted by Wil Wheaton — who has 1.8 million followers — and then all hell broke loose. Retweets and responses started flying, my email started buzzing with one new follower after another.

Realizing I had, for a fleeting moment, the potential attention of all those people, should they click through to my account to see who this wisecracking jackmook was, I began casting madly about for stuff I could promote. Among other things, I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that I am working on the film adaptation for a novel called The Translated Man.

Not exactly the way I wanted to announce it, but I kind of panicked (and also the author saw what was happening and yelled at me for not mentioning it). But this is a project that I’m very, very excited about, and it deserves more than the 280 characters I was able to devote to it.

I first heard about The Translated Man when it was recommended by the screenwriter John Rogers on his blog. This was just when I had gotten my Kindle and I was ravenous for good new books to read, and he even dropped the L-bomb (Lovecraftian), so I went and snatched it up immediately.

The Translated Man is an industrial horror-fantasy, set in the richly-textured city of Trowth, in a world where the line between magic and science is heavily blurred, and dangerous sciences — such as necrology (the reanimation of corpses), and translation (cross-dimensional travel) — are declared heresies by the theocratic Church Royal. The enforcement of anti-heretical measures falls under the jurisdiction of the Coroners, Trowth’s version of the FBI, authorized to use lethal force with any confirmed heretic, on sight. The story begins with the Coroners’ investigation of a brutal murder, an investigation which leads them down a path toward a secret that threatens to destroy the city.

Like Rogers, I loved it, and my manager at the time was encouraging me to seek out potential properties for adaptation that I could take on, so I contacted the author and discovered that the film rights were still available, and we made a deal.

Which brings us to the present. One of the reasons I’ve previously held off saying anything about it was because I wanted to finish writing the script first. And then I struggled for a long time with how to take such a detailed, evocative, interesting book and distill it down into 150 screenplay pages or less, without losing what made it so great and worth adapting in the first place.

So it took me a while, during which time I was chipping away at it without making major headway. But in the last few months I got my head around a cinematic way to structure the story — aided by my re-examination of the successes and failures of the HARRY POTTER adaptations, and the immensely well-executed adaptation of GAME OF THRONES — and had a breakthrough. I’ve finally completed the first draft of the adaptation (which came in at 125 pages), and gotten the go-ahead from the author to start sharing it with some of the producers and other contacts I know and see if we can’t get something moving along.

You, my friends, can help.

See, one of the reasons adaptations are so popular in Hollywood right now is because the studio gets a sense that the movie they’re making has a built-in audience. It’s not a slam-dunk for the film’s success — nothing is — but it makes it seem like a surer thing than the completely original screenplay they got great coverage on this week.

What you guys can do to help this movie get a little closer to happening is head on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of the book, either in print or on Kindle. The book also comes with four short stories, set in the same world and expanding on its mythology, and already has a sequel, with another on the way. If you like the book — and I think you probably will — spread the word about it. Recommend it to a friend, do a blog post or even just a tweet, and give it a review on Amazon so it can start to rise through the rankings and get even more attention, and make it easier for me to stand in a room with some executive and go “See? The people want this movie.”

Setting my personal interest in its success aside, it’s just a great book that deserves more exposure and that I really think, especially for the people who share my sensibilities enough to read my blog, it’s something you won’t want to miss out on. So check it out, and I look forward to updating you guys on the project’s status in the future.

There’s an app for this!

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

What people call writer’s block is, in my estimation, a combination of two things — laziness (often in the form of procrastination) and fear. It usually masks itself behind perfectionism — oh, I can’t get anything done in just five minutes, when there’s time I’ll do the thing properly; oh, I just know the words won’t come out right, I’m not ready to write them yet, when I’m ready they’ll come; I’m not feeling inspired right now…

And sometimes people will just flat out tell you they’re “blocked.” They can’t write a word. They talk like it’s some mystical thing, that the well’s dried up and they just have to wait for the juices to flow again, whenever that’ll happen.

In my opinion, that’s horseshit. There hasn’t been a moment since I learned to write words that I haven’t been capable of doing so — and that’s not to brag, I don’t think it’s different from anyone else. Unless you have literally lost your ability to form a coherent sentence, you are without excuse. If you can talk, you can write. And if you can write a tweet, email, or message board post, you can write a poem, novel, or screenplay.

Or, in my case, a blog.

I may have more to say about my feelings on writer’s block (writing that intro has gotten those fabled juices flowing, those gears turning, those metaphors mixing) but I’m really just getting at the fact that I totally know I’m a shitbird for posting so rarely and I have no excuse.

I mean, when in my waking hours am I without arm’s reach of an internet-enabled Apple product entirely capable of posting to this site? Never, that’s when.

Yet I so rarely post. So rarely set aside the time to set down even a short post — reassuring myself that it’s because I want each post to have some meat to it, to make sure I can devote enough time to really make it worthwhile.

And so, supposedly demanding perfection, I give you tumbleweeds.

Bah.

Bah, I say!

I’ll tell you something else I don’t believe in. New Year’s Resolutions. But this past year, I did join a gym (last November actually, but), and unlike most resolution-makers, I have been going on a near-daily basis. My nutrition’s been for shit, so I’ve been running in place literally and figuratively, but I made a change and I’ve stuck with it.

It’s all about developing a routine.

I write every day. Be it a tweet or a script, I’m writing. There’s no reason the blog shouldn’t be part of that, so from now on it will.

Skeptical Sunday: Lucky to be Alive

I had intended, with the conclusion of my work on PIRANHA 3D, to take more time to write on the blog and work on personal projects. But I concluded my final day (or to be precise, an all-nighter graveyard shift) on the project with a trip to the hospital for terrible stomach pain. Though I might have tried to ride out the pain usually, I had just signed up for health insurance the month before and was covered for the first time in four years, and I decided I might as well make use of it. I was diagnosed with gastritis and sent home with a prescription for a powerful antacid and some generic Vicodin for the pain.

About a week later — having been told to stay away from spicy or acidic food for the next few weeks — I was drinking a milkshake when I was hit with such a sudden and intense pain in my abdomen that I thought my appendix might have ruptured. I called an ambulance and was whisked to the hospital and examined.

Brian, my roommate, had his gallbladder out 3 or 4 years ago after a protracted series of gallstone attacks that took some time to be identified. When I let him know I was in the hospital and described my experience to him, he advised me to insist upon an ultrasound exam to check for gallstones, as this is not standard procedure and, if I had gallstones, it would take some time for them to diagnose it via the normal process.

After some hemming and hawing — I don’t know why they were so hesitant — the hospital staff gave me an ultrasound and discovered that I did, in fact, have gallstones. Unlike kidney stones, you can’t simply let gallstones pass out of your body; if they pass out of the gallbladder, they can either block the bile duct or get into the pancreas, causing even worse trouble. And they can’t be broken up by ultrasound like kidney stones, either. The only option is surgery.

I worked on PIRANHA 3D

Remember how I said that I was “drowning” in work and that was a pun and you didn’t know why but I’d tell you?

Yeah. I worked on a movie that involves water and drowning, and a lot of mean little CG fish.

Get it?

Anyway, I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t go see PIRANHA this weekend. What I will say is that this film actually took its time with the conversion. Whereas most films get finished and then go “We can charge how much for 3D tickets?!” and turn around a shit-tastic “3D” version in six weeks (I’m looking at you, everything), they knew from the word go that PIRANHA was going to do a conversion and they gave it the time you need to do it right. Nine months, on this one. I was there for seven.

I am very proud of the quality of the conversion that was done on this film. I think it is genuinely the best, cleanest 3D conversion to date. The quality of the film we did the conversion on is…not Shakespeare. Let’s leave it at that.

Like I said, I’m not promoting the flick per se. Don’t make plans to see it just on my account. But, if you were already going to see it, I think this one might be worth the 3D tax. It’s big and silly and gimmicky — quite honestly, a movie like PIRANHA is what this 3D thing is really good for. And you might spot my name in the credits!

Descendants update…

If you read the blog earlier today, I posted an update on the status of the DESCENDANTS project.

The short version, as I said in that post, is that the version of the project I worked on for two years is dead. I then continued in that post with my perspective and experience of how the project fell apart. It was a bit of frustration venting, of course.

And it was up for a bit, and then I got a message from our guy over at Dark Horse. And now the post is down.

I wasn’t asked to take it down. In fact, when I spoke with him on the phone I offered to take it down and he said it wasn’t necessary. He, in fact, wanted to apologize for the way the project had panned out and that he was still hoping we could do something together. So while I don’t think I said anything libelous in the post, and made sure not to name names even with that in mind, I feel it would be ingracious of me to leave any dirty laundry out there after our conversation. I don’t like how this project turned out, but I liked working with them when it was going well, and that’s not a bridge I want to burn.

Getting a movie going is a bit like catching lightning in a bottle, really. All the right elements have to come together, and in this case they just didn’t. Some of that was within our control and judgement errors were made (on my part as much as anyone else’s, if not more), some was outside our control. But the upshot is that DESCENDANTS isn’t going to happen, at least not the version with which I was involved.

I also probably won’t post the scripts after all, at least not before discussing it with Joey. That’s also not a bridge I’m out to burn. So I’ll just have to find something else to post about.

Meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead on KUNG FU RED. In fact I think I’ll post about that one next…

Holding Pattern…

Sorry for the dead air lately. Life’s been wall-to-wall, and what time hasn’t been spent at work, writing, or trying to get Sandrima Rising done has mostly been spent sleeping — with one exception I’ll talk about in a forthcoming post. 

By way of some related news, my buddy Anthony and I have officially partnered up as a writing team on the strength of our recent spec collaboration, Ninja Johnson. I haven’t mentioned this one around here before because we were waiting to get a draft of the script polished and out the door; now it’s awaiting judgment in the hands of our manager. Once he weighs in I’ll be able to say more about it, in particular about what’s going to happen next with it. 

I never thought I’d be able to work with a writing partner, but Anthony and I, aside from being close friends, have a great creative energy and since we both give a lot of input on each other’s writing as it is, it made sense just to make it official. I’m looking forward to cranking out more scripts with him. 

At the same time, it’s definitely an example of “be careful what you wish for.” I’ve got two treatments and two partial scripts in my inbox waiting for me to take a look and do my pass, so that’s taking up writing energy and the reason the blog has been kind of slow, and why I’ve missed a couple Secular Sunday posts in a row. 

I’m not dead and I haven’t abandoned the blog, though. I’ll try to post more YouTube videos or something in the meantime.

Secular Sunday: Freethought IRL!

So no post today. (Er, besides this one.) Finishing up a script for entry into the Nicholl Fellowship^[1] is taking most of my writing energy.

I did, however, manage to make it out to the Festival of Books at UCLA this morning, and came by the booth for Atheists United. It’s an organization that I joined toward the end of last year but, life being what it is, I haven’t had a chance to get involved or attend any meetings. It’s mostly an educational/community building organization, but they get involved in the occasional activism regarding civil liberties and the separation of church and state.

I showed up at the booth just as a Christian decided he wanted to present the moral argument for God, a fifteen minute conversation that you know I dove into headfirst. After talking himself in circles endlessly (first “we can have total knowledge” then “we can’t know anything for sure” then “we know God’s nature” then “God’s nature is beyond our comprehension” etc.), and attempting false equivalencies (saying that morality = mathematics, there is either right or wrong), he said someone was waiting for him and scurried off.

I introduced myself to the booth folks as an AU member and, having checked out most of the Festival already and paid for a full day of parking, I availed myself as a volunteer to man the booth for a few hours.

I won’t lie, I was kind of hoping for more debate opportunities, but surprisingly enough, after that first guy, the people who came to the booth were very friendly, and mostly atheists glad to see an organization of like-minded individuals (which is, after all, the point).

They’re looking for ways to do more social outreach, including resurrecting a radio show they apparently used to do (!!), so I might be getting more involved in the future. We’ll see. For today it was fun and I met some cool people.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a script to finish.

---

1. Coworker: Is it really a “Nicholl” type of script?
   Me: It’s the closest I’ve got, at least. ↩

WordPress like Burning!

If you’re reading this, that means you took my advice and bookmarked DorkmanScott.com as the portal to my blog. Conglaturation! You have been successfully re-directed to the blog’s new home on WordPress. I decided to migrate the blog sooner rather than later. It came to my attention that WordPress has a “pages” function that will allow me to build a serviceable website without having to know HTML or pay someone who does. 

I have successfully imported all previous posts and comments, so the transition should be relatively seamless on that front. Although since it displays all the posts in line, I’m flogging the “Insert more” tool within an inch of its life, to keep the longer posts short on the main page. Previous posts are being edited to be shortened, and from now on I’ll default to dividing long posts that way. If you see a “Continue reading” link, you can assume it’s lengthy after the jump. 

The theme currently in use is just one of the WordPress defaults, unaltered. I will probably change or at least customize it, so the look and feel of the blog may be in flux for a little while, but I had to pick something for the launch.

New Job Joys

So as a brief note, I’ve landed a full-time visual effects gig for the next couple of months with Digiscope. I can’t say yet what I’m working on, I’m afraid, but I think I will be able to by the time the trailer hits.

This isn’t my first experience with working at an FX house. I had a brief stint at Glowgun at the end of last year working on Feast 3 (which I assume is safe for me to say since they’ve already added it to my IMDB profile). But this is the first time working on a high-budget, high-profile movie that will see a wide theatrical release. But again, I can’t say more than that right now.

I’ve got a ten-hour workday and I’ve still got a bunch of personal projects that need my attention in the off-hours, so while I’m not suspending blog activity, I’m going to shift the focus for a little while. Instead of the longer, more opinion-driven posts, it’ll probably be more re-blogging. YouTube videos, news articles, stuff like that, with maybe a very brief commentary. That’s aside from Secular Sunday posts, which will still be relatively comprehensive.

So I’ll still be posting with frequency, and possibly even more frequency than before since the posts will be brief. And stay tuned for when I can actually say what I’m doing here!