It’s a new year! I hope everyone is looking forward to good things. I’m looking forward to working on a number of projects of my own.
Today I had the pleasure of hearing my friend Blake Snyder speak for the Alameda Writers Group. Blake is always an engaging speaker, so I knew that it would be good on just that level. But as I sat listening to him cover familiar (to me) ground, I discovered certain turns of phrases he was using at the moment triggering ideas that would help me solve problems with a couple of different story ideas. What a pleasure it is to find answers that way. So that’s my recommendation that you never assume that you “know” everything, even if you’ve read a text before. It is why I do keep Blake’s Save the Cat! at hand.
Here on the website, there are some updates.
More reviews! The music score for Memoirs of a Geisha, the first season of Mission: Impossible, a very useful book on screenplay format, The Hollywood Standard, and a delightful musical confection, Grunt.
Also new on the site, is another poem, “Villanelle”. The poem was written in response to a discussion about poetry and spontaneity I had with a pen pal. My correspondent was claiming that poetry absolutely had to be spontaneous, and hence by necessity non-formal. My contention was that all poetry is crafted as art, and therefore unlikely to be the spontaneous, “off the cuff” writing he advocated. “Villanelle” was written to address this. Surprisingly, considering that the villanelle form is rather carefully structure, my correspondent said that the poem “was spontaneous”. I guess it is all in the feeling that the reader has in response to the reading of a poem, and not in the labor the writer applied to it.
From the Works page, you will also find a link to a spec television script (in a PDF file) I wrote about three years ago. The introductory page provides you with more information on that script and how it came into being.
