![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Greed is Good-looking
Aug. 21st, 2005 09:29 pmStill working on my Canadian Film History book pitch. I’m almost through the actual pitch itself, at which point I need to append a prospective chapter list, repackage it with a nice cover letter, and send it off. Needless to say (though I’m saying it anyhow), I really do hope this comes to something; it’d really rock to be able to A) do this for B) a company that might actually publish it and C) even pay me for the opportunity to finally get to disseminate my annoying views on the subject in a way which might eventually reach classrooms other than my own.
Shark-baby Cal is sprouting new teeth right and left, which keeps him feverish and more-than-slightly frantic. He throws himself headlong around the apartment, doing his dinosaur roar no matter what the input: Good, bad, indifferent. This makes it hard to concentrate on much besides laundry, dishes, all the usual. Sometimes I think we must have the best-looking dishes in the Northerm Hemisphere.
Nevertheless, I do try to make time to do a few things each day that take my mind off Cal, the knobs at school, or the size of my stomach (which is shrinking, but not fast enough for my personal tastes). Over Thursday and Friday, I read Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler, who…believe it or not…is a worse writer than Dan Brown. OTOH, he’s also sold an equally obscene amount of books, so maybe there’s some equation here that I’m just failing to make. But any guy who has the balls to write a one-sentence paragraph like "Truculent jerk, Pitt thought" really does need to be dropped from a great height, head-first, sometime very soon.
On Saturday, meanwhile, even though we’d just figured out that we are ONCE MORE broke until a week from this coming Wednesday, Steve bought me the complete Profit on DVD—because Jesus, why not? They only made it to eight episodes, so HMV is selling it for thirty bucks. (In the accompanying retrospective documentary, Greed Kills, David Greenwalt makes the very funny observation that he and co-creator John McNamara came off this otherwise total failure with their careers in TV pretty much assured: "Everyone would be like: ‘Hey, get me those guys who did Profit." Then be like, to us: ‘But for Christ’s sakes, just don’t do more Profit!’")
And oh, but I have missed my dead ambisexual psychopathic show—a headlong black farce about corporate bad behavior with a weird moral core shifting around somewhere south of where its heart should have been, populated solely by people with gorgeously eccentric looks and 5:00 A.M.-whiskey-binge voices, driven by an admixture of loopy Og Mandino Zen koans and awful proto-VR computer graphics. Not to mention it being certainly the only network series ever headlined by a guy who was raised in a cardboard box eating scraps of raw meat with only TV for company, whose only true relationship was with the trampy trailer trash stepmom who deflowered him, probably thinking all the while: "Well, somebody was screwin’ on ME by the time I was thirteen…an’ God knows, by that standard, I’m bein’ a hell of a lot nicer to li’l Jimmy here than I could’a been!"
I guess all you Angel-heads out there could ease yourselves into it by seeing the demented inner mechanics of Gracen & Gracen ("The Family Company!"), whose box was Jim "Profit" Stokowski’s entire world until the age of eleven or so, as Greenwalt’s trial run at what would eventually become Wolfram & Hartt (barring actual deals with the Devil, and such). Other draws? Well, there must be a few other people who find Adrian Pasdar as loin-burning as myself, even when he doesn’t come with a cornpunk vampire girl hanging off his neck. Or maybe you could just see it the way McNamara did, as the American equivilant of House of Cards…Richard III in suits, with top-secret heart-attack-inducing drugs instead of a butt of Malmsey. One way or the other, thirty bucks and three hours well-spent thus far.
On a more professional note, I haven’t talked directly about my "real" writing for a hell of a long time now. So to keep those poor fools who friend me because of that amused, here’s what I’m working on right now—no, not the novel(s), though if I have my druthers, I’ll be getting back into them too. But short stories are supposedly easier, or at least more familiar, and that urge I’ve been getting to finish my fragments is becoming immediate enough to distract, like a fracture’s healing itch. The collection, were it ever to be put together, would be called Dark is Better. At the moment, the roster reads:
"Bright White Light": 701 words already done
"Mors Certans": 2,544
"Host": 938
"History’s Crust": 4,805
"Novocaine Kiss": 5,011
"The Mercy Seat": 3,113
"The Jacaranda Smile": 2,083
"The Cruel Mother": 981
"Trouble Again": 2,751
"Drone": 8,642
"Your Name Is Darkness": 394
"Trapweed": 635
"Dust-Bowl": 214
"Dead Voices on Air": 628
"Yaga": 4,915
I suppose "Drone" would be a pretty good place to start, given the word-count…so there we go. After the CFH pitch, it’s straight on into the world of mating were-dragons, with a side-order of underground poisonous snake-breeding. Boo-yah!
Shark-baby Cal is sprouting new teeth right and left, which keeps him feverish and more-than-slightly frantic. He throws himself headlong around the apartment, doing his dinosaur roar no matter what the input: Good, bad, indifferent. This makes it hard to concentrate on much besides laundry, dishes, all the usual. Sometimes I think we must have the best-looking dishes in the Northerm Hemisphere.
Nevertheless, I do try to make time to do a few things each day that take my mind off Cal, the knobs at school, or the size of my stomach (which is shrinking, but not fast enough for my personal tastes). Over Thursday and Friday, I read Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler, who…believe it or not…is a worse writer than Dan Brown. OTOH, he’s also sold an equally obscene amount of books, so maybe there’s some equation here that I’m just failing to make. But any guy who has the balls to write a one-sentence paragraph like "Truculent jerk, Pitt thought" really does need to be dropped from a great height, head-first, sometime very soon.
On Saturday, meanwhile, even though we’d just figured out that we are ONCE MORE broke until a week from this coming Wednesday, Steve bought me the complete Profit on DVD—because Jesus, why not? They only made it to eight episodes, so HMV is selling it for thirty bucks. (In the accompanying retrospective documentary, Greed Kills, David Greenwalt makes the very funny observation that he and co-creator John McNamara came off this otherwise total failure with their careers in TV pretty much assured: "Everyone would be like: ‘Hey, get me those guys who did Profit." Then be like, to us: ‘But for Christ’s sakes, just don’t do more Profit!’")
And oh, but I have missed my dead ambisexual psychopathic show—a headlong black farce about corporate bad behavior with a weird moral core shifting around somewhere south of where its heart should have been, populated solely by people with gorgeously eccentric looks and 5:00 A.M.-whiskey-binge voices, driven by an admixture of loopy Og Mandino Zen koans and awful proto-VR computer graphics. Not to mention it being certainly the only network series ever headlined by a guy who was raised in a cardboard box eating scraps of raw meat with only TV for company, whose only true relationship was with the trampy trailer trash stepmom who deflowered him, probably thinking all the while: "Well, somebody was screwin’ on ME by the time I was thirteen…an’ God knows, by that standard, I’m bein’ a hell of a lot nicer to li’l Jimmy here than I could’a been!"
I guess all you Angel-heads out there could ease yourselves into it by seeing the demented inner mechanics of Gracen & Gracen ("The Family Company!"), whose box was Jim "Profit" Stokowski’s entire world until the age of eleven or so, as Greenwalt’s trial run at what would eventually become Wolfram & Hartt (barring actual deals with the Devil, and such). Other draws? Well, there must be a few other people who find Adrian Pasdar as loin-burning as myself, even when he doesn’t come with a cornpunk vampire girl hanging off his neck. Or maybe you could just see it the way McNamara did, as the American equivilant of House of Cards…Richard III in suits, with top-secret heart-attack-inducing drugs instead of a butt of Malmsey. One way or the other, thirty bucks and three hours well-spent thus far.
On a more professional note, I haven’t talked directly about my "real" writing for a hell of a long time now. So to keep those poor fools who friend me because of that amused, here’s what I’m working on right now—no, not the novel(s), though if I have my druthers, I’ll be getting back into them too. But short stories are supposedly easier, or at least more familiar, and that urge I’ve been getting to finish my fragments is becoming immediate enough to distract, like a fracture’s healing itch. The collection, were it ever to be put together, would be called Dark is Better. At the moment, the roster reads:
"Bright White Light": 701 words already done
"Mors Certans": 2,544
"Host": 938
"History’s Crust": 4,805
"Novocaine Kiss": 5,011
"The Mercy Seat": 3,113
"The Jacaranda Smile": 2,083
"The Cruel Mother": 981
"Trouble Again": 2,751
"Drone": 8,642
"Your Name Is Darkness": 394
"Trapweed": 635
"Dust-Bowl": 214
"Dead Voices on Air": 628
"Yaga": 4,915
I suppose "Drone" would be a pretty good place to start, given the word-count…so there we go. After the CFH pitch, it’s straight on into the world of mating were-dragons, with a side-order of underground poisonous snake-breeding. Boo-yah!
