Canada, Eh
Jul. 1st, 2007 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSome amusing strategic (or possibly simply disorganized) contortions later, the Dutch people actually have sent me something resembling a deal memo, so now I have to send them something resembling a short story. They promise a fee and credit for the story itself, which are both things I’m certainly interested in; anything that gets me listed on the imdb as more than the daughter of Gary Files or one of the "stars" of Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 and a Half is always welcome. Add this to the marks as yet un-gotten-in, the attendance folders which need to be returned and the course outlines which need to be fitted up/put through for copying by—say—Tuesday, and it should be a fun coming week.
Also fun is being suddenly reminded that the purpose of Novel_in_90 was to spend all that time and wordage working on one specific project, at which point, I guess I haven’t done shit. Oh well. But I think I’ll keep to the death-march routine all the same, since it really is sort of working for me.
In true tales of consumption, meanwhile, Steve and I celebrated the end of the semester by going out for a nice sushi dinner, after which he bought a thriller I’m currently reading— On the Fifth Day, by the same guy who wrote the Mask of Atreus—and I bought Annette Lapointe’s Giller Prize-nominated book Stolen, which I’ve been looking for ever since I sort of eavesdropped on its birth through her blog. That in itself should be enough to convince me that yes, I probably could write a damn novel if I really wanted to, particularly if I was looking to pitch the result to the Canadian literary market.;) (Which is not to undercut either her or the book even a tiny bit, because from what I’ve seen thus far, it rules—just a bit of black Canadian humor, brought to you courtesy of the holiday.) I also bought Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile again, pretty much so that I could put "Just Like You Imagined", the music from the 300 trailer, on my iPod. Lame!
As for the semester itself…I’m still not happy with the way that the TV Scriptwriting course always seems to fall apart near the end, in a far more spectacular way than any other course I teach; people don’t show up, don’t bring their work in, never know when anything’s due, breeze in and out like they can’t read a clock—ask me if I’m teaching a "real class" today, even though they just missed the lecture I spent the last hour giving, etc. This one guy (a genuine idiot, mainly swanning through life on his own resemblance to 50 Cent) came in half an hour before his own class started, insisting that the class I was teaching right then was "his class", then wanted to argue about it with me! ("Buy a watch, dude," I said, and went back to what I was doing.) Or the guy who couldn’t figure out what a teaser was/why his pilot script needed one/what a bible called for/how to write a beat-sheet (all of which he suddenly had to do at the last possible minute), mainly because he’d never come in to class and simply relied on other members of his group to tell him what was necessary—a dubious tactic, especially when said group had since split into two guys who came in consistently and two guys who never came in (him and this other guy), so he wasn’t quite getting the benefit of his evil plan anymore. And it wasn’t like I was going to spend most of one of the last classes reteaching him what he’d missed, either…
But all this really pales in comparison to the case of one girl who came in two hours and fifteen minutes late for my last Short Screenplay class, which had started two hours previously. They paid me to be at school for seven hours that day, and she could have caught me at any previous point; instead, she chose to breeze in fifteen minutes into the portion of the day I was NOT being paid for, and spring her bullshit script on me then. "Do you have any idea how inconsiderate this is?" I asked; obviously not. Nor, one assumes, did she care.
Anyhoo: I looked at it anyways, because I’m an idiot, so at least she’ll graduate. And I think what I’m going to do re TV Scriptwriting is just not schedule in breaks anymore—yeah, it’ll be annoying to have to come in for one or two classes, but I think it’ll benefit them. I hope, at any rate.
And what else…gym isn’t open today, which means I may have to (horrors) avail myself of the machines et al downstairs in order to get my usual fix. I did BodyPump instead of BodyFlow yesterday, because Steve kept hitting the snooze button and I kept letting him; I held my own, and it was better than nothing, but it annoys me that I’ve somehow worked myself down from three Flow classes a week to one, and now to none. It’s an important, centering thing for me to do at least some yoga every week, so if I’m going to have to struggle to fit it in, it may be time to re-evaluate my schedule.
Movies in play right now: Silk, a Taiwanese "ghost story" that’s more philosophy crossed with science fiction than horror, but creepy all the same; Dead Silence, James Wan’s haunted dummy story, which looks incredible and makes close to zero sense; Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a slasher-culture "spoof" which mixes in a good deal of Man Bites Dog’s you-are-there mockumentary sensibility, examines its own tropes from the inside, then spins them around and bites you in the ass with them. And the guy who plays Leslie also sort of looks like an American Guy Pearce, which never hurts.;))
All right, enough noodling. I need to put my nose to the grindstone, and see what comes out.
Also fun is being suddenly reminded that the purpose of Novel_in_90 was to spend all that time and wordage working on one specific project, at which point, I guess I haven’t done shit. Oh well. But I think I’ll keep to the death-march routine all the same, since it really is sort of working for me.
In true tales of consumption, meanwhile, Steve and I celebrated the end of the semester by going out for a nice sushi dinner, after which he bought a thriller I’m currently reading— On the Fifth Day, by the same guy who wrote the Mask of Atreus—and I bought Annette Lapointe’s Giller Prize-nominated book Stolen, which I’ve been looking for ever since I sort of eavesdropped on its birth through her blog. That in itself should be enough to convince me that yes, I probably could write a damn novel if I really wanted to, particularly if I was looking to pitch the result to the Canadian literary market.;) (Which is not to undercut either her or the book even a tiny bit, because from what I’ve seen thus far, it rules—just a bit of black Canadian humor, brought to you courtesy of the holiday.) I also bought Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile again, pretty much so that I could put "Just Like You Imagined", the music from the 300 trailer, on my iPod. Lame!
As for the semester itself…I’m still not happy with the way that the TV Scriptwriting course always seems to fall apart near the end, in a far more spectacular way than any other course I teach; people don’t show up, don’t bring their work in, never know when anything’s due, breeze in and out like they can’t read a clock—ask me if I’m teaching a "real class" today, even though they just missed the lecture I spent the last hour giving, etc. This one guy (a genuine idiot, mainly swanning through life on his own resemblance to 50 Cent) came in half an hour before his own class started, insisting that the class I was teaching right then was "his class", then wanted to argue about it with me! ("Buy a watch, dude," I said, and went back to what I was doing.) Or the guy who couldn’t figure out what a teaser was/why his pilot script needed one/what a bible called for/how to write a beat-sheet (all of which he suddenly had to do at the last possible minute), mainly because he’d never come in to class and simply relied on other members of his group to tell him what was necessary—a dubious tactic, especially when said group had since split into two guys who came in consistently and two guys who never came in (him and this other guy), so he wasn’t quite getting the benefit of his evil plan anymore. And it wasn’t like I was going to spend most of one of the last classes reteaching him what he’d missed, either…
But all this really pales in comparison to the case of one girl who came in two hours and fifteen minutes late for my last Short Screenplay class, which had started two hours previously. They paid me to be at school for seven hours that day, and she could have caught me at any previous point; instead, she chose to breeze in fifteen minutes into the portion of the day I was NOT being paid for, and spring her bullshit script on me then. "Do you have any idea how inconsiderate this is?" I asked; obviously not. Nor, one assumes, did she care.
Anyhoo: I looked at it anyways, because I’m an idiot, so at least she’ll graduate. And I think what I’m going to do re TV Scriptwriting is just not schedule in breaks anymore—yeah, it’ll be annoying to have to come in for one or two classes, but I think it’ll benefit them. I hope, at any rate.
And what else…gym isn’t open today, which means I may have to (horrors) avail myself of the machines et al downstairs in order to get my usual fix. I did BodyPump instead of BodyFlow yesterday, because Steve kept hitting the snooze button and I kept letting him; I held my own, and it was better than nothing, but it annoys me that I’ve somehow worked myself down from three Flow classes a week to one, and now to none. It’s an important, centering thing for me to do at least some yoga every week, so if I’m going to have to struggle to fit it in, it may be time to re-evaluate my schedule.
Movies in play right now: Silk, a Taiwanese "ghost story" that’s more philosophy crossed with science fiction than horror, but creepy all the same; Dead Silence, James Wan’s haunted dummy story, which looks incredible and makes close to zero sense; Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a slasher-culture "spoof" which mixes in a good deal of Man Bites Dog’s you-are-there mockumentary sensibility, examines its own tropes from the inside, then spins them around and bites you in the ass with them. And the guy who plays Leslie also sort of looks like an American Guy Pearce, which never hurts.;))
All right, enough noodling. I need to put my nose to the grindstone, and see what comes out.
