EVERYTHING ALL OF THE TIME

I seem to be writing here less and less, which runs somewhat counter to this interesting article on the ol' "Forum/chat room problem" and how it relates to Facebook vs Twitter vs Blogs. What's funny, is I want to be writing here more and more...partly out of inspiration by the quality of this blog.

Once thing that definitely has me wanting to get back on the blog-o-horse-o is that when I used this more regularly, it was pretty much all I used. For example, when I was in London and taking some neat pictures with my digital camera then I knew there were only really two possibilities for sharing - printing a copy for my photo albums and tossing it up on el bloggo for friends and family.

But of course I eventually got into Facebook and, a whiles after that, Handful has led to my reviving the Twitter account I originally put down as quickly as I picked it up and even a brief dabbling with the utterly forgettable Dailybooth. I don't much care for feeling redundant when I want to post a link-or-picture on Facebook for pals and then the same link-or-picture on Twitter for some other friends plus Handful fans and then OH YEAH DIDN'T I USED TO DO ALL THIS ON MY DANG BLOG, WHICH I LINK TO ON THE ABOUT PAGE FOR HANDFULOFMINUTES.COM?

Also? It kind of makes me feel young again to be using this sucker as if it's a brand new toy - so apparently my threshold for nostalgia is about three years. NOW. It's tempting to be all "anyways guys, get ready for the exciting retro-nipple-clamping future past of blogging to begin....soon". But that is The Shittiest Thing with blogs and so I am going to follow up this "Oh hey I like my blog again (and apparently I have made peace with that word)" stream of gobbledefuck with something akin to what I hope to be putting up here on a semi-regular basis again!

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE/WHAT IS GOING TO BE DONE

I am often struggling with the desire between what I know is sensible & rewarding (waiting until you have done something worth talking about, then talking about it) and what is very exciting & sugar-high gratifying but also potentially unwise (talking about what I'm gonna do). If I was a perfect man then I'd stick entirely to the former...but, surprisingly, it would seem that I am not a perfect man.

So here is what is going in with me in the former:

The sci-fi project for which many glamorous folk donated money to earlier in the year has had it's series outline finished, it's pilot filmed and the first cut of the editing on that pilot also finished. Wheels continue to turn and I hope to have more to report before year's end.

Handful proceeds apace and, I'm told by some, continues to improve. "Introducing Shawn MacLean" has been generally well received. I'm wondering if it'd not be a bit much to try and do something special for the fast approaching fiftieth episode, given that I already did something special for the one year anniversary episode AND I have something diabolical planned for a year end special. Better to let it pass with quiet dignity, I think...

The feature script I started in June during my writing sabbatical has been picked up again. With 36 pages of script and a 99% finished outline, I might make my goal of finishing the sucker before year's end. What's that? I didn't write about the sabbatical at the time? Well basically, my pal Joe and I were fortunate enough to be able to borrow a cottage where we could Get Away From It All to just focus on makin' things which we were having a hell of a time makin' during out regular routines in the city.

From this was birthed the slightly-less-than-halfway written feature script, spawned by almost two years of tossing notes in a bucket labelled "try to do a new take on post-apocalyptic-film"...and many, many improvised "Introducing Shawn MacLean" audio clips. It was grand and I'd love to do it again next year.

Organization of all the crap I'm juggling has gotten better since I nabbed a beautiful beast of a magnetic dry-wipe board and stuck it on my wall. I can't believe it took me this long since University to get another organizer, given that my last one repeatedly saved my bacon while I was earning my degree. This has led to my plotting out basically everything I'm doing for the rest of the year, which produced the alarming sensation that that time had already passed.

It's an annoying choice to have to make, but given that the time is going to pass anyways...I'd rather choose to feel a bit like I'm pressing the fast-forward button on my life and have accomplishments to look back on then to kind of drag my heels and stretch out my perception of time passing but then have a very disappointing life to look back on.

Now, the latter:

Going to Russia to Wade Through the Ruins of the Soviet Empire is an idea that has seized me by the sensitive bits rather firmly over the past year. I think I may even have gotten a pair of pals interested. This is something that will take a lot of prep and probably won't happen until I'm thirty, but dangit I want an adventure and I want to do more than look at crazy old ruins on the Internet. I'd like to think that if I lived twenty years after the fall of the Roman Empire that I'd want to go crawl through that, as well.

It's something I'd definitely want to film and document, but there'd be good reason to try and work out some contacts before arriving. I don't believe that Russia is filled with nothing but starving pseudo-serfs and fat, violent mobsters...but I am also hardly under the impression that I could just show up with a bunch of AV equipment, some cash and a smile.

The Handful End of the Year Special: I can't tell you anything except that the "Introducing Shawn MacLean" bits I've started tacking on the end of episodes are, in fact, building to this. Also, if all goes according to plan, it should go up on Sunday, December 27th.

But for now: I gotta go do exciting things like laundry. I shall return (promptly)!

Seeing London, Seeing Toronto

Look up.


So I followed through on my desire to take more pictures, but I guess I mostly got the desire to literally try a different way of looking at the city.
Not to be mean to Toronto, but in London I could just spin in a circle, tap the button and get an interesting picture - if I put myself in the right neighborhood. I find that isn't the case here.
But I don't want to give up on finding a little wonder where I live, just because it's more familiar.
I haven't spent as much time here as I did in London, but we're getting there. In a little over two weeks time it will have been a year since I returned from London.
To myself I have fairly frequently thought "A year ago I was doing X in London, today I'm doing Y in Toronto". No one comparison is enough to answer "Did I make the right call coming back? Did I make the right call to go in the first place?". So I keep checking and I guess I won't stop until November 14th, a year from the day I dragged my life down the Northern Line and into Gatwick airport.
Trying to answer those kinds of questions is fairly asinine in my opinion, but necessary all the same. Between having received something of a steady kicking for the past couple of months and seeing several projects and working relationships change shape recently...I'm feeling that urge to try and draw out on a piece of paper the perfect diagram of what I'd like to make happen in the months to come.
So take a picture why don't you.

1234

Shucks howdy, I sure had me some fun joining my friends Victor, Paul and Ryan in The Board Meeting yesterday. I'll share some of the pictures when I can steal'em off Victor (man I can't wait to finally get a new battery charger for my own little beast in a couple of weeks).

So yes, I didn't really finish my thoughts in the last post.

The sabbatical was a success in many ways. I distinctly remember setting myself two goals.
1) Get paid for writing.
2) Make something, anything.

I achieved both and so I guess I'm pretty satisfied! I wish I'd been able to find someone else to do the editing on Handful. As much as I enjoyed challenging myself in quite possibly my weakest area, at the end of the day I'm not trying to become an editor/tech support guy...I'm trying to become a successful writer/director! So it is without any great dismay that I've begun looking for someone to take that over and, blessedly, I got a lead yesterday that might pay off.

I can also fairly say I made pretty good use of the summer weather, there was no languishing in a beige bin while gay children busied themselves under a shining sun. I wrote a fair deal while sitting under a tree in either Kensington or Trinity-Bellwood parks and so that was another little personal goal that was met.

But man I could have done without winding up in such dire money trubbles. I guess I could have escaped them if I'd been willing to go back to temporary office work to sustain myself, but I felt that after almost two years of the shit...well it's called temporary for a reason. Even though I've ended up back in retail to rebuild my coffers, it's at least at somewhere I can feel like an adult and maybe even a little classy at times. Plus I saw a rich woman punch her husband in the gut, then face...so I guess some of my friends predictions that this would provide good writing fodder were pretty apt. My coworkers are pretty A+ too, which is always key.

But I think that the next step is to focus more on writing, get the second season of Handful made and ready to upload before the first episode is put up and to start applying for writing grants like crazy. Money from the gubbermint to live on while I scriptwrite? YES PLEASE.

Grants are a side of the industry I haven't thought about since just after I got my degree and I might have gone longer still if my pal Mark hadn't started applying for some himself. Most government grants aren't open to folk who're less than a year out of school, so that mixed with my feelings that I didn't have enough "chops" to have a chance of getting anything and led to my ignoring grants for long enough to plum forget about'em.

But it's been a couple of years and now I've got film and show ideas bursting from a fat binder and several notebooks. I've got a little bit to show, between my trailer and Handful (and that short film I've gotten paid to write, once it's made). I'd also like to think my writing has improved!

You know what, I will.

I will think that.

I've slapped together a three to four month plan and as long as I don't eventually get up to a five-year plan I think life won't feel too fleeting.

Here we go!

Well!

After some scrabbling and a very kind favor from a friend, I can finally say that my planned writing sabbatical is beginning and it begins at 5pm this Friday. I'm looking at six to eight weeks, depending on how I'm able to stretch my dollars, of getting up and scriptwriting from 9am-5pm (and probably more, but you see what I'm getting at here).

I got so exited over this that I even made an Excel spreadsheet - an EXCEL SPREADSHEET , PEOPLE -trying to plan ahead and draw up a rough schedule for the six weeks. Past the first week I can see this getting blown to hell by assorted circumstances, but as long as I'm wrapping up projects and getting the foundations laid for new ones then I'll be pretty happy. Plus I'll be able to avoid burning out, which I've seen coming at me like a monster truck for the past two weeks, from shoving what I really care about into the margins of my days while also trying to find time to relax, eat, sleep and shit*?

Aside from writing, writing, writing I am hoping to be able to get on the set of a friend's short film , shoot some episodes of a web show and learn enough CSS that I can wrestle a decent looking web page out of Wordpress. I'll doubtless write again at the end of these six weeks to say what the end result of my attempts is. Until then!

*I don't have time to pee! That is also something I look forward to in this sabbatical.
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Addendum: Holy crap this is pretty cool.

Also, here's my moment of punditry: Obama's got it and this seals the deal for me.

Leveling up...

NERD

Moving on!

So okay already, I've been in Toronto nearly 12 weeks now. I've got a place, I've got some furniture and though I don't have a steady job...I'm no longer entirely sure if I want one. This is related to my desire for something more than working jobs during the day in which I gain nothing but a paycheck, then trying to pursue my scriptwriting career in my spare time - essentially working 60 to 80 hour weeks and, even if I use spare time to relax, feeling at all times like I am doing something wrong if I am not writing.

As I'm sure anyone reading this can imagine, this has become pretty draining after two and a half years. That's how long it's been since I finished my degree and decided to forgo further education to dedicate myself to my career. I'd say I got off to a good start, making my short film and then heading to London...but along the way I think I may have fallen into a bit of a trap. This stems, essentially, from my take on the idea that you have to put up with a certain amount of - let's be poetic here - "shit" in order to earn "the good stuff". This is a pretty fair thing to believe.

But I'm now sure that I've either been putting up with the wrong kind of shit or too much shit in order to really get my mitts on a fair share of "the good stuff" - AKA progression in my struggle to make scriptwriting my full time career. At times, scriptwriting has been so squeezed into the margins of my day that it has begun to feel more like a really passionate hobby than what I really want it to be.

So, in no small part inspired by a daring move by my friend Victor in his own artistic endeavors, I've decided that it's time to either commit or quit. Luckily something has happened which I didn't think would - a third room mate that I could actually tolerate and enjoy living with has come up and shall be moving in at the start of the next month. This will help get my monthly living expenses down to a level which I believe most chartered accountants would define as total bullshit.

Thus!

I am going to try and get myself in the position to work a permanent job for just three days a week and use the other two working days to scriptwrite and hustle. To do that starting fresh instead of hurriedly scribbling during lunch breaks and after long days of punishing mundanity. I will then even be able to, heaven forbid, take a day on the weekend to do nothing but recharge my batteries and not feel like I have fallen victim to the bullshit that is an "opportunity cost".

Until that permanent part-time role becomes mine, I plan to alternate between temping and "not working". The contract I'm on right now goes for another two weeks (I think, maybe a third). After it ends, I'm taking one solid week off to experiment and see if my work ethic can be honed to (or is already at) a sharp enough point to really knuckle down to the grindstone and not look this gift horse in the metaphor until I can come up with a better metaphor for "to see if I'll actually spend the day writing or just wank around".

So er uh what's up with that Oliver guy?

Kensington Rooftops

I live!

So yes, the last week and especially the last few days have been total chaos from waking up in the morning until going to bed in the morning. But now I'm on the other side of things, life is much improved. I have a free chair with a desk (not free) to work at. My room, now having my old bedside table and a new bookcase, now looks like My Room and not just some doss. I've pulled another three day temp job whose earnings have pulled me out of The Danger Zone and had a very promising interview - the kind that feels more like a friendly conversation - for a magnificent job which lay not even twenty minutes from my place.

Sleep continues to be an elusive creature, but la dee dah. Toronto is generally being pretty good to me so far and I've been able to get set up here a lot quicker than in London. For that, I'm really quite grateful.

Meanwhile, if you want to read something beautiful then you could do a lot worse than the recently uploaded, serialized tale that Daniel Clowes did for The New Yorker.

Tarahhhhna

Well, post #400 and I'm in Toronto now. Not where I expected to be by now, but then I rarely am.

I'll be pretty crappy for emails etc in the next two or three days as I figure out the neighborhood and attend to all sorts of tasks, but then "regular service" should resume.

One thing I will note about Toronto is that it seems to have a very similar relation to the rest of the country as London does to England - namely in the perceptions of those looking in and those looking out.

Looking in: It is dirty, crowded, crime-ridden and full of people with their head's up their arses. Some nice things to look at, though.

Looking out: The world more or less ends at city limits. Everything you could ever want is here, why live anywhere else? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to book a vacation for somewhere with different weather, people.

These are, of course, sweeping generalizations but still worth noticing I think. I'm heading into towne tomorrow (the friend of the family with whom I'm temporarily staying is a little ways out from what most folk think of when they think of Toronto) and will most likely take a picture or two. I realize that this city is far less exotic to most of you, but I just see that as a challenge to find the really interesting bits.
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ALSO: This is just my damn favorite Scarygoround in some time, mostly for the first and last panels.

Tick tock, tick tock: Halfway through the probationary period.

"Little Ben", not a product of Island Dwarfism, is to be found near Victoria Station.

So time has flown, as it will, and I'm now halfway through the two year probationary period I've placed London on. Well, it won't technically be the one year anniversary of my arriving in London until Monday night but I'll be out that evening and blah blah seize the moment when you can.After a painfully sore foot keeping me in pseudo-house arrest last weekend, I was damned if I was going to stay around Islington today. With no specific game plan in mind, I grabbed a bus down to The City and went on a ramble which helped connect a lot of the dots which I've been highlighting here. I can honestly say that I can now give directions with confidence when it comes to The City and that I don't really need my London A-Z for that area anymore. If I had three hours and felt like wearing my feet into stumps, I could actually navigate from my doorstep to the Thames. My journey today started with a rough plan which placed me at that 177 year old cane and umbrella store I found near the British Museum.

After ogling some decently priced, superior umbrellas for the discerning gentleman (one of which I may come back and buy to replace the stupid, cheap thing I bought from a pharmacy) I think I was just about to inquire about the sword canes when I looked out the window. The fall sun hit the leaves and the architecture just right enough to produce that weird sensation which I've fallen prey to a few times before (at least one of which I've mentioned here). My eyes got a little wider, my imagination starts firing on all cylinders and any plan I may have had gets wiped out with a ruthless efficiency. One barely trembling foot steps in front of the other and off I go, a slight running of excess saliva along my lower lip. After my experience in Soho the other night, I must say I'm pleased this can still happen.
Retracing my steps, I know I went to Soho Square, enjoyed the peace it offers and wrote a short while before heading down Charing Cross road and Leicester Square. From there I found myself at St. Martins just before Trafalgar square - where I more took pictures of features which I've neglected in the past. I'll post most of them later in the week, for now I'll stick to the ones which I feel are most relevant today.So yes, do I want to come back? Sometimes! In fact, it wasn't more than a week ago I was seriously looking at coming over for the holidays...and staying. But while I was going around today, after the initial tourist-ettes passed, I guess all the thoughts I've been turning over for weeks now have finally coalesced into something better resembling a decision. I'm not coming back for good, this December. I don't yet know if I want to stay for good, but I know I want to stay longer. Fifteen months just isn't enough. Not when there's so much to do - I've just signed up for the ICA and by gum that place alone has enough to keep me fascinated. Plus the very physical reaction that sights like the southern promenade of St. James Park can trigger in me is something I'm not ready to say goodbye to yet.Addendum: Oh man oh geez I wish I had had some million dollar camera which could have captured the way I saw this last sight. The picture just doesn't do it justice, so I've included the others I took in the hopes that maybe they'll help. I'm not being hyperbolic for effect here, something really moved me about this.
It not only touched upon my appreciation for beauty but trigged some kind of nexus point between a dense multitude of treasured memories from as many moments and places in my life. If I'd been standing in a regular lane I'm not sure how long I would have ignored the cars behind me, but probably long enough for someone to get out of the car to move me.Anyways, I better sign off now before I start prattling on like some coke head squirrel going on about his favorite car.