Literacy huh? How 'bout it?

Yowza, today has been a real classic English day (re: grey skies and unrelenting rain). Between that and some other factors, I've ended up staying in today to try and finish the presentation treatment for my Archbrook script.

So, as to take a break from writing this durn treatment, I'm going to try my hand at a little "From the Writers Den" thing. Time for a peak in the, assuredly, exciting mind of somebody who usually gets away with calling himself a writer!

SCRIPTIN' FANCY-LIKE: Part 1
Now, I've taken a couple of courses with the CSTC, nabbed myself one of those fancy shmancy degrees (English w/Honors, minor in Film Studies) and have generally been writing fiction in one form or another since I was able to speak (at which point I apparently dictated a strange tale to my mom about numerous technicoloured peoples, God and lots of nuclear explosions. Also, China?). Though all these things have definitely contributed to whatever level of skill I have, I wouldn't think of them first.

Then we have the time-worn "You learn by doing!" maxim to consider. It is certainly true and I do place this high on my list of Sayings With Something To Them. If all you do is talk about what you'd like to write, then that is all you are - a talker. But just squeezing out shit after shit after shit won't make you a good writer either. There is more to quality, I'd like to think, then quantity!

My current theory as to the necessary "third component" is the willingness to experiment with your writing process and to challenge what you do without mercy (this is not to be confused with being really disparaging about what you do, because you have low self-esteem?). Whatever your exact method, it has to be flexible because you yourself are always subject to change - even if it is just your general mood as it fluctuates throughout the day.

For the sake of brevity and focus, I am going to look at how I wrote my last script (Tonight We Fall In Love) versus how I am writing my current script (Archbrook).

With "Tonight..." I didn't start with a big concept, theme or historical era that I wanted to explore. Simply enough, I had noticed how much the sense of humor that myself and a handful of friends shared in high school seemed to stand out and really enterain people of all shapes and sizes. I thought that if I could try to capture that in a story, then I might be able to do something others could really enjoy.

So I tried to write an engaging dialogue between two characters having an evening drink somewhere. At first my mind was flooded with questions about "What do they look like? Where are they? What are the camera movements?" etc etc. Though I do not discourage multi-tasking, trying to take on everything at once can often lead to serious writers block - particularly in your very early days.

So I shamelessly set it somewhere in real life that I regularly went to, made one character look like me and the other like my oldest friend, let whatever pictures popped into my head dictate what the camera was doing and then got the fuck on with it. But you cannot just have people make jokes back and forth, so I decided to give them a topic. How novel!

But man there are sure a lot of things for people to talk about. I tried picking something at random (Dogs, due to one going past my apartment at the time) and that bombed pretty bad. Looking back, I know what I probably should have tried to think of a topic which I could work a lot of jokes out of - particularly since, at that point, I was just trying to write a scene and not a feature length script. The problem at the time was, frankly, that I didn't give a shit about what the characters were talking about. I got fed up and may have even been heard to say 'The hell with dogs!". That's just the kind of monster I am.

After a few minutes of twiddling my thumbs and being fed up, I did what I usually do when I'm fed up with anything. I turned it around and challenged myself, my fed-uppedness, by asking "So okay, what do you care about? What are you passionate enough about to stay interested in and what these two characters might say about it?". At the time, for reasons I won't expand upon 'less I turn this website into precisely the reason I viciously mocked blogs for so many years, I was pretty uppity about (in)authenticity in people's romantic dealings - particularly as it related to expectations and reactions that clearly were common tropes from film and television...

Next thing I knew, I had twelve pages of chatter and a burning desire to expand it into a feature length script. I eventually broke those pages up into pieces which I plugged into later parts of the full story, keeping only what I wanted to use to establish the main characters and the premise so that this conversation at "the Mercury" could be the opening scene.

Looking at how much I've written and how much more I could write, I think I'm going to stop here and do another installment sometime in the near future. Plus, I am hungry. *Plus* I should get back to my treatment.

Anywho, I hope this was of some interest and/or use!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to cook some delicious dinner.

...

Yeah I guess climate change is a load of baloney to fool us into paying higher green taxes or some such shit. It's not like anything remarkable is happening as a result or nothing, no sir, hey did you hear what Tits #4 did lately?

Not all streets are paved with gold.

It's something of an adventure for me to go diving through my hard drive, seeing as how I've kept transfering all my files from drive to drive since I was about fourteen.

I was a witty, witty guy when I was turning 19. SOOO damn witty.


Gonna try and get some more night time pictures of London tomororow. Let's see what comes of that. ALSO I thought maybe I would do an entry on scriptwriting, seeing as how...

1. The whole thrust of my coming here had to do with film work.
2. I have basically been re-inventing the way I write scripts over the past two weeks.

For now, here is a reminder that not everything in England is purty. Don't worry folks, I haven't lost perspective! Sometimes England is all gorgeous monuments to mans potential for creating beauty. Other times it is a pile of rotting tires I saw outside of Blackhorse Road station.

Seeing...

....things like this remind me of better times, when America had a good leader.

Given that America has recently taken one big leap towards greater resembling Imperial Rome (I doubt I need to expand upon the disgusting event that I am referring to), I would like to use my tiny soapbox to encourage them to go whole hog.

Split in two already! Clinton could lead the more stable, civilized half into a progressive age.

Bush jr. can lead the proud, gold-plated opulent half which will rot out from the inside thanks to an unsustainable economy.

Then be overun by barbarians from the north!

Addendum: I finally wrote the last tenth of a text installment of Dirk Hardwood. I wholeheartedly invite you to enjoy Dirk Hardwood in....THE FOURTH WALL MUST NOT BE BROKEN.

Now please excuse me while I furiously try to write the proper context for me to get away with having a character say that "she broke my heart like it was the fourth wall".

New Dirk!

NEW DIRK!

Also: A very short addendum to the new Dirk Serial! (Make sure to watch this second). I thought I'd fiddle with added dialogue, now that I have my sexy belkin voice recorder.

Optimism?

I grabbed this from here, if you'd like to explore further.
------------------------
WILLIAM CALVIN
Professor, The University of Washington School of Medicine; Author, A Brain For All Seasons

The Climate Optimist

Mention global warming at a seasonal social gathering and see what happens, now that skepticism has turned into concern and sorrow. They will assume that you're a pessimist about our prospects. "Not really," I protest. That earns me a quizzical look.

"Wait a minute," she says. "If you're an optimist, why do you look so worried?"

"So you think it's easy, being an optimist?"

Many scientists look worried these days. We've had a steady diet of bad news coming from climate scientists and biologists. To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.

First, I reflected, the history of science and medicine shows that, once you mechanistically understand what's what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. I'm optimistic that we will learn how to stabilize climate.

Unfortunately the window of opportunity is closing. Fifty years have now passed since the first unequivocal scientific warnings of an insulating blanket of CO2 forming around the planet. Politicians apparently decided to wait until something big went wrong.

It has. We have already entered the period of consequences. Climate scientists have long been worried about their children's future. Now they are also worried about their own.

Our Faustian bargain over fossil fuels has come due. Dr. Faustus had 24 years of party-now, pay-later—and indeed, it's exactly 24 years since Ronald Reagan axed the U.S. budget for exploring alternative fuels. This led to doubling our use of cheap coal, the worst of the fossil fuels. They're planning, under business as usual, to re-double coal burning by 2030—even though we can now see the high cost of low price.

The devil's helpers may not have come to take us away, but killer heat waves have started, along with some major complications from global warming. We're already seeing droughts that just won't quit. Deserts keep expanding. Oceans keep acidifying. Greenland keeps melting. Dwindling resources keep triggering genocidal wars with neighbors (think Darfur). Extreme weather keeps trashing the place.

All of them will get worse before they get better.

Worse, tipping points can lead to irreversible demolition derbies. Should another big El Niño occur and last twice as long as in 1983 or 1998, the profound drought could burn down the rain forests in Southeast Asia and the Amazon—and half of all species could go extinct, just within a year or two.

Time has become so short that we must turn around the CO2 situation within a decade to avoid saddling our children with the irreversible consequences of a runaway warming. That means not waiting for a better deal on some post-Kyoto treaty. It means immediately scaling up technologies that we know will work, not waiting for something better that could take decades to debug.

This isn't optional. It is something that we simply have to do. The time for talk is past.

"I see why you're worried," she says. "But what's your optimistic scenario for dealing with this fossil fuel fiasco?"

For starters, I think it likely that the leaders of the major religious groups will soon come to see climate change as a serious failure of stewardship. And once they see our present fossil fuel use as a deeply immoral imposition on other people and unborn generations, their arguments will trump the talk-endlessly-to-buy-time business objections— just as such moral arguments did when ending slavery in the 19th century.

Second, the developed nations are fully capable of kick-starting our response to global warming with present technology—enough to achieve, within ten years, a substantial reduction in their own fossil fuel uses. How?

Wind farmers will prosper as pastures grow modern windmills to keep the cows company.

Giant parking lots, already denuded of trees, are perfect places for acres of solar paneling. Drivers will love the shaded parking spaces they create.

The Carbon Tax will replace most of those deducted from paychecks and create a big wave of retrofitting homes and businesses.

Big brightly lit grocery stores with giant parking lots will compete poorly with warehouses that deliver web and phone orders within the hour, like pizza. Smaller neighborhood grocery stores will once again do a big walk-in business and they will compete with the warehouses by offering "green bicycle" delivery.

High-speed toll gates will become the norm on commuter highways. (Yes, I know, but remember that the paycheck was just enriched by eliminating withholding for income tax.)

Speed limits will be lowered to 50 mph (80 kmh) for fuel efficiency and, as in 1973, drivers will marvel at how smoothly the traffic flows. Double taxes will apply to vehicles with worse-than-average fossil fuel consumption, reducing the number of oversized vehicles with poor streamlining. Hybrids and all-electric cars will begin to dominate new car sales.

A firm, fast schedule will be established for retiring or retrofitting existing coal plants. My bet is that adding nuclear power plants—France gets 78% of its electricity that way, New Jersey 52%—will prove safer, cheaper, and faster than fixing coal.

On the quarter-century time scale, let us assume that the new rapid transit systems will reduce car commuting by half. The transition to electric and hydrogen vehicles will shift transportation's energy demands to greener sources, including biofuels, geothermal, tidal, and wave generation.

The highly efficient binding energy extractors (BEEs, the fourth-generation nuclear power plants) will be running on the spent fuel of the earlier generations.

The low-loss DC transmission lines will allow, via cables under the Bering Strait, solar-generated electricity to flow from the bright side to the dark side of the earth.

And in this 25-year time frame, we ought to see some important new technology making a difference, not just improvements in what we already use. For example, we might encourage rapid adaptation of the whale's favorite food, the tiny phytoplankton which provide half of the oxygen we breathe as they separate the C from the CO2.

Since the shell-forming plankton sink to the ocean bottom when they die, their carbon is taken out of circulation for millions of years. Forests can burn down, releasing their stored carbon in a week, but limestone is forever. If shell-forming plankton could thrive in warmer waters with some selective breeding or a genetic tweak, their numbers might double and start taking our excess CO2 out of circulation.

But even if we invent—and debug—such things tomorrow, it can take several decades before an invention makes a dent in our urgent problem. And all this assumes no bad surprises, such as the next supersized El Niño killing off the Amazon and, once we lack all those trees, increasing the rate of warming by half.

By mid-century, let us suppose that we have begun extracting more CO2 from the atmosphere than we add.

This will only happen if the technology of the developed world has become good enough to compensate for what's still going on in the overstressed nations that are too disorganized to get their energy act together.

When CO2 levels fall enough to counter the delayed warming from past excesses, we will begin to see a reversal of droughts and violent weather— though the rise in sea level will likely continue, a reminder to future generations of our 20th-century Faustian bargain.

As Samuel Johnson said in 1777, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

We need to turn on a dime—by which I mean, close to what we saw in the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

From a standing start in late 1941, the automakers converted—in a matter of months, not years—more than 1,000 automobile plants across thirty-one states... In one year, General Motors developed, tooled, and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft... GM also produced the amphibious 'duck'—a watertight steel hull enclosing a GM six-wheel, 2.5 ton truck that was adaptable to land or water. GM's duck `was designed, tested, built, and off the line in ninety days'... Ford turned out one B-24 [a bomber] every 63 minutes....
— Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride, 2000

Now there's a source of optimism: we did it before. Indeed, GM currently needs a new purpose in life (and I'd suggest repurposing the manned space program as well). All of that talent is badly needed.

With great challenges come great opportunities and I'm an optimist about our ability to respond with innovation. Countries that innovate early will have an economic edge over the laggards.

Our present civilization is like a magnificent cathedral, back before flying buttresses were retrofitted to stabilize the walls. Civilization now needs a retrofit for stabilizing its foundations. It will be a large undertaking, not unlike those that once went into building pyramids and cathedrals. I'm optimistic that the younger generation can create a better civilization during the major makeover—provided that those currently in the leadership can stop this runaway coal train, real fast.

Climate change is a challenge to the scientists but I suspect that the political leadership has the harder task, given how difficult it is to make people aware of what must be done and get them moving in time. It's going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.