Blog or Treat!

The answer, of course, is both.

Just to let everyone know what my Hallowe'en's been like, today I gave a somewhat successful argument on why cannibalism is a good thing. I should assure all my readers that this was for an assignment and does NOT represent my personal views on the subject. If it turns out I am arrested for inspiring cannibalism in one or more members of my audience, know that I will feel very bad about because I'll be arrested, but I'll also know I totally nailed that assignment!

Worked a little bit with Adobe InDesign too. Neat little program. I might like to pick up a copy if I get to know it a bit better, I don't know. It costs 180 sterling if I buy it through the school, so I better be damn sure I want it before I consider buying the thing.

Aside from that, not much. I'm not going to any costume (or "fancy dress" as the British say) parties as of yet but I do have a kickass Neo all ready in the event. Pictures will follow as soon as I get around to putting it on and breaking the camera out. I've not taken any pictures in a long while, I should probably break that run soon.

'tis no man, nay, this be a blog

My ass has been sitting on cold concrete in a place that smells of either poo or industrial adhesive for over an hour, so I'll be brief.

Today good. Me do many things that make me good. Me write story for bloc-online. Maybe not good, need work, but me write. Me also read. Like Guardian and Observer newspapers. Me just about perfect italian sausage recipe. Dan eats lots. Daughter of Marsha likes to bounce, it would seem. She cute, me allow.

Me sleep now.

Marooned for all eternity... blogged alive

KHHHHAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I tried to take it easy. Did a bit of shopping, checked the bank (still no money), came back and did a touch of editing. A knock at the door. A mysterious man from BT, only no one said they were coming, so I'm a bit suspicious. He says he's here to set up our internet. He's the bestest guy ever. An hour later the guy says he can't because the landlord never gave him the access codes. So here I sit in our kitchen siphoning someone else's unsecured broadband, the dream remaining a dream. So... close....

I actually didn't do as much as I wanted yesterday because Duncan just had to get Family Guy: the Game. He went out for a freeview box, by the way, never happened. ANYWAY, he brought that home and we were just about useless for the rest of the day. The game's crap, total "fan-wank" as Duncan put it, but hey, we're fans of Family Guy. I didn't get up today until 12, it's been years since I've done that! I need to get a bunch of writing done today so I can hang with coursemates tonight. It's probably going to be the only socializing I dod this weekend, so I gotta make it count.

I blogged my pants

Well, there's no denying it. I'm in England. The past two days it's been a very constant drizzly blah outside. Just from walking around my pants have gotten wet to the point that they're not wearable. I swear, it's the rain. Shout out to Libby Holmes back at Butler U, that umbrella you gave me doesn't look like much but is a wonder!

Yesterday was NOT a good day - it wasn't bad really, but it wasn't good either. For one thing, I rang up about $15K on my credit card because my student loans are THAT fucked up (Grandma, I'm sorry, I know the word 'Fuck' and use it occassionally), my essay was torn into in lectures, and I was homesick. I like lectures, they're informative and fun, I just really wasn't in the mood.

Today was better. Just a morning of lecture which was all about feature writing, quick lunch and a lot of errands. I set up my rent so that it'll take it directly from the bank, I picked up some shoe-cleaning supplies which I really need now (thanks, weather...), and some good for and ales. they're having a sale at Threshers (liquor store) where you can get any four independent ales for 5 pounds. They cost 1.75 normally, so heck yeah! Add that to the steak dinner I made and I'm sitting pretty. The bad news is that I got myself all worked up to finish up the Indiana Jones game with my writing group over Skype tonight, and only now noticed that the call went out two days ago. Granted, I would have been up until 4am tonight, but I was ready dammit!!

No closer to getting our own internet account, but the plumbeer should be coming by tomorrow to make our sinks work. My sink won't shut off once it gets started without a crescent wrench, and a few report green water out of theirs. It's an issue.

Captain's Blog:

Been a while, sorry I haven't posted!

It's been a wild past few days. Friday was rough, I had to deal with the bank telling me it could take six weeks to cash my student loan checks, DHL for trying to charge 200 pounds in VAT on my laptop, and the landlord for thinking we'd all magically know what his plans were with the phone line. Not a good time. I'm getting through it, hopefully it'll all be resolved soon, but it was not fun. I needed to relax. I needed beer. Good thing the beer festival started that night!

Admission is buying your own pint glass, then you buy cheap pints or half pints with a selection of about 130 ales, ciders, and perries (like cider only with pears). I did not get wasted drunk, but I did get a very nice buzz out of it all. This was also a big opportunity to mingle - most of the people there were over 40, but enough were in my age range to talk to.

Saturday I was all over the place. There was an oyster festival in the town event square, so I had to try my first oyster. Not my new favorite food, but not as bad as I feared either. If a plate of these were put in front of me, I'd eat 'em. I also bought a couple pints of strawberries (much lighter in flavor to good ol' American berries, but they work), a block of strong cheddar, a bag of coffee, and a much-needed trash bin for our house. I came home and wrote a piece for class that was supposed to be first-person distinctive voice; I chose to write in the voice of the immigration officer who kept me for four hours. Turns out the dude has some issues. Oddly enough, I was pretty tired after all that. I was all ready to turn in a bit early, but no, the beer festival called yet again. This time I hung out almost exclusively with a few people from my course, one of which was from last year so we pumped her for gossip. We tried our hand at tabletop shuffleboard, turns out we suck at it. We also chatted it up with some of the bar staff for a while - Joe got a great idea for an article, I was this close to getting a 4-pint beer jug gratis, and we ended up getting locked in after closing time. That was just plain awesome, we got to drink some of what was left on the house. A few other people there at the time were just gone, seriously wasted, they were drinking from the dreg bucket. They made me drink from the dreg bucket. I drank from the dreg bucket. Thank God I'm still alive.

Today's been very quiet, no complaints there. Did laundry, edited my pieces for this week, played some games, good times. It's cold and rainy here. That's Cornwall for ya.

These keys were made for bloggin'

The story of me, Duncan, and the dark dark forest can be found in the comments section on the last post. I also edited the links on the right of the page to something actually relevant to... well, anything, really.

I've got a picture now on my profile. It's not a picture of me, I need a fresh one for that. I'm still working on resizing my pics of the area for web viewing. Unless you want pictures twice as big as your monitor that don't load? Nah, who'd want that?

Fist Full’a Blog

That will never get old, right up until the minute it gets old.

One thing I’ve learned is that British shops are very domesticly minded when it comes to sausage. They have various brands of breakfast sausages and Cumberland sausages, but if you ask for any other kind you get blank stares, as if to say “go to that country if you like their sausage so much”. I’m a big fan of Italian food, so not having ready-to-heat Italian sausage is new and distressing to me. Tonight I surfed around and found a few recipes for making your own, shopped for the ingredients, then made substitution guesses when no one had them. For the curious:

-1lb ground pork
-good splash of water (they also suggest wine)
-1-2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
-1 tbsp parsley
-1 tbsp cumin (They ask for fennel seed, which I couldn’t find. Apparently it’s in the same family as cumin.)
-1/2 tsp salt
-1/2 tsp ground pepper
-dash of crushed red pepper

It fried up dry, as raw meat is supposed to have a 3:1 meat-to-fat ratio for sausage, but for a first try I say not bad. The flatmates liked it

We got introduced to http://www.bloc-online.com/ today, the website we pro writing students are going to run this year. I’d be comfortably excited about this since it means I’ll have to pick up web design basics now and it’s something I can link to, but there’s a catch. The site was nominated for a Guardian Media Award, which means the nation will be looking at it. This means we can’t fuck up too badly. PRESSURE!

I beat Halo on Normal yesterday. I tried the first few levels on Heroic and guess what? They’re hard. Can you tell I’m stretching for subject matter right now? The end of the day would be my first guess for writing a blog entry, but my brain is fried. If this is a regular thing, I may have to wait until the morning after to write stuff, and by then I forget all the juicy bits.

There’s a blogging phenomenon I’ve known about for a while, but that doesn’t help me when I experience first hand. Blogs like this are supposed to be personal stories. They’re what you think at the time you write them. It’s online, though, so people ARE going to read it. A line forms: on one side is the safety of banal reports on what you did today, nothing that could possibly offend anyone reading it. On the other side of the line are the sordid, gritty bits that involve the people you see, talk, and work with on a daily basis. Will they be offended if you talk about them in your blog, or will they be offended if you don’t? Can you write something in your blog your real life friends don’t know about? What about work? We’ve all heard stories about people that’ve written about their jobs and were subsequently fired, where’s the line there? I’m finding my own answers to these kinds of questions as I move along, and it feels a lot like walking a tightrope. Only thing I can guess is that one has to have a really firm idea what they want their blog to do and stick to it.

To test this, I’m going to try something. This weekend me and Duncan had an arduous, slightly embarrassing adventure. I know he reads this blog and would just as soon not see my account on here, and since I live with him I should consider his opinion. I also know it’s a funny story and other people that read this blog would enjoy it. So, I’ll compromise. For Duncan’s sake, I won’t write the story in the blog. If you’re intrigued by the story, let me know on the comments page and I’ll write about it in there. Is this an actual experiment in hypertext psychology or an excuse to get more comments? Only history can tell.

Tomorrow I have to read an essay I wrote on why higher education should only be for the rich. I’ll be taking a very long hot shower tomorrow evening.

I sense much blog in you, young Jedi

So today half of my class went to a Business Writing Seminar right in the middle of town. Not me. WHY????? you ask? It was my intention to make my way to Penzance and attend a workshop on pitches for stories. Would have been right up my alley, too, if it weren't for the fact that I am an idiot child when it comes to public transit systems. Blame my inferior American upbringing, I guess. Still, I got a lot done here.

I finally got my federal loans today, so the first thing I did was take 'em down to the bank, where they told me they'd have to go to the central branch because they were in dollars and too much money, so I might have it in my account next week. I've never been told that me having too much money was an inconvenience before. I should milk it, but how?

I got myself a cheap slice of pizza, and when I say cheap I mean someone hit a tomato, wiped the mess up with a piece of bread, threw some cheese on it and called it pizza. It didn't matter, I was hungry. Halfway threw I realized this did nothing to satisfy my pizza craving, so it was just as well when a huge fucking seagull flew right up behind me and snatched the thing right out of my goddamn hand. Jeebus, it was right oout of a Stephen King novel (still haven't started On Writing by the way). I noticed as it was flying off that it had a lot of competition for the pizza, little shit deserves the heat. "No worries" I tell myself, "I'll try that Great Shakes place and all will be well."

Wrong. They do a lot of things right in Britain. Tea, ladies, fish, they do okay. They should just leave milkshakes alone, though. It's a shame, too. I watched as he put in real fruit and enough ice cream to build an igloo, but what I got was hardly satisfying.

Still, something new experienced. Name of the game here. Pretty quiet for the rest of the day. Not much planned for the weekend, I'll probably get ahead on my work placement stuff. (For the uninitiated, that's code for playing Halo.)

Here I sit, bloggin' hearted...

The titles of these posts are something I intend to have a lot of fun with, regardless of the fun other people might have with them.

The second day of the Blake Snyder workshop was incredible. He hands out this sheet of templates for leading characters, 'heroes' that Hollywood is using and buying by the truckload and that the consumer is, in turn, also buying. There are two women in the workshop who pullthe emergency stop on the seminar and hold it for half an hour just complaining that there aren't many women on the sheet. Now, I have no problem with strong women, truth is I prefer them, and I'd love to see more, but the reality is there aren't many in movies these days. They take their displeasure of this out on Blake, all the while saying "No, I'm not attacking you..." but at the same time telling him "it's your duty to include these characters". I swear, direct quote, I nearly died.

He also went through the scripts and pitches of people from the workshop and ran them through his pattern, and they seemed like genuinely good ideas. One's a movie about a man that tries to commit suicide only to find himself a daffodil picker, another about a delinquent young man that find a better life through Morris dancing. I swear about this last one, in five years you'll be hearing about a movie called either "Clogging In" or "With Bells On", and you'll hear yourself saying "I want to see that". It'll be a surreal experience when it happens to you, I still don't think I've recovered. I brought mine in, but thanks to the PC-Pronoun Council we couldn't fit it into the class.

A few things you should probably know: Blake Snyder IS a three-year-old child in terms of energy; he never stops going, he never stops smiling, he is a dynamo. Up until this moment, I was wondering in the back of my mind if this was nervous energy, and the guy was so jittery getting up in front of us that he might crumble at the first instance of pressure. Dude's response to the criticism? "Name one." They couldn't. The dude's a rock.

We watched some clips of a few blockbusters to see in action what he'd been talking about the past two days, and it's all there. There are plenty of big movies made that don't follow this structure, but they're movies that also just don't work.

Afterwards, those of us from Falmouth held him back half an hour for a mini-interview, and then he went through the story I'd brought in but couldn't do in the workshop! One-on-one meeting with an established film writer? Yeah, that was worth getting hosed in the workshop. I learned about a lot of problems with my story just in presenting the beats to him, and he brought up a few other points I need to work on. I may not use them all, keep in mind that he wrote "Blank Check", so there are differences in our tastes, but he told me I had a really good idea and hoped I would keep in touch.

Can you f&*&ing believe that?!?!?!?!

Also in this workshop, apparently Cornwall has some kind of magic aura to it. When you live here for any significant length of time, it does something to you. That's kind of what I left home for, but hearing that the location is some kind of mystical nexus of "Bam! you've changed" is kinda intimidating. I'll be sure to let everyone know if it's true or not.

I'm here in the student bar on campus, typing away in my "quiet" little corner waiting for my tutorial session to come up. I'm just about dead last. I'm penultimate. I have an hour to wait, and I've been waiting for nearly two. Thank god for laptops. This may become my A-#1 day to post. I should be working, but screw that. I'm in grad school, I should get me a beer.

Blake Snyder Workshop

Today was Day 1 of the two day Script workshop by Blake Snyder. It went from 9-5 and was some of the most intense stuff I've ever experienced. I'll probably write up a full report after Day 2 when I get a chance but I'll say this: I'm buying a copy of his screenwriting book, and I'll bet everyone I know who likes writing stories could benefit greatly from it.

Still so much to do before I sleep...

Great Night Tonight

So all day today we have towork with some actors the school shipped in to act out the scripts we wrote yesterday (adapted from The Man from the South). They were good people, very nice, knew their stuff, great actors on the fly, and gave feedback. Ours was the last group, so we had a few hours before we could really work with them. We went back to my place (it's very nice, apparently, by student standards) and blocked out the scene mostly, then broke for a couple of hours because we could. I cleaned the kitchen and played a level of Halo. I love Halo. Then we met back at the school - actually, I went back to the school, was told someone had taken the cleaver so I had to run back home to get a knife, only to return and find TWO cleavers on the set, making me breathless and displeased - to shoot our scene. Being the last group and having to give the actors a chance to go to the refectory before acting meant we were crunched for time. I was director, which only happened because I'd been on a set before, so I was barking orders, making calls that maybe shouldn't have been mine to make, and basically being the loudest American I could be. We got done on time and afterwards the actors seemed very pleased with the way it went, the other people in our group seemed pleased, the overall director seemed very eager to leave, so I think it went well. The actors, one other person in my group named Joe, and myself went to the student bar for a drink after, and we just hung out for a bit. It was a very short bit as they were closing the bar very early that night because they're jerks. So I'm sitting with a troupe of four actors, ages 30-60, another Pro Writing student, sipping alcohol and listening to violent dirty stories, and y'know what? I made the right choice. I'm glad I'm here.

Tonight's Porn Night at some bar. I'm not entirely sure what that entails, but popular belief at the house is that you are almost guaranteed to leave with a date for the evening. Works great on paper, but in practice???? Not tonight, I need sleep more than anything.

So apparently this counts for credit

It turns out that at least one blog is "highly recommended" by the Pro Writing profs. One for reading, that is reflecting on the reading assignments and their impact on my writing, and another for writing, how much and what it felt like. I guess.

Yep, Day 1 of the class is under my belt. IN. TENSE. This week is all about us filming a shortmovie based on Roaul Dahl's short story "The Man from the South." I have plenty of short film experience, especially when it comes to the quick and the cheap (thank you Garrett, Jeff, and Ray, in no order, for all your help over the years), so to me this is a walk in the park. Everyone else in the class is freaked. Wankers.

Most of the profs are very easy going. One speaks with no accent, so I'm thinking American, but is the hardass of the group. He wanted us to write three pages for next week on the pros and cons of prenups. Also we have to write 750-800 words on stains, but that's for another, easier-going prof.

This is going to be a hard year, but I can tell I'm going to get so much out of it it's criminal. Now if I can just find me a bonny English lass, I'll be in great shape, but I suppose I should just be thankful for what I've got.

Still Haven't died

Just checking in right now, not much new to report. I'm waiting until I have internet at the house to do a real update, which keeps seeming farther and farther away. I have a cell phone now, bank account is imminent, even the student loans are just about done. The scholarship essay is sent in, classes start tomorrow, all is pretty much well. Not on for too much longer, so see ya!