Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
I love Buster even when he decants 2 inch chunks of yard debris into my bed. Sigh. This was his kitten video this am.
Writing progress continues in the teeth of everything & all of it. Seeing Katie and Alex today. Walking down to New West to see my friend.
Forward motion again. Job interview this morning.
Sorry it seems I’m running backwards, but the interview with Michel and Farah was a non-starter of a scene even though I really like it and may cannibalize it later.
Spent the day yesterday colouring, writing a very small amount, eating cookies and watching tv. And getting a job interview, for Wednesday. Best prospect since Patricia lined me up for a job interview.
Saw Deadpool again yesterday with Mike, and he cooked me one of the best steaks I’ve ever had for supper. I prepped veggies, it was all very convivial and relaxed.
Writing continues.
Although the count doesn’t look like it, I wrote 1100 words yesterday, did two loads of laundry, took the bus down to the Quay to see little Alex and Katie. Katie left me alone with him for a while for a bathroom break. Without speech he demanded a closer inspection of the train then parked on the track. We went to inspect it, and he took my hand with no demur. When we got there I said, “When the train starts moving again it’s going to make a lot of noise which you may not enjoy.” He stuck his little hand up like a flag and demanded to recross the street, where it occurred to him that his mother had once again abandoned him to strangers and he grizzled and grizzled until she came back.
We walked to the kids’ submarine and back and then I did a quick SCHNACKS run to the Safeway at New West Station.
The arthritis flare in my left index finger joint is preventing me from practicing mandolin for longer than about 10 minutes at a time, which I’m really hating.
Writing a little, thinking a lot. Bathing suit is very comfortable in use. Only 30K left to go, I suspect I’m gonna go long.
May he perish in obscurity and poverty, far far from here. That’s all I’m going to say about Jian Ghomeshi.
I got $40 off today’s Spud delivery. It will make it extra specially yummy.
Saw Force Awakens, finally, and loved it. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again, and if it happens again now, you will be drawn up in it.
I got a new bathing suit yesterday. I now feel like I can go back out in public; the green one made me look like a mistake in post processing and the blue one was so sheer it was quite lewd.
Since I have nothing else polite to say, I’ll stop.
Still not grinding quite as hard as I need to finish this book, but oh well.
I never go swimming with Paul any more but I haven’t told him that the real reason is because my fave bathing suit is too small and the bathing suit that fits me has become too sheer to wear in public. So today I’m off to get a bathing suit.
Out yesterday for a walk, got drenched, experienced thunder and graupel. Writing continues.
Yet Moar Takeaways from VWF2016.
Passion for a project is the storyteller’s greatest gift. Assemble a team that feels the same way you do about it. It’s not about the meal ticket, that has nothing to do with what you deserve for how hard you’ve worked. It’s about what you learn and who you work with on the way to “Project complete, Project launched” which immediately turns into “Quoi de neuf?” “Et aprs?” Other people sigh and dream. YOU MAKE.
The webseries community is generous and open and hardworking and collaborative and very quick on the uptake.
Once you have a product, you can have merch. Merch extends the reach of the series and provides a revenue stream. When Bernie Su talked about the merch sales for Lizzie Bennet Diaries you could hear all the oxygen leave the room as everybody looked at the numbers, and then the cumulative, adorable plop plop plop noise as many jaws cascaded down into laps.
There are metric crapstacks of tiny, cumulative and potentially career-stalling IP issues around what you’re doing so don’t make a project without legal advice. In Canada, there ARE NO FAIR USE LAWS and assuming that you can do what American webartistes do – that is a road strewn with take down notices and having all your carefully selected music go up the flue. This includes getting proper releases from all the friends who supplied music at no charge, since if they die their estate can sue. As a part time anarchist and full time irritated person I feel the amount of legal crap you have to put up to make webcontent in Canada is flat out unconscionable.
I have ideas for two webseries, Doing Poly Badly and Permaculture in Vancouver. Other ideas have occurred but those two I think have the tight niche appeal that is relatively easy to research. I also want to produce Allegra’s Rant of the Week, which is basically me sitting down after two beers and going all splodey on the week’s worth of news, local, national and international. At least the music will be mine so one less hurdle in the race toward respectability.
My brain is still spinning, but I have never been so pumped for my own writing project, which I hope, once it makes it onto the page, will be realized in screen media format.
DO NOT WANT TO GET OUT OF BED TODAY. But I have ten minutes to get dressed and catch a bus.
Goddamn but there’s a lot of wonderful web content out there. There’s shit too.
Ron Howard and Brian Grazer started a company a few years back called New Form Digital and they are starting to bring interesting entertainment to various sizes of screen. I didn’t clap for their ‘all our shows’ teaser ad. It was everything I FUCKING HATE about H-style advertising; loud, bozoid, and did I mention loud.
The most successful of the new content development, aggregation and production companies like New Form do three things: they leave the copyright with the creators, they pair inexperienced storytellers with experienced, collaborative production overseers who know how to make the most of their budgets, and they do what seems like incredibly intrusive market research in quantities that drop-kick my brain into orbit.
Mass markets do exist, still, but they seem to be making like tortillas under the weight of behemoth brands.
Niche markets with deep pockets are perfectly matched to the new kind of content delivery.
The Canadian government subsidizes digital content production and some of the material thus subsidized, like The Drive, is made by a small number of people with a small budget (they didn’t pay for most of their locations, or maybe none of them, which might annoy extended family members) who make intelligent decisions about acting, directing, lighting, writing and yes, locations.
Over the last ten years, I’ve had more and more moments when I’ve said, “My tax dollars at work, out-fucking-standing,” when I’ve seen the subsidy bugs scroll by at the end of the film. Yes I watch credits, but for cool character name ideas. Why do YOU watch them?
People’s attention spans get shorter and shorter and they want their stories little. But they also want to binge watch, depending where they are. Depending on the demographic, they might be taking a break from their work, or outside having a smoke, or waiting for a bus, or for a friend outside a concert hall, or on a bus, and these little bits of story work because they provide a weird kind of continuity in an otherwise chopped up day. Screen related media, scaling up to a Jumbotron and down to a watch, is where it’s at. It’s being driven by kids, but there will always be a screen for the market. You just have to know what kind of a screen your target is next to and wants to look at, when they have the time to watch (or can make it).
I predict when movies in theatres, as currently distributed, are facing too much competition from small screens, there will STILL be movie houses, and there will still even be chains, but they’ll have to play anybody’s content on the basis of what the people who live closest to the theatre poll. So if New Westminster citizens say Here’s What We’ll Sit in A Theatre to Watch and the list reads as follows:
Three Classic Arnold Schwartzenegger action flicks in a row in one theatre on special
Titanic and The Rose double feature
The RIGHT version of the English-dubbed My Neighbour Totoro and anybody who understands this knows the burnination that I feel even having to say anything about that other hellspawn travesty
The fancut remake of Star Wars
Die Hard
A simulcast concert of whichever band babydykes are swooning over this year
And one newly released Hollywood movie. Maybe two.
And of course I have no idea about the demographics of New West but I could find out. In greeesome detail.
To me the shortening of the story cycle makes no fucking sense because you’re just asking for the intrusion of a commercial at that point. Sell advertising, after all, is what stories are supposed to do.
Keith PITCHED SOMEBODY today at the VWF which makes me so astonished and happy I don’t know what else to say about it. And shouldn’t — it’s his story to tell.
There were falcons in the media room for most of the day. I didn’t go near them. Keith loved on them for a while.
GROSSLY INAPPROPRIATE COMMENT which combines the worst of “Kids these Days” “Allegra’s inappropriate fear of handicapped people,” “Entitled parents make me puke” and “Who cares what I think so I might as well say whatever racist, obnoxious, anti-social or mean-spirited thing comes into my head and why are you always upset with me?” Aren’t you glad I gave it to ya at the meta level instead of actually making the comment? Pah, I amaze myself at times.
Managed to squeeze some writing in about George, Harri and the Oldest last night and this morning. #VWF2016 is proving to be a good investment for me. I paid for Keith but he’s been too sick to attend.
There were talks on lighting, audience capture, metrics, entertainment law and it was very informative and to my mind well done.
Buster has assumed the position, so it’s time for cat videos.
Ayesha is still very sick. If she doesn’t start eating she’ll probably die. Paul, who’s only had her for a couple of years, is heartbroken, and I can’t say I blame him.
In a couple of hours I’ll be off downtown in the rush, bleargh, but there you go. Keith may be joining me for part of the festival.
Absolutely lovely evening at the Aerie, got about 45 minutes worth of back and arm massage, tried a new coffee flavoured doppelbock, etc, etc. Anyway, feel like I’ve been restored to something resembling the cheerfulness I’d like to know all the time, and the sun is shining, pathetic fallacy, blah blah. Also, I wrote a song last night. Mike was astonished when I told him, “No, I wasn’t practicing! That’s how it comes out sometimes! That’s why it’s so great to be me, every once in a long while I sit down and something like that emerges with an authority that is not mine… it is the universe singing to itself, and I’m just the fatty bony meaty critter that strokes the wood and metal box to enable it.”
I hope everybody feels as good as I do. I know they don’t, but that’s what I wish for you today.
I HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW IT IS ALL GOING TO END. The trilogy. I knew that the end is ‘getting George into space because that’s his goal’. What I didn’t understand is how. It’s going to make my universe bigger, and I love it. And all of the points I’m trying to make about reconciliation and communication and collaboration will be supported thereby.