The past few days have been quite horrible here. Even as I write I feel as if someone is drilling into my upper right sinus. Being sick gives one the opportunity to think, and watch TV, as there is nothing else better to do. Even more so when you have a partner in crime who is also very sick.

There’s been this huge desire to create lately, which of course happens at times when it less than ideal. I want to create life and emotion for others to enjoy. Yet, there is huge sense of wariness. Can I do it or will it turn into a huge pile of unspeakable, horrible goo? Frankly, I’m getting sick of the wariness. I want the power to do it. I want the confidence that I can succeed. I want to believe that I am, we are ready to tackle the world and entertain it until it begs for mercy and a tissue. After all, I’m still sick and contagious. So is my partner in crime.

Read Angel After the Fall 1. I regret to say illegally, but it is so hard to get comics here for decent prices that doesn’t include $20 S&H costs. Dragon. I dig dragons. They have flamey breath of breathy goodness. Some people are alive when they should be dead. Others are dead who should be alive. It makes my head hurt… more. In the good, perplexed way. Not more of the “Oh you have sinusitis! Let’s give you Rulide! Hope you’re not allergic to it, yet.” way.

There’s something to be said about sick people and blogs. Sick people should not be able to blog when… sick. They tend to babble on about nothing and make terrible typos and spelling inaccuracies. Almost gives an American the desire to stick a “u” in color. Almost.

Spent the past few days up at the beach. It was nice to get away from life and relax for a bit. Once we get our own laptop we’ll probably be spending a lot more time at the beach. We’ll have to figure out a plan for staying connected up there. The cost of the internet is unruly up the coast.

As far as the site goes I was going to add some Animation feeds to the sidebar, but there is just one too many Animation blogs out there and yet I have not found one I deemed worthy. So until I find an Animation blog that is without question awesome, it’s just going to have to stay this way.

The holidays are coming up and yet they just don’t feel the same since I’ve moved to Australia. Christmas in summer is something I still haven’t gotten used to and this is the third time in a row for me. I do like not having to clean my car off or wearing thousands upon thousands of layers, but sweaty Santa is still rather gross.

I hope all my fellow Americans enjoy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the last few moments before the shopping season. It’s such a brutal time of year.

If you have eyes you’d notice by now I revised the site. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do ever since the Gallery started giving me headaches. At the moment it’s a blog, just a blog. Eventually I’m going to add pages for my portfolio and animations. At the moment though, I’m happy with it just being a blog. ‘Cause you know, it actually works how it’s meant to.

You’ll notice I changed up the sidebar. I’ve got feeds of writers who inspire. Mostly they’re scriptwriters, aside from Neil Gaiman who’s like an everything-writer. Through my studies of film and animation I’ve gathered so much appreciation for screenwriters. It’s such a time consuming, life consuming process. Yet, these writers film time in the day to blog. Tim Minear even puts the scripts of his works up for new writers to learn from. Jane Espenson is a never-ending wealth of spec writing tips. Neil Gaiman’s blog just amuses me. If they weren’t worth reading, I wouldn’t be sticking them up. Now if I can just filter out Joss Whedon’s words of wisdom on Whedonesque.com…

Give me more time and I’ll start sticking up feeds for animators. I’m going to have to start organizing methinks. Bleh.

I recently wrote a short for my Scriptwriting course that is absolutely silly and inane. A drugged man thinks he’s Little Red Riding Hood. And yes, hilarity ensues. I wasn’t actually going to write the piece, but my lecturer during the second week of tutorials asked us to talk about what ideas I had. I started with “Well, I have two ideas. One is…” and you know I never got around to talking about the second? I’m sort of glad about that because I was internally torn about what that piece would encompass. Add in laughter from my cohorts at the concept and I decided to conquer the beast.

Comedy writing, so I’ve been told, is far much more difficult to write than drama as jokes need placement. My lecturer was already freaking because I had to write two stories to be able to tell the one story in the space of a short film and distrusts animators with scriptwriting. He reminded me that I needed to keep the important elements of the Grimms’ tale in there. He had no idea how to even approach it, yet for me it flowed naturally. If you look at the tale and break it down to the essentials it actually gives you a nice structure. I followed that structure, fleshing out parts to show the reality of the moments. When it reached the script workshop group, my lecturer was actually quite surprised at how well it worked. And you know, I do feel quite confident about the script. It’s not very often I feel confident about my structure.

So now that it is summer in Australia, I have until March to come up with a proposal for our final year projects. This is something I feel strongly about and need to take time to develop. I want as little dialogue as possible since we have absolutely no budget. Yet at the same time it needs to be creative, inventive and original in the span of less than 5 minutes. Jane Espenson mentioned on her blog how writing shorts take just as much time as writing 40 minute scripts. I agree. With the limited amount of time, every word counts, whether they be inside or out of the script. So to develop a proposal for a project that will not only have to reflect me, but will reflect my cohorts if they decide to support it, will require every ounce of creative energy. Kithal’s too.

He can’t escape my babblings.

As everyone knows by now, the WGA (Writers Guild of America) is on strike and I’m finding that very few people understand the need for this strike. First off, ignore the media - television news, newspapers, magazines - do you forget who owns these sources? Executives. They flaunt that they present an “unbiased” view and that is a load of garbage. They want the masses to believe that to sway them into believing what they believe.

Now let’s look at the current situation. What we see is on television is the finalized version of the script. What we don’t take into account the many drafts before or even the hours spent in the writers room. Writers work from the beginning of the year right up to the holidays with MANY long days and nights. They usually only have a week to write the script and that is really pushing it. And right when their creative energies are at their height, then have network executives who have no creative experience come in and change elements of the script because “it’s what the public wants to see” based on their “research”. You know what? Writers really don’t get much choice in the matter because the network has already bought all rights to the episode. They will get what they want or the show gets canned, never to be seen on TV again.

What happens in the years after the episode goes to air? The DVDs finally get released. Avid fans of the show go and buy the DVDs, thinking they’re supporting the creators. In a way they are, but not at the extent they imagined. At the moment writers are getting 4 cents a DVD, which usually consists of 4 episodes. Who are taking the huge chunks out of the sales? It’s not the directors or the actors. It’s the networks. Because, you know, they had so much to do with creating the episode. These DVD sales are being milked by these executives.

And now there are talks of selling the episodes on the internet. How much of the profits are the networks planning on giving the writers? Nothing. The writers are demanding two and a half percent. There was an argument in an article stating that with the uncertainty of the internet sales the writers are demanding a lot. Obviously the writer failed high school math. Two and a half percent is two and a half percent no matter the number of sales.

To the average Joe, it may seem like a lot of money being talked back and forth, but what is important to remember is writers don’t always have jobs. They never feel job security. Networks on the other hand… well they’ll still be in the job when the world comes to an end. Writers need to depend on residuals during the tougher times to raise their families.

Then the other issue, which unfortunately will never be won because it isn’t something that can be negotiated, having writers’ names be as publicized as the directors, producers and actors. These are the writers who created the dialogue and scenarios that the aforementioned then work with to create the movies and television series. Yet the public is generally unaware of them. In an industry where namedropping means everything, writers, although in general peeved, are stuck with that situation. It is a dream that one day writers will be recognized for their works, but sadly will not be seen.

In general I’m finding that media keeps trying to undermine the strike by telling the public that the writers’ needs are nothing like the needs of mine workers. Just remember, the writers are the ones who fabricate the enjoyable stories that the public can relax to. Ed Hooks said that it’s a shamanic experience, telling the stories that the tribe needs to hear to get through life. To be able to bring that experience to the audience, many long hours of work is required involving much time away from the family. Why do they do it? Partly because they enjoy it, but also because it’s what they can do to earn a salary to feed the family. With inflation it would only make sense to ask for a raise.