Semi-Urban Cartography

October 19th, 2009 First day of writing the feature length, Promise Before The Sword. Using Blake Snyder’s “Beat Sheet” as a guidepost, I hand sketched out the first five pages of screen time (through “Theme Stated”). All of these scenes have been hashed out in concept months ago. These are the scenes for setting tone [...]

As recently as Friday morning on this blog, I described on-going frustration with a game of “wait and see” that has taken over my creative life. Progress with a prospective agent has inadvertently led to stasis at the writing desk. Four treatments. A dozen poems. A few really promising short stories. None of them spark [...]

More than two months have passed. The weather has changed back into Autumn the season where it seems in perpetual returning. One more turn of the calendar and its into the holidays, sliding quickly into the end of the year benchmark. Time to know where have I been. I’ve found myself in this transition, waiting. [...]

They describe a quiet place. They would describe it as yours, somewhere comfortable and familiar. Your pens and pencils, paper taken from your drawer, your ream. They would say that this is the place. Arrive there early, in your time, ideally the same each morning before anyone else is awake. You will hear the garbage [...]

Returned home from Europe. Thirty-three years old, past the time in your life when going abroad to Italy and France can transform you. Hope is that amid all the lavish ruins of an old world, some of the wise antiquity will transfer. It’s why I steal touches of buttery marble in the long, lazily monitored [...]