Saturday, January 22, 2011

Spontaneous Prose - 1/22/11

Twisted skeletal remains dance in vibration from earthly shudders, just dominating the visual field. My eyes can’t but harness the real activity as the life of these dusty bones makes fear crawl into my spine like a thousand tasty snails. Oozing. Sliming their way into my occipital lobe and I only hear their language. The language of sudden change, the lifespan of a summer, of dirt and mold and rain. The blood doesn’t phase me when I taste it in my mouth. The iron dab on the taste buds is a much needed snap back to reality, the earth is quaking like a dynamic emperor on bad beer. The cave tap dances on my head with little grains of ore as they pass down into the air which is always being stirred and thrashed, making a malt of musty grime that cakes my eyes, now taking the laughing skeleton of a tired, abandoned miner, fade away from my awareness.

The fever is just a fever, an OS code of an ill advising virus, fucking around with my gene structure. Telling my DNA that it is archaic, of a making not ready for the rugged. I shouldn’t have tasted the waters from the underground river that trickled, that looked black in the glow of my lantern, that sucked me in to quench my thirst like a magnetic siren body, tugging at me with unpronounced pheromones.

Living organisms have a right to take what they need. Just as I have right to crawl out into the Autumn light, the setting of dusk as the earth stopped. And to lie there and cry for help until it arrives, pawing away at branches, through the woods, ready to pull my body back to the village and maybe siphon some life back into it, maybe my own life force, maybe that of a demon who was wading in the dark pool and slid down my tongue as I lapped away. There he punches at my belly in a-rythmic sweeps against the freeforall of plate tectonics.

The cave is doomed for curious losers. No treasure is worth biological, geological and spiritual possession. Bring a canteen if you go down there.

Post Privilege




This is a Wood Sugars short film we did for the National Film Challenge, where we were given Fri-Sun to write, shoot, edit a 5-7min short film, using a prescribed prop, character name, occupation, and line of dialogue. Here is a trailer for what we came up with. Please watch the full version of Post Privilege on Wood Sugars Film.

I think its definitely worth setting deadlines for a project and doing it. Might not be our perfect opus but at least we knocked out a new visual story and had the learning experience to accompany it.


Friday, January 21, 2011

Diary Diary

I've been away from this blog for awhile, been pretty active with the Wood Sugars, producing, writing for, performing in a variety show podcast called Inside the Barrel. We're gearing up for some short films we're about to shoot. We're adapting a fun play by Keely Flynn into a film, so that's definitely a good challenge to reshape for the screen and cut down on some of the time constraints we're faced with, a lot of great banter dialogue that we want to keep in there. It's my first experience adapting a stage piece for the screen.

I think I mentioned some time ago that I was reworking a novel manuscript of mine. I've seen begun playing with it in screenplay form. When I wrote the manuscript originally, I wrote it very stream of conscious so some sections easily become tangential and sloppy, and took on the challenge of completing it in a month, sitting down and doing it. It proved to be a great exercise in character creation and point of view. There are some chapters in which I'm quite proud of the language, although as a whole, I don't find it publishable, which is sad on one end, I put a lot of work into writing a novel. But the story itself I'm still excited with and have restructured, redeveloped and got it to a point where its ready to be done again.

I've felt a lot of creative fluidity with the screenplay format recently, for some odd reason. I think it stems from the thrill of writing scenes, and having a form that can hatch performances. I've found it quite rewarding to see actors bring my writing to life, from writing podcast sketches, from the Bosto workshop with XIII Pocket, and in writing Post Privilege with Wood Sugars for the National Film Challenge. I wanted to write more scripts, its exciting to build that text for a group of various artisans (actors, cinematographers, composers, etc) to bring to life, and so in reworking my novel manuscript, it started to come to life again in writing for an audio/visual medium. So I'm about half through the feature length film script which I've molded into a new medium, which I'm finding is strengthening this particular story.

Anyway, I'm probably going to be jotting more stuff down on this blog going forward. I feel like my brain needs it, to spew thoughts on various creative projects, maybe vent, maybe rave about certain excitements. And another excuse to write when I feel like my brain is too drained at the end of the day to do justice to any current story projects. Kinda like a diary, a public diary, which is fine. I have a diary book by my bed but my handwriting sucks and my cat keeps stealing my pens to play floor hockey.