Long time no write… at least not here…
Wow… what a change a few months brings, and in this one case it’s one of the only good changes of 2020: I’m back to writing.
So… yeah, the whole art thing fizzled for a variety of reasons but mostly because that involves being in the widget business and I really hate the widget business in all its myriad forms.
Also because it’s more efficient to just say your damn idea than to try to communicate that with sound as I used to do in the music days or in images as I tried in early 2020 (and various other points in my life).
Will I paint again? Oh, of course. I’ve been going through those phases on and off my whole life.
But it’s really not my destined path, and with the Karens and tyrants in charge, the whole gallery thing is even more insufferable and near-impossible than it usually is, which was already pretty damn insufferable and near-impossible.
So… writing.
Granted, at the beginning of the year, I did have some book concepts I was toying with, and those may still come to pass, but things took a turn for the weird around Samhain (as one might expect) and the girl who refuses to even own a TV let alone watch any of its content (save South Park and old Married With Children DVDs on a small portable player video thingy) started writing scripts.
I know, I know… I didn’t believe it at first either.
So, I have a weird little sitcom-y thing that I will make into a web series featuring doll tableaus with voiceovers and I already have 5 episodes written, albeit none shot yet because I’m awaiting more wardrobe to arrive from Amazon and I have to make the sets still.
And I have dozens of possible plots for that so I have way more than 5 episodes still to come.
And last night I came up with an idea for a hopefully-funny rom-com feature script.
And then there’s the theatre…
Once upon a time, I was a tech theatre major for, like, 8 months, back when I still wanted to be in the music biz but before I’d had my turn on the merry-go-round and decided to fling myself off of it to escape and back when my mother was still alive and still harping on me to get a useful degree so I thought learning to do lighting was my ticket to get to where I wanted to be.
(Y’know, before I was reminded by experience of how much I dislike heights and absolutely loathe ladders? Yeah… a career as a lighting director was not in my future, be it in the theatre or in the music biz…)
Anyhow: at UBC they make the tech theatre people also take all the theatre history and even some acting classes. Or at least one that I barely passed.
I thought I left all that behind but… you guessed it…
So I now have a super short 10 minute mini-play, written as a portfolio piece for a cause we’ll get to in a minute, and I have two other full-length plays in development. One of which is set in Ireland during the Troubles, a setting I know nothing about and so guess who’s ordering enough books on the IRA to probably land her ass on a government watchlist?
Oh, who am I kidding? With the sort of views on politics and public health I have and the sort of friends I like, I was probably already on a government watchlist.
Lord knows Facebook has been deleting a lot of my old joke comments from the now-verboten “dank meme stash” groups on the grounds that they now violate community standards and safety, even shit from 2015 that’s relatively mild.
The latest?
Go to Hell, Facebook. Note that they don’t tell me where this meme was posted or when. I don’t recall posting it in ages, and I have friends who have caught 30 day bans for shit as stupid as this that they apparently posted as far back as 2014. But anyway, I guess I’m a “dangerous individual” for posting a cheesy Billy Mays joke about something that happened 20 years ago.
This shit is increasingly common in my circles and my friends’ circles, but I bet most people don’t even know technocrats are doing shit like this. Or they think it’s only false information being expunged, not jokes. (And frankly the technocrats’ definition of false information is itself questionable.)
(Also, if you ever try sending me a friend request there, don’t hold your breath. The profile with my name on it is essentially abandoned, and I won’t post the alt I actually use once or twice a week to chat with the 20 friends from FB I actually like.)
Anyway, that 10 minute play and its cause? Well, you see… I want out of Canada before it completely collapses. And an MFA would facilitate that in all sorts of ways, not the least of which would be if I went to a Yankee university to attain it (and hopefully score my MRS. whilst there), but also because an MFA allows one to teach writing anywhere.
But there’s just one problem: I never did finish my BFA or BA.
Now, I did contemplate applying to USC and UCLA or some other Yankee school to finish my degree and then go on to an MFA. However, they want letters of recommendation. Which I could get but USC at least specifies at least one must be an academic letter of recommendation.
Which is a problem because I’ve been out of school for ages. I could probably get in touch with one of my audio instructors from 10 years ago, but then what are they gonna say about my ability to write?
Meanwhile, I live an hour from a local and apparently decent university and it seems I can wrap up that BFA pretty quick with the only limiting factor being that each of the 3 levels of the screenwriting workshop must follow in succession, so it might well be 3 years before I can finish unless they offer the middle one in the summer terms in 2022.
They don’t require academic letters of recommendation but they do require 5 writing samples, 3 of which I pulled from old pieces of mine (poetry, short story, creative nonfiction), 1 of which was a 5-7 page screenplay excerpt which I pulled from those sitcom-y web series scripts, and the last of which was 5-7 pages of a stage play, which I pulled out of my ass upon reading that requirement, but I like it and I think I might try writing a whole bunch of little 10 minute plays this year, especially since it seems a lot of cities actually have festivals for 10 minute plays.
Or they did, until the Karens and the tyrants and the sniffles and all that jazz.
So… that’s where I’m headed in September, just have to finish up my application and portfolio this month, but I’m pretty sure I’ll get in.
In the meantime, I will be working on the web series and reviving the Zamo podcast and will try to keep the blog up a bit more frequently than every six months, lol.
In my defence, though, here’s what I’ve been dealing with in 2020 that made me distracted:
March through April: found a big ol’ lump in my titty, just in time for all the docs to panic over a certain virus and shut all the shit down. I had to argue with and get guilt-tripped by my doc on the phone for 3 weeks to get in and get it seen (because I dunno… I guess some women lie about having walnut-sized lumps in their tits? Also because dying of cancer is far more noble than catching the coof) and it eventually turned out to be just a lump of fat when I finally did get it mammogrammed and ultrasounded. But in the meantime it was decided to put me on antibiotics to rule out it being some sort of abscess or infection… which is how I came to be in the ER late one Friday night after the first dose of said antibiotic started to put me into anaphylaxis and I could have died. Then the replacement antibiotic gave me the runs so bad my doc ordered me to stop taking them after 4 days lest I die from C. diff toxicity.
June: I slipped and fell down the stairs and the back of my head took out a couple spindles of the bannister on the way down, giving me a fresh concussion. Fortunately, that was the worst of it other than a whole lot of bruises.
Later in June: I got it in my concussed head to clean my stupid pond in the front garden which was filthy again after only a couple months despite earlier efforts. Naturally, I slipped in and hurt myself and ended up having a panic attack which took me back to the ER for further embarrassment.
Plus the whole house arrest on account of the sniffles with a 99.6% recovery rate bullshit that all the Karens and the tyrants can burn in Hell over.
Plus a lot of family drama between my dad and my brother, at least one of whom is nuts and both absolutely despise each other. My brother is now in the process of moving to Mexico, it sounds pretty cool and who knows, I may yet join him… sooner rather than later if made possible by the local place carrying on with the whole Zoom classes thing… and UBC does offer an MFA done completely online… pass me the tequila and a giant sombrero to keep me from instantly dying of sunstroke…
Funny story about the UBC MFA: the thesis project options are pretty much all things I’ve already done. If one focussed on TV writing, then 2 episodes and a show bible would do it, and I’ve written more than that for the web series in the last two months. If one focussed on songwriting as I once did, a collection of 10-15 songs would do it, so I’ve done that 3 or even 4 times over back in the maQLu days. Etc.
I have a feeling that IRA play might end up being my MFA thesis. It has more gravitas than my sitcom-y projects, after all, which somehow makes it more appropriate for an MFA thesis. But I’ll probably change my mind six times between now and then, and I might need to write it sooner in one of my playwriting workshops.
Some positive news on the health front is I’m down about 30 pounds since the spring, whereas it seems most of my fellow home inmates have put on almost that many. As you can imagine, losing 30 pounds does tend to have a disappearing effect on fatty tit lumps as well, so that’s good too.
Anyway, this has been long enough, so it’s enough of a blog update for now.
