I finished the novel contest in 3 days with 22,000 odd words. Quite something to do in 3 days. Whooo-hooo.

I am in the midst of the incredible 3 day novel contest. See:

http://www.3daynovel.com/

If I survive, a resulting PDF will be posted here. Yes siree.

I just submitted a copy of a screenplay I wrote called THE LIBRARIAN to my favorite screenwriting contest. I must say that during the years since I left film school (1992.) Screenwriting contests have been sprouting like dandelions on an untended lawn. There used to be only 1 or 2 big contests. Now, there’s a contest you can enter any month of the year, though the big contests remain the most popular. I quote what one contest says they look for to qualify a winner:

“Writing criteria for judging will be based on a 1-10 point grid system developed to analyze a screenplay. This will include:
A. Mechanical Execution – format, page count, font and general presentation. B. Character Development – Character arc, motivational implementation, and dramatic interactions. C. Conceptual Integration – understanding of the script’s genre and market compatibility. D. Story Structure – Implementation of standard story structure, proper use of transitions, story reveals, and plot reversals.”

Now that all seems like development voodoo-speak garnered from a bevy of “how-to” books. I am sorely chagrined to note as absent things like “a good story” and “would be fun to watch” but—hey, what do I know, I’m just a writer.

T.C. Ellis aka Todd Crofton Ellis is a homeless guy that lives in my alley. Last Winter, when it got cold I gave him some dry socks. He has a college degree and is well-spoken but rather than put up with things he’d rather not put up with, he lives on the street. And puts up with that. He is also a writer, but due to the fact he lives in an alley behind some cans, he tends to lose many of the pages he writes. The cannabis does not help keep track of things either. Todd forages for food, clothes, reading materials, and the varied stuff of life in the trashcans of Venice, California. Among the interesting things he’s found in the trash are:

1) Jewels
2) Drugs
3) One of Julia Robert’s bank statments with a balance over $35,000,000.00. (Thirty five million).

Today when I saw Todd pass my gate, I gave him a beer for basic nourishment and looked over what he had in his shopping cart. I noticed a newly scavenged shrink-wrapped issue of VANITY FAIR.
“Hey, Todd—is that the Terry Hatcher issue?” I said.
“Uh—lemme see, yes, it is,” Todd said.
“I want to read that article, can I have it?”
“I haven’t read it yet,” said Todd.
“Todd, you’re a homeless guy that lives in an alley, why do you need to read the new VANITY FAIR?”
“Oh, I know all those celebrities, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a good friend of mine,” Todd said.
“Todd, I just gave you a beer,” I reminded him.
“O.K., take the magazine,” Todd said.
“I’ll give it back when I’m done.”
A deal was struck.
At least now I can say I know a guy who’s best friends with Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I just saw Nick Cassavettes adaptation of Nicholas Sparks novel THE NOTEBOOK. What a full-nelson, non-stop, every note, kitchen sink, 103% tear-jerker! Masterfully manipulative. Hell and hot cucumbers, I may have to actually read the source novel now. But considered meditation on this insulin-shocker did make me write down two things:

(1) We (Americans) live in a swamp of false emotion. And like it that way. False emotion is the mainstay of our media, art, advertising.

(2) It’s only possible to fall in love while you are still innocent (of something.) The more innocent you are, the easier it is to be in love.

Now for that (2) above—should we blame Satan?

In 2001, Daniel Chavarria’s first novel, Adios Muchachos, a quick romp in the life of a Havanna bicycle whore, won an Edgar Award for Orginal Paperback Fiction. Unfortunately, Chavarria was not able to receive his tourist visa and could not make it to New York as he was planning to. His translator, Carlos Lopez, accepted the award on his behalf. A fine story of crime, sex, and noir skullduggery, Adios Muchachos belongs with the work of John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiassen, and a good deal of Elmore Leonard, and it’ll fit right in with those masters of incongruously sunny, quirky capers.



Order your personal copy from Amazon.com.

I guess I better buy a copy of:

Warped Passages : Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions(Hardcover)
by Lisa Randall

In this easy-to-read volume, MIT’s Lisa Randall takes on the next level of physical inquiry. In the 1970’s, Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, a truly fine physicist speculated that we would soon be approaching the physical limits of what we “could possibly know.” He meant that we couldn’t build much bigger telescopes, atom-smashing cyclotrons, or electron microscopes. Our tools for studying the energies in the physical world we hitting walls and there was no good idea on what may lie beyond those walls.

Randall’s book is about what may lie beyond what we understand as “reality.” There may be all kinds of extraordinarily strange forces at play beyond what we can sense. If Randall and her co-theorists are right, they deserve +14 Nobel prizes for divining the true nature of “reality.” If they are wrong, well—GOOD TRY! And maybe a step closer to the truth.

I’m not a biblical man, but I do like that LUKE 12:27

“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Luke knew it wasn’t all about the money.

Another “Must Read”...

The Female of the Species : Tales of Mystery and Suspense
by Joyce Carol Oates

See Amazon reviews & buy…

Here’s a well-written review by HILLARY FREY
Published: January 22, 2006 NYT…

SUSPENSE fiction is like a powerful drug: one page, one taste, can induce such a tingly, speedy feeling that it takes an almost superhuman effort not to finish everything off in just one sitting. At least, that’s how it is with Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection of mystery and suspense stories. Even as her unrepentant, selfish characters repel you, their tales hold you hostage. It’s impossible to leave one of Oates’s antiheroines for long without wanting to pick the book back up, to discover what gruesome end she’ll meet – or, more likely, inflict on someone else.)

In “The Female of the Species,” these characters are unremarkable women – the proverbial girls next door – who double as adulteresses, whores and cold killers. For some, killing is an act of mercy; for others, it’s pure pleasure. For a little girl in a story called “The Banshee,” it’s an accident – kind of. Taken together, Oates’s nine stories seem to suggest that the fairer sex is more capable of calculating cruelty and brutality – and that women have less reverence for the lives of others – than we’d like to think.

Mystery and horror fans are most likely to relish this collection, which works best as a source of cheap thrills. The short stories have all appeared elsewhere: some in literary quarterlies, many more in publications like Spook, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. As with much genre fiction, the plot lines tend to be predictable. In “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi,” a teenage prostitute’s taste for slicing up johns hardly comes as a revelation. Yet the familiarity of the tale is part of what makes it fun. Suspecting what will happen whets the appetite for Oates’s icy, often gory, conclusions, and the relief that comes when it’s all over.
Will we ever tire of reading about adulterous affairs as they go horribly awry? The story called “Hunger” centers on a 34-year-old mother vacationing on Cape Cod with her daughter. She’s a character we’ve seen a million times before in books and movies, on “Desperate Housewives” – a beautiful, wealthy woman, a former dancer married to a decent man but with a yearning to escape the deep sleep of domestic bliss. Walking along the beach, she spies, as convention demands, an enigmatic outsider, possessed of a mysterious limp, and something happens inside her. “He’s tall, very thin. He has a childlike eager look. A hungry look. . . . A wounded dancer, an ex-dancer like me.”

The sex, of course, is hot. Returning to Boston, she fights to adjust to her comfortable reality. But when her lover shows up at her front door – demanding her, daring her – she knows she’ll have to choose between him and her husband, and the only choice a story like this allows is for one of them to die. Like Patricia Highsmith or Rachel Ingalls, Oates adroitly shows how one bad decision leads to a host of others, and how those choices can change a woman from a mistress to a murderer.

“Hunger” runs roughly 50 pages. Like the collection’s last story, “Angel of Mercy” – composed of the intertwined narratives of a long-dead nurse with a penchant for mercy killings and that of a nurse with a similar mission in the present day – it feels the most complete. The shorter stories here seem more like sketches, and perhaps they are. Oates’s best form is still the novel. Yet stories don’t have to be great to be addictive; they just need a trick – and Oates has nailed that. Even as you’re wishing you could, you can’t put this book down.

Faithful readers check out Kent Anderson’s Vietnam novel SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL see amazon here and that is one terrific book. I thought PLATOON and FULL METAL JACKET were good but this outdoes both. Interesting temporal structure and the lead character, Hanson, is a uniquely believable soldier in the first rock ‘n’ roll war. Evocative prose, ample blood & guts.