Amazing

I never thought that I’d ever be able to say this, but my story outline was approved by my editor, and I’ve just submitted it to the film producer. Now to wait and see if they’ll let me do the screenplay on spec.

It’s nothing major, a very small film by an indie production house, and I don’t expect to get paid at all, but if I actually ever write something that someone actually shoots then I really don’t care. It’s my version of a novelist getting his first book published by a micropublisher (but not a vanity publisher).

If anyone told me that I’d have this opportunity six months ago, I’d have thought they were insane.

I guess you just can’t give up on your dreams, because they seem to never give up on you.

Boardgamers will chuckle at this…

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How many did you say?

Game night had been passed over a lot over the past weeks, due to myriad holiday and work commitments among the group, but also due to several illnesses that took all of us down at one point or another. While playing on the Frog’s Wii was fun, there’s still nothing like an organic tabletop game made out of dead tree products to get the blood flowing. The last game session we got in was Traders of Genoa, weeks ago.

Erik, Annie and I finally were able to show up at the Frog’s on the same Saturday evening, so aside from the great conversation we were finally able to get some boardgaming in. Since we were all still dealing with the holiday hangovers and a heavy game didn’t agree with everyone, we decided to try a party game. My several months-old copy of Dominic Crapuchettes’s Wits & Wagers finally got its shrink taken off and we settled down to play.

W&W is a trivia game where the players guess the answer to a question that always has a number for an answer. Once everyone has written down their guesstimate on a little dry-erase board, the guesses are revealed and arranged in descending order on a rubber playmat which has betting odds on it. Everyone then wagers on the guesses. You don’t have to wager on your own guess! Payouts increase as the asnwer you bet on gets further from the median guess. After seven rounds, the player with the most money wins! (PS there are bet limits each round but on the last round you can go all in)

It’s a simple game, but the wagering mechanisms will appeal to the Hold’em player in you. The trivia is very offbeat, and the answers provided in the game are sometimes questionable, but overall it’s a pretty decent party game.

The Frog won the game that we played with all the right rules (we missed the payout for the closest answer in the first couple of times that we played).

As a nightcap, the Frog found the Sheep in my game bag so we got a game of Attribut in. Annie still refuses to acknowledge that the Titanic is simply not burnable. In this game, I believed that Annie believed that Andrew E is Gorgeous, which apparently was not correct. The Frog sneaked in another victory.

It was good to play again. Maybe next time, we’ll have enough in us for a heavier game.

I’ll make sure to pack Die Macher in the bag.

Maybe a screenplay, and not a novel.

I flamed out of NaNoWriMo 2007 with a word count under 20,000. The story simply didn’t have enough life in it, and I was relieved when I hit the delete key on the file. Still, getting 20,000 words onto the page was exhilarating in and of itself, so I’ll try again, this time in what I consider my home genre.

Script Frenzy (click the logo on the right) is the screenplay sister to NaNoWriMo. The 2008 version will happen in April, and if something I’m working on comes to fruition, I may be able to do this for a little more than flexing my fingers and mind. More on this as April approaches, but if you’re interested head on over to scriptfrenzy.org and sign up.

A New Leaf on Life

There’s a lot of reason to consider pegging of New Year’s Day as a silly, arbitrary point at which to mark beginnings and endings. It’s probably a good reason why “resolutions” made in commemoration of a new year don’t really work for many people. You decide to do something, and you do it immediately. Why put it off until some specific date or time for no real purpose?

We tend to like nice, clean demarcations. In business, we compartmentalize financials on an annual basis. In hobbies,we count the number of games we play in one year. We mark birthdays and anniversaries of anything and everything.

Sometimes, this leads to us missing the exact points in time and the significance of each. We played a boardgame today. We spent time with people we care about, doing something we love to do, and we shared our lives. It makes for a nice tick mark on the games played log, but too often these things blur into just another tick mark in a yearly summary of tick marks. Maybe we’ll remember that someone won or lost in some remarkable fashion. But we’ll forget the warmth of the company we kept, the laughter and smiles, the fuzzy feeling of having enjoyed the evening that far transcends the tick mark in the notebook under “Die Fursten von Florenz”.

This becomes most apparent when you’ve been away from the gaming table, and thus been away from the company of friends and the activity of relaxation and enjoyment shared. I care little that I don’t get any more tick marks; I yearn for the warm fuzzies that I get when playing and talking and sharing.

The new leaf on life that I’m turning is that of relationships. The activity matters far less than the company kept in the doing. Work, home, social, what have you. Need to do a better job of connecting and reconnecting with people, because I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m happiest when I do that well. Everything else falls in line behind that.

So to my friends across the seas that I’ve never met but have been a part of my life, thank you for 2007. I promise I’ll do a better job of connecting in 2008. It’s really silly. The tools we have for communicating are so powerful compared to twenty years ago when cellphones and websites and Gmail and Skype were dreams. I remember signing up to be someone’s pen pal and bailing on that person after three letters. Now, I bail on responding to friend’s emails when it would take five minutes or less, and I waste time on flash games or Guild Wars and LOTRO or surfing sites.

So silly as it is – New Year’s Resolution. My only conceit will be my writing and the music and film that fuel it. That’s my private domain and artistic outlet. All else will be in relation to human connections, because that’s what I want my life to be built around. People.

It’s an hour to midnight here, as I write. Happy new year everyone. 2008 will be better than 2007 for me. I would that it be the same for everyone. If you are reading this, thank you for staying connected to me. Drop me a line: dreamweaver7@gmail.com. We’ll talk. I promise.

Of Christmas, Gift-horses and a Witch’s Wardrobe

In a year of really nasty surprises, it quickly became difficult to discern presents from looking gift-horses in the mouth. (Jeez, my writing has deteriorated so much over the ordeal of the past months. Getting back on the horse is going to be more painful than I thought.)

Anyway, I guess I’ve begun to appreciate the simpler things in life now, and to be content with far less than I used to believe I deserved. Having your life’s very foundations shattered does that to a person, I suppose. Suddenly, being alive and healthy and basically free is a blessing. Every breath is a miracle, every drop of water a rainfall, every crust of bread a feast.

I’ve never been a very devout person, but when your faith in the goodness of man and your ability to trust anyone is utterly destroyed, I fell back to the habits of youth. I sat in Roman Catholic churches for hours to try to find peace.

I still don’t like sermons, but it was an amazing day when a priest gives a sermon based on something written by one of the old masters of fantasy, C.S. Lewis. It took all my Google-Fu to track this obscure scrap of writing down. But this helped me keep it together when I wasn’t quite sure if all my ballyhooed mental and emotional strength would hold up.

I asked for strength that I might achieve; He made me weak that I might obey
I asked for health that I might do great things, He gave me grace that I might do better things
I asked for riches that I might be happy; He gave me poverty that I might be wise
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men; He gave me weakness that I might feel a need for God
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life; He have me life that I might enjoy all things
I received nothing that I asked for; He gave me everything I hoped for

I’m still not really big on the almighty as a distant, uncaring omniscient omnipotent overlord, but human writing does do it for me. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. We all bleed. We all cry. We all die. And we can all choose to see the humor in things, accept things we can’t change, laugh at the stupidity of life and be happy. There is always someone out there with a better reason to be miserable than me.

Happy Christmas to all. I wish peace in your hearts, laughter in your lives and fulfillment in your souls.

Signs of Life

It sells for so little

I don’t know who you are. Please believe. There is no way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks. But I don’t care. I am me, and I don’t know who you are, but I love you.

I have a pencil. A little one they did not find. I am a woman. I hid it inside me. Perhaps I won’t be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I have ever written and oh God I’m writing it on toilet paper.

I was born in Nottingham in 1957, and it rained a lot. I passed my eleven plus and went to girl’s Grammar. I wanted to be an actress.

I met my first girlfriend at school. Her name was Sara. She was fourteen and I was fifteen but we were both in Miss Watson’s class. Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful. I sat in biology class, staring at the picket rabbit foetus in its jar, listening while Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew. Sara did. I didn’t.

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later I enrolled at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart.

But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.

London. I was happy in London. In 1981 I played Dandini in Cinderella. My first rep work. The world was strange and rustling and busy, with invisible crowds behind the hot lights and all that breathless glamour. It was exciting and it was lonely. At nights I’d go to the Crew-Ins or one of the other clubs. But I was stand-offish and didn’t mix easily. I saw a lot of the scene, but I never felt comfortable there. So many of them just wanted to be gay. It was their life, their ambition. And I wanted more than that.

Work improved. I got small film roles, then bigger ones. In 1986 I starred in “The Salt Flats.” It pulled in the awards but not the crowds. I met Ruth while working on that. We loved each other. We lived together and on Valentine’s Day she sent me roses and oh God, we had so much. Those were the best three years of my life.

In 1988 there was the war, and after that there were no more roses. Not for anybody.

In 1992 they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth while she was out looking for food. Why are they so frightened of us? They burned her with cigarette ends and made her give them my name. She signed a statement saying I’d seduced her. I didn’t blame her. God, I loved her. I didn’t blame her.

But she did. She killed herself in her cell. She couldn’t live with betraying me, with giving up that last inch. Oh Ruth. . . .

They came for me. They told me that all of my films would be burned. They shaved off my hair and held my head down a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They brought me here and gave me drugs. I can’t feel my tongue anymore. I can’t speak.

The other gay women here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I’ll die quite soon. It’s strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody.

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

I don’t know who you are. Or whether you’re a man or a woman. I may never see you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.

Valerie

X

from V for Vendetta.
Written by Alan Moore.
Art by David Lloyd.

Still alive.

July 2007 is officially the worst month of my entire life to date.

But I live. The sun still rises. Every day is a new day.