Where's my other X?

Sometimes, I have to admit, I envy women. Oh sure, both genders have their advantages, to be clear. But I think a women has a better time channeling the male in her than a man has in picking out his inner female. I think a lot of this has to do with the latitude we give for the female personality as opposed to the stricter rules we place on males.

Take, for instance, Professor Rebecca Priestley, designer, inventor and creator of the Kronosphere. She's a woman working in a man's world, the world of academic Physics. She is a woman, she likes to dress nicely and has a lovely house in a quaint part of Notre Damme de Grace, or N.D.G. as the Montréal locals call it. She's more or less secure in her job, though constantly in danger of loosing her funding and her recent focus of research has gained her much ridicule among her peers. This makes her driven, and so sometimes she spends the night on her couch after a late night's research and experimentation. Sometimes, she may look disheveled, but she's keen to get cleaned up when the opportunity arises. But she's most assuredly left-brained. She's mathematically methodical, almost Aspergerian. She's quick to anger but soon lets her more passive, feminine nature calm her back into reason. She's not a girly-girl or a fashion Deva or a sex-crazed Cougar. What the Professor is, is extremely intelligent. She's a woman with 2 PhDs with very diverse academic and professional experience. Does this make her any less a woman?

Sure, I've not told you everything about our Professor in Episode 1. I haven't even revealed it all here. There's so much more to the Professor; it will take time to tease out the threads of this woman's life. We must wait until she's good and ready before she's reveal her past pain. Until then, we must accept that the Professor holds her past close to her chest and doesn't trust easily. Does that make her any less a woman?

Or is it just me? Is this Y I can't write her? Because my X lays along on the chromosomal roller-coaster? Does this prevent me from channeling this woman into my stories?

No!

In fact, I disagree with this postulate. In fact I posit there be more inside a gender than there be betwixt. A nerdy male may better know a nerdy female's mind than he may that of a sports-crazed arm-chair quarterback. An atheist female can channel an atheist male better than he can the blind faith and ecstasy of religion. That's not to say an atheist nerd can't write a devout Christian and Sports Fanatic. Just that that type of person is less likely to navigate in her circle of friends. We tent to surround ourselves with people like us, male and female. And this leads to our experiences being highly colored by similar personalities.

So can I write for a woman? Well, I was told I cannot by a genuine, to the best of my knowledge, XX woman. Does this mean she's right? Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn't. Certainly being told this makes me question whether I should even bother continuing. Especially when positive feedback's been so few and far between. So perhaps she's correct right now, in this one small case, but not over my full abilities or the total future of all of my writings. In the end, when I present this show to you, my dear reader, in it's final, recorded form I will leave it to you to judge if I've correctly described the Professor and all the other characters that appear within and surround the existence of the Kronosphere.

The Reviews are in! Episode 1 is a MISS!

First of all, I just want to say I'm sorry I've been so remiss in posting here! Believe me, I will, at some point, retroactively add those posts I indented to submit earlier. They should eventually appear here once they've been properly edited. I have a huge post that I may make into it's very own blog given its length. It recalls my adventures in the hectic month of April 2009. But that's for later – or sooner, as the case may be…

Anyway, I've been getting a steady stream of input on the script to the first, maiden voyage of the initial Project KronoSphere crew and I think in summary you could say this: I don't know how to write my characters. I've had numerous suggestions that my characters should have an affectation or some other delineating personality trait. More recently, I've been simply told they are flat, wooden and uninteresting by a number of people. I wonder if this is what Harlan Ellison told J. Michael Straczynski when the later first contact the former? I really wish I knew, because if that was it, then I can't help but feel I'm in excellent company. But it doesn't belittle the fact that my story, at least the initial, and in some way most important, episode, is really quite flawed.

If that were not enough, the woman who runs one my primary meetup groups, the Verge Writers of Reston, has been ill and quite busy and unable to schedule any meetings since March, 2010. Well, technically a lot of meetings have been scheduled since then, they've just always been canceled at the last minute, meaning that I get all excited about giving and getting feedback from my fellow writers only to have my hopes continuously dashed just before the appointed hour.

But in the end, another group, the Loudoun County Writers Group run by a wonderful woman named Susan, has been very welcoming and helpful for me to hone my writing skill. But at the same time, both groups have repeated again and again how my characters are uninteresting each time they get a new piece of my script and I don't know quite what to do. I have some very good suggestions that would change the story around a bit that I will try to implement at some point before I release the Tag to the writing groups – So far, at least the Loudoun group has read the Teaser and all 5 Acts and are just waiting for the Tag. Of course, with all the missed meetings in the Verge group, they're still on Act 4, but it's good to have feedback for most of the script from the Loudoun group.

In the end, I will probably move the climax at the end of Act 5 to be the new Teaser and make the current Teaser, as of script revision 856, the beginning of Act 1. As it is, that would mean the Teaser takes place about a week before Act 1 and, assuming this becomes a Radio play, this is is very hard to do without some narration indicating that Acts 1 - 5 now occur in the past relative to the Teaser and Tag. I don't want to use the crutch of narration because it breaks the suspension of disbelief and although that practice was common in the 1940s, it's relatively frowned upon today. There's also the problem of the ever-growing Acts. Acts that I'd like ideal to be 5 - 10 minutes at most are now bursting at the seems with 20 or so minutes of action! I really don't know what to do. I don't think Episode 1 should be a 2-parter – Episodes 2 - 3 already are and not enough happens in Episode 1 to sustain it through 2 full episodes! That means a lot of dialog is going to need to be cut. That, too, breaks my heart, but at least I have the version control software to recover the lost content should I ever so desire.

As for the bland characters, I will probably put more of the Professor and Yuseph's back story in the Auditorium speech and may do more exploring in Act 4's environment to make it seem less mundane and explain why the characters are so restricted in their actions. But overall, it's as I feared long ago: there's too much technobabble. Of course, I don't want to give away too much in this public forum, but needless to say, there is work I can do to improve the script but even then I think Episode 1 is a total failure and as Episode 1 fails, so fails the entire Project KronoSphere concept. Alas and alack, I knew the Professor well!

But even if I do edit the script 1 more time, as I've said in my Twitter Feed @TimeHorse, "Editing my own work a third time would get me fired if I worked in Television." And yet, that's what this is: a third draft. To be making such major edits so late in the script just demonstrates how poorly a writer I truly am. And as for my pipe dream of seeing Project KronoSphere Television, that dream is utterly hopeless. Ironically, when I was googling to find a link to the Verge Writers of Reston, I actually came upon this link: NBC Universal Careers. Oh, would that I were young, unencumbered and able to just hop on a plane and spend more than 5 months in Los Angeles even if it would be a stepping stone into a much less lucrative dream career, one in which, in 10 - 15 years, I may be able to build up enough of a reputation and enough experience to pitch and sell the Project KronoSphere idea, write it the way it should be written and finally garner the $50,000,000 per series that a proper dramatic television series needs to survive. Then, promptly get canceled 13 episode in because I didn't have and Daleks and go on to try produce the rest of the story as a cheap radio program.

So be it!

It's not easy being Green... or Blue for that matter

I attended the DC Podcaster Alliance meetup over the weekend and much to my delight, the topic of the day was using Chroma Key (commonly referred to as Green Screen) in your podcast. Although at times it was slow to explain or information too basic or not much use, the talk given by Ray, the author of the Produce Picker podcast (see comments), was excellent and rather enjoyable. The meeting was crammed to the gills as this talk was apparently a very popular topic. I previously attended a meetup in November which was about legal issues with respect to protecting your podcast which has me seriously thinking about designing a trademark for my production company, TimeHorse, Multimedia — as well as simply incorporating, like the folks at Green Dragonfly, LLC.

I do dream of Project KronoSphere being a live-action drama, with real actors and computer generated special effects, and Chroma Key would make that a lot easier. None the less, the Computer Generated Images (CGI) alone are quite beyond me, having cut my chops on POV-Ray many a moon ago only to be completely frustrated with how difficult it is to create even the simplest of landscapes. And POV-Ray would only generate a single frame of video, never mind animating this creature or that monster or even a simple moving table. And then there is the problem that a proper drama should have 3 cameras to switch between close-ups and long shots, and I don't even have one. Finally, I think it will be deathly hard to get simple voice actors to voice Episode 4a, never mind do live-action. It all boils down to who will do it for a proportion of the money I plan to make on this, which is currently $0? I might be able to do all the male voices for a given script, but I'm at a loss when it comes to sounding feminine. I will probably ask folks in the various clubs and associations I belong to, asking for volunteers, but let me finish the script for Episode 4a first, and then worry about actors.

Finally, as a follow-up to yesterday's post, I was thinking of attending The Washington Area Novel Writers' Critique Group this weekend, but was too knackered and decided to bugger it off instead. I'm still pretty bummed out about the incident from a couple weeks ago, so I haven't make any progress on Episode 4a since my last update about it. Finally, for those wondering about the title: on film it is often easier to use blue as the Chroma Key rather than green.

Writing in a Vacuum

As a writer, I sometimes long for input. I have asked a few friends to take a look at my work, and 2 of them have given fair and valuable critique but I really wish I could find more like-minded, aspiring writers. My wife has always resented my writing; she thinks it is a pointless enterprise as it may never generate revenue and what is the point of my life if not to generate revenue? Well, I love my wife more than words can express, and there is no way I'm going to quit my day job for the life of an aspiring writer, so in that sense she is absolutely right. But I still have a story to tell — this story — and wish I could spend time with others like myself who just need to write. I did have one aspiring writer friend — the one you, good reader, are no doubt getting sick of hearing about at this point — but trying to connect with her on this issue lead to the result I discussed in my last entry, so there is no need to rehash that sad tale. I discussed this issue with someone earlier this week, and that person suggested that I would be better served finding a local writers' group to help spur my creative spirit and hopefully replace my muse.

So this day, a lovely warm Friday in the mid-Atlantic region of the nation the Chinese call beautiful, I decided to go to my local library and ask the kind and friendly librarian whether she knew of any amateur writers' groups that meet in this area. Well, we searched meetup.com and The Virginia Writers Club for information, and both look promising but neither quite hits the mark. The main problem with The Virginia Writers Club is that it costs money to join. As someone starting out, I would have to join as an Associate member, and the cost would be, as far as I can tell, $30 (US) per year. There is also a $100 annual level and a $500 lifetime level to join this 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization. All in all, The Virginia Writers Club seems like a nice idea, but I think I'm too early in my development to be thinking so big. However, they do have a meeting in a nearby library so if I did join, it would not be too inconvenient.

This leaves me the meetup option. There were 2 groups of interest on meetup.com, The Washington Area Novel Writers' Critique Group, which meets a bit farther than I'd like to travel for such a group, and the Aspiring Women Novelists Meet-up, which meets at an inconvenient time and, well, the other obvious problem. The Washington Area Novel Writers' Critique Group meets on the weekend, making them time-convenient if not for the fact that I prefer spending my weekend with my wife as I don't get to see her much of the week. None the less, I do like their motto and hope to attend a meeting sometime.

As for the Aspiring Women Novelists Meet-up, it meets at a very inconvenient time: 10:00 in the morning on a weekday, which is no doubt chosen to keep males like me away. I do tend to have unusual hours, so for instance I don't like meetings that take place much after 19:00 since I generally have to get up the next day at 03:00 in the morning. However, what I consider convenient, namely 16:00 weekdays, is generally out of reach for most working professionals. So ironically, had this group chosen 16:00 as a time to avoid working professionals — and were it not for the other, obvious reason I would not be allowed to attend — I might find this group the most convenient of the lot. But, then there is that other problem, since last time I checked, through no fault of my own, I am not a woman. Since I really do want to join a society that is positive-reinforcing and goal-oriented, the Aspiring Women Novelists Meet-up does seem like a perfect match for me, but there's no point lamenting what we can't change so alas, they may be for me, but I am clearly not for them.

Finally, I looked into creating my own positive-reinforcing and goal-oriented, free-membership, locally run, 16:00 on a weekday meetup. Meetup.com wanted money. Since a podcast will likely net me $0 per everything, I don't think I can afford this approach. So there you have it, my options to join with my fellow writers for my ambitious writing project are not great, but they exist. And if that's not good enough, there's always Craig's List...