One Day More

After several hours of perusing the interwebz for information prior to my juice fast, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really only need copious amounts of the following items on hand:

1. Apples
2. Spinach/Kale
3. Celery
4. Carrots
5. Ginger

The Plan, or Lack Thereof

The plan is simple: I eat my last meal on Friday, then juice fast for 10-14 days or until death takes me.

I suppose I should think more about it than that, but I’m trying to keep things simple. A big factor in why I am choosing to do this is the absolute simplicity of it, which at least makes it hard to loose track of. Let’s take this step by step.

The Juice Fast (Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet!)

One of the many lovely perks of working for a Jewish agency is that you get a lot of holidays off that most people (including many Jews) have never heard of. This past Monday and Tuesday was one such example, and as fate would have it I get NEXT Monday and Tuesday off as well!

So how does one celebrate having two 4-day weekends in a row?

Well I mean there’s holidays and something, but I mean really celebrate! How to make this day different because you get a day to do whatever you want and your wife and all your friends have to go to work?

This past weekend I destroyed myself, but that’s another story for another time.

Next week, the experiment begins.

One More Time (Why Not?)

Oh yes, I have a blog.

This has been sitting dormant for some time, but I think it's high time I dust this off and get moving on it. I'm sitting at my computer, my wife (holy shit I have a wife) is sitting in the other room watching "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" again on Netflix, and I can't think of a better time to start the gears of this blog moving once more!

Seriously, could there be a more ideal time? I asked my friend to be my Best Man while he was sitting in my living room pants-less drawing Dungeon and Dragon maps in my living room. These are the sort of people I keep in my life. If this isn't par for the course I don't know what is.

My life is in flux, but no more in flux than any other period of my life. I'm in the crazy-insane-please-kill-me period of my current job, and I've got a million things to read and a million things to write, which is not entirely uncommon for me.

I suppose that calamity is a pretty good starting point right?

Back to the Drawing Board: Blake Snyder’s Structure Method

Now that the summer’s come and gone, I've gotten back to my own writing. Namely, the one script that has plagued me for years: Ciao. Ciao is more than a story. It’s a tribute to a family friend who had a great influence on my development and love of movies. I only have a smattering of memories to work with, the rest is letters and papers he wrote when he was alive.

Reading my current draft, something dawned on me: my script sucked. It was thin and fake. There was no substance to my characters, and they were talking heads in a 2-d world.

As Willum Dafoe said in Spiderman. “Back to formula.” That’s where Blake Snyder comes in.

What I Learned from Reading a Hundred Crappy Pilots

This was the summer of "meh."

I read about 125 screenplays total. They were of all varieties and genres, from the almost painfully mundane to the beyond fantastic. I read one or two gems, scripts that really blew my mind. However, the overwhelming majority this year were, for lack of a better way of putting it, just okay. It took me a long time to figure out why.

The Brutal Ten Percent

I’m only a fifth of the way into my quota, and already I’m struggling. I’m holding off on my judgment of some scripts. I’m delaying my decision. I want to wait. Most of the time people hold off on a good thing because they fear they may miss something better. I’m doing quite the opposite: I’m looking for something worse.