PiBoIdMo and 30 Todays

This past weekend ended daylight savings time (or began it?  I forget), and our household "fell back" an hour, earning (one would think) an extra hour's sleep.  But we have preschooler twins, so our extra hour turned into a just as early but extra long morning.  And I have to say, it was sublime.  Spending time with brand-new or nearly new people is a fantastic way to see the world with renewed eyes.  It's also completely exhausting, but despite that exhaustion, new people are inspiring, and my new people are making me better at the things I thought I was already doing kinda well.

Case in point:  The PiBoIdMo Challenge.  Once informed, I immediately said, "Yes!  I will do it!"

What is the PiBoIdMo Challenge?  Well, for real and specific details, you can check out Tara Lazar's site where she explains it.  In short, the goal is for participants to come up with 30 ideas for 30 children's picture-books in 30 days, making November a kind of national Picture Book Idea (PiBoId) month (Mo)!  I also find it a wonderful "keeping-writers-motivated-through-the-holiday-grind" challenge, and I can't thank Tara enough for sending out the mass invite.

My twins inspire a great many picture book ideas, and they often enjoy telling me lengthy yarns of their own, more often than not featuring their "brothers" Iron Man, Superman, and Captain America, and their sisters (or sometimes alter-egos) Hello Kitty and her twin sister Mimi (also "Boxy" in our house).  It's spectacular, and fun, and the cruelty of it is by the time they're in bed or I have access to a pad and paper, I'm so bleary-eyed from the day I can hardly remember my name (or to take the keys out of the front door lock, or to take the milk out of the cabinet and put it in the refrigerator where it belongs), let alone recount or even short-hand the cool, funny, and remarkable sayings, ideas and tales of the day.

Tara's great gift to me this November is to commit me to writing at least one down.  I wake up in the morning with that goal in mind, I hold onto it like a lifeline in raging waters throughout the day, and when an idea--ANY idea, as with a goal of 30, they don't all have to glow in the dark!--solidifies enough to form words, I scratch it down so at the day's end I can decipher my harried scrawl and translate it to an actualized, fully-formed book concept.

Today is the fifth.  So far, I have not missed a day.  While I began this blog with the intention of posting once a day, then once a week, then blinked and months sped by, I do believe I'm up for this 30 day November challenge.  And with a recently received writing rejection under my belt--a real one that took energy to apply for and months to receive--I believe in myself as a writer.  And with remarkable twin preschoolers lighting up my days, I simply believe in me.  Today, at least. 

To extra-hours and longer mornings.  

To exhaustion by preschoolers.  

To 5 down and 25 todays to go!
 

Burning Both Ends

You know you're staying up too late when your cat irritably comes to fetch you to bed.

Burps In The Road

The Marvelous And Magical

I can't remember when or why I started drawing, but by kindergarten it was something I did a lot and greatly enjoyed.  I also had (and still have) a deep affection for books that began long before I can remember.  My parents had a lot of books I wasn't allowed to peruse at my leisure, mainly because most of them were words-only books and as I was an avid drawer I'm sure they wanted to protect their things from doodles and crayons.  I'm also sure that mild restriction only added to the great mystique books held for me, then and now.  Books were special, treasures.  My mom often took my brother and me to the "big" city library, and it was like walking into magic to be surrounded by all those books!  And an entire wing packed with books just for kids?  Amazing.  We'd select a few, check them out, cherish and re-read and re-read them at home, then carefully bring them back.  

Because they weren't ours to keep.  They were not mine.  Yeah, it's a thing.

It seemed to me then a lot of things were "not mine."  Being little in a world of adults, everything seems made for giants or inherently dangerous or not allowed.  My world happened to be cable-TV-free, so there were no "just for kids" channels, and just-for-kid-ness seemed uniquely limited to things like Saturday morning cartoons, Sunday paper comics, booster seats at restaurants...  There was a vast adult world kids got to visit...and then had to take a nap.

One thing I knew was mine and just for kids was school, and I loved school.  Still do.  When I was in kindergarten, our school library held a bookmark design contest.  First prize was a brand new, hardbound Complete Winnie The Pooh.  I knew and loved Winnie the Pooh, even though I knew Pooh was not just for kids.  A grown up wrote it after all, and my parents enjoyed reading it and laughed at things I didn't quite get -- there's more to that bear than first meets the eye.  I didn't understand why I was sad when Pooh was left to wait on the hill for Christopher Robin to return, but I was, and I hugged my bear "Cousin" especially hard so he wouldn't be sad, too.  So, for the bookmark contest, I drew Pooh bear eating out of a pot of honey with bees flying around.  I drew it with pencil, just like a big kid, and I WON!  My bookmark design was selected over every other kindergartener, first and second grader in my little school and was replicated (probably just xeroxed, but it seemed like a very professional publication to me at the time) so everyone could take my drawing home and mark their places in their own very special books with it.  And as an artist, I got my first commission -- a hardbound book that was entirely, completely mine.

I don't still have that bookmark.  It was lost to the ages.  But I remember feeling shocked and  utterly surprised my drawing was chosen.  After all, I'd been competing against bigger kids--two full years bigger, and in kindergarten-terms, that's like a generational split.  That little bookmark contest felt like a huge endorsement and was what let me think of myself as more than a kindergarten kid visiting the world.  I started to think of myself an artist, and to see my artwork as something special that not everyone could do.


Not that I thought of cartoons, art, or anything creative as something I'd get to do for real.  You get to do art when the real work was done, after school or during free time.  I believed making art and drawing were enjoyments I would have to earn by working at other things, real things, because art is an indulgence reserved for leisure time and play.  I did not think, "when I grow up, I'm going to be an artist."  I was an artist already, just like I already had brown hair and a spider vein on my finger--it was just another inseparable part of me.  And for some reason, I thought that meant it wasn't valuable.  I don't know why or where I got that idea, but I wish I hadn't.  

At least some small part of me doubted that ridiculous conviction, though.  The part of me that was elated to be recognized among bigger, older, better-skilled, more mature competitors.  The part of me that cherished that Winnie the Pooh book and kept it safe all these years.  The part of me that's warmed by a rare sense of pride and a secret sense of shared magic when I read that book to my daughters, who also love that marvelous bear.

Woe Is Writer

If writing were this easy and painless, I'd have completed whole libraries by now...

I recently read an article about boosting self-confidence with the power of positive thinking.  

How original -- snide remark compliments of my inner critic.

When it's on break from beating me to a non-productive, quivering pulp, my inner critic often amuses itself with wonderfully cruel asides.  It should blog...  Funny thing, the article knew my inner critic well and said the reason it's swelled to the limits of my skull is because I'm a girl.

"Another perk of womanhood!  Yay!"

--said my inner-critic.  I'm calling her Unis.  (The rest of me had a bit of an f.u. reaction...)

The article claimed that's because little boys tend to be criticized way more than little girls.  What?  I have no idea why that would be the case, but let's say it is.  The article claims boys criticize and tease each other more openly than girls, and anecdotally-speaking that does seem to be the case.  And it feels true that girls grow and nurture a substantially stronger inner critic than boys.  Just look at public restroom behavior.  En masse, women don't tolerate gross bathrooms or slovenly bathroom habits.  Men do.  Within 10 minutes any male public restroom becomes a post-apocalyptic mire pit.  Which I don't get at all.  Anyway, the article said because they're more used to criticism being heaped upon them, boys learn early to shake it off, confront it, or ignore it.  Which is why some can miss a toilet or sign their names in pee and go right back to their day.  Men who don't behave that way--often just hold it until they get home, if they are so able.  On the other hand, girls perceive criticism often when it isn't even really there.  We experience it more acutely, and internalize it, making it part of our identities.  A slovenly bathroom reflects on us, and we will not have that. We'll demand intervention, call in a manager, complain, the most fringe of our sex may even attack the mess themselves!

I don't know if the article was accurate, but it felt and feels true.  At least as a description of me and Unis.  And the inner-critic theory also fits with the "practice makes perfect" model.  Most boys and men I've known do seem better at ignoring, compartmentalizing or confronting than I am, all skills I'd like to master, though not at the expense of decent public bathrooms.  And I do dread a regular regimen of high-fiber frustration and cardio-criticism just to build my confidence muscles.

"Embrace your anxieties."

Shut up, Unis.

 

Screw The Devil You Know

For the longest time, I feared a creative career would make me hate being creative.  I'd heard authors and artists complain bitterly about compromising their vision or bowing to market pressure or client whims, or having to spend all their time making only one kind of thing which limited their time to explore other kinds of things.  Selling creative product corrupted their joy.  

I was terrified of that.  Of losing art.  Losing the joy of creating.  It's very personal and satisfying and self-indulgent to tap the imagination.  A person can do lifetimes of living deep within. 

What would I do if art and language ceased to delight?  The very notion is unbearable.  I don't mean to be melodramatic about that, but it is.  Unbearable to lose that passion, that escape, that huge component of my identity.  And because I worried so much that a creative career would corrupt my enjoyment of it, I kept it to myself and working was only a means of supporting my creative habit.  Art was my fantastical plan C or E or Q.  It wasn't something you do for a living, it's what you do after you get home from doing what you do for a living.  Art is for evenings and weekends and to be set aside before the rigors of a real work day.  

I worked and I created and I didn't sleep much, and all the while I secretly hated myself for giving it up like that.  And I resented any intrusions into my creative "free time."  I harbored anger, I nurtured dread, and I fed my inner-critic to bursting.  But the Devil you know, right?  At least going without art most of the time spared me the possibility of going without forever.

I worked a wide variety of jobs, putting in sometimes twelve hour days just to race home clinging to whatever kernel of an idea I was attempting in the hope I could execute it before exhaustion set in.  Road Crew was among the more vivid as it involved scraping up road-kill, repairing guard rails, digging ditches, washing trucks, laying asphalt, applying hundreds upon hundreds of those little yellow reflectors...  It may sound strange, but clearing culverts and rotting street-meat remains one of my most favorite support-my-writing-habit jobs.  It was physical and demanding and my brain was my own most of my time.  I could re-direct traffic and still write in my head all day long.  I could be there, and not be there at the same time.  It was great.  On the other hand, that's also a recipe for getting run over.  Happily, I didn't.   

Now that I have children, I look back on "my youth" in awe of the vast quantities of "free time" I had at my disposal and wonder, "why didn't I do more [enter any fun or productive pass-time]?"  I didn't vacation, I didn't party, I didn't entertain friends much or tackle my increasingly long list of hobbies and activities I'd like to get to one of these days.  Instead, I hoarded and funneled what time I could into my real work, my life's work, my raison d'etre.  I learned, I wrote, I drew.  Effort and inspiration poured out of me in sporadic, undisciplined bursts, often stalling out or switching projects as energy came and went.  Then back to work to earn scratch enough to keep buying supplies, to keep dreaming.

I don't know exactly when I started to really care about including others in my dreams.  I know I did care, right from the start, but at some point it became an actual goal, sharing with others.  It wasn't enough to make something, I wanted that something to be seen and felt, I wanted to engage with others, to be heard and to listen.  Maybe I grew up a little.  I realized I'd sabotaged years of creative productivity by wasting years' worth of available productive hours on irrelevant labors and being afraid of losing something I couldn't actually separate from myself if I tried.  I'm an artist.  I'm a writer.  I can't not be, I don't know how.  Thanks to a collection of odd jobs, I do know how to do a ton of other things.  I console myself saying these experiences all feed the writing, they all inspire the art, but I'd rather have that time back.  If I had it, I'd probably write a better post.  

On the other hand, I don't know if I'd have thought of the cartoon...

Blue, Pink, Sith, Oh My!

The best thing about getting a new dishwasher (or any other large kitchen appliance) is it comes in a gigantic box.  As all fans of the Toy Hall of Fame know, there is not much better in life than a great big, unassigned box.  It is object, space, room, canvas, frame, vehicle -- a big box can be anything, and if your home is kid-infested, too, that opportunity should not be lost.

In our house, the box met several needs.  All kids love a hidey-hole to make their own, and you can't do better for that safety and convenience-wise than with a big cardboard box.  The world of tike-mites is rife with stickers (almost every event and activity ends with 'em!), and we needed a convenient sticker-repository to spare the rest of our things from sticker-mania.  And we needed a kid-friendly project to interest-up a couple afternoons.  Then the dishwasher broke and --  Hooray!  -- we got a great big box!


For us, it was a multi-day event.  After much discussion of what it should be, my daughters decided they wanted a house of their own, so one day was spent transforming the box with a little  peaked roof, windows and a door.  Looking back, the windows could have had working shutters and I should have better re-enforced the door, but all in all the construction went well.  Another day was in preparation of its decoration, and we shopped for supplies and colors.  My daughters are identical twins, so of course one picked blue paint and the other picked pink.  We set up outside for an afternoon of painting any way they wanted.  I didn't care how it looked (it's not my house, after all, it's theirs), I just wanted them to make it their own.  

Boy, did they, with a miss-mash of color and design, speckled with stickers outside, a whole nebula of stickers inside, spiraling out and layers deep.  It has been a space ship, a cave, a submarine, a castle, a "kitty cave," a workplace, a school, the store, the library...  I'd wager it's one of the the hardest working boxes in America.

But something happened in the painting process.  When you're little (and when you're big), there are never enough chances to do things any way you want, and sure enough a couple of our young neighbors upon spotting our free-for-all wanted to join in.  We made do with the brushes and paints so everyone got thoroughly coated.  My girls were excited to share and to show their neighbors what they'd done to make the house ready, including the paints they picked themselves.  Then the oldest girl commented:


"Blue?  That's a boy color."


I couldn't believe the statement.  I mean, yes, I could believe it.  I'm in preparation for a friend's baby shower, she's having a boy, and I'm shopping around for "boy-colored" things.  And now that my girls are in preschool, I understand better how hyper-aware little kids are to classification and distinction.  They take great pride (and seem to feel great relief) when they can correctly group or identify a dominant characteristic.  Currently, my daughters are very focused on finding socially acceptable occasions to express the phrase "p.u., stinky!"  For example, if you smell a strong smell, like garbage, it is perfectly reasonable to mark the observation with a "p.u., stinky!" as long as you make the remark about the thing and not, say, the person carting it to the dumpster.  And you can see their confidence soar when they correctly identify a smell and occasion that justifies saying without reprisal, "that's so stinky!"


My blue-loving daughter looked like the older girl had struck her in the face, and for a moment I resisted the impulse to return the favor (I am frequently alarmed by these semi-violent mommy impulses I get from time to time.  They're totally irrational, I've never acted on them, but if fantasy prepares you for real-world situations, I can say with confidence I'm so prepared to war for these tots of mine, it scares me.).  But seeing my daughters' startled shock, and even more out of a sense of duty to little girls everywhere, I could not let that comment stand.  It's one thing to theme a baby shower, it's quite another to restrict half the human race from a major chunk of the color spectrum.  

And maybe I'm particularly sensitive to this issue.  Okay, yes, I am.  I grew up with a wide range of interests that included everything my older brother did, often to his annoyance, and while my many interests were encouraged, they couldn't all be financed.  My brother got the toolbox, but I borrowed it until he relented years later and gave it to me.  I still have it.  I made dolls, I climbed trees, I built forts, I sewed dresses, and none of that made me more or less girl.  My boy-pals didn't invite me to their all-boy birthday parties, my girl-pals made fun of me if I wore bows or ribbons, and I got real familiar with the term tom-boy, which to this day I believe reveals a significantly retarded imagination in the speaker.  And I hate that "girlie" and "like a girl" remain commonly-used if mild insults, while "oh, boy!" connotes excitement and "man-up" courage.  Boys have plenty of junk heaped on them, too, but I wasn't gonna let some first-grader crush my toddlers first forays into self and independence.  Besides that, both my daughters' eyes are blue.  And they know it.  Something drastic had to be done.

"There's no such thing as boy colors or girl colors," I said.  "There are only colors." 

I know there are tons of examples, I guess beginning with baby showers on up, when specific colors are not only easy identifiers but appropriate go-to shorthands for sex distinction.  But in a wider context, color is just color.  In another, it's the absent frequency of reflected light, so the color we see is really the color we're not seeing, and after our brain does some simple math, we say, "well hello, yellow."  

That's as un-sexed as I can describe it.

I think I succeeded in sounding  firm yet encouraging.  At least no-one cried.  And the painting fun continued.  Irrational protective-mommy impulses aside, I don't ever want to tear any kid down to prop mine up.  It's destructive, doesn't really work, and this world needs as many whip-smart kids to grow up with psyches and feelings intact as possible.  Funny enough, to help make my point, I steered their conversation to "girl things" they knew that are blue (certain items, characters, princesses, etc.), applying one kind of gross stereotype to try to combat another--sounds stupid, and it was, but feelings--and my daughter's self-confidence--were preserved.

Whether they decide to be Sith or Jedi, so far my girls' light-sabers are pink and blue.

The Power of Power

I grew up in a magical land called the foothills where snow came each year and knocked out the power.  (More accurately, snow came each year and invariably sent some yahoo-nin-cow-poop too dumb to stay home careening into a transformer-bearing power-pole, knocking out the power, but I digress...)  We lived with a well and well-pump, so no electricity also meant no running water, which meant no doing dishes, taking showers, or flushing toilets (more than once, because of course the tanks hold one flush).  It was like going back in time, except we initiated each low-tech term with board games by lantern light and polishing off any ice-cream in the freezer before it turned to soup.  In the hours or days that followed, we'd play in the snow and warm up by the wood-stove, read and talk, and let the sun set our bedtime.  I remember feeling particularly frontier-ish once, building a helicopter with nails and block wood, drawing details and a pilot with a ball point pen, making a low-tech toy "just like the early settlers did," I told my mom not at all ironically.  Yearly and from an early age, I experienced and learned to embrace this trans-formative event.

Lean years later, while still a grad student and living so close to the cuff our "nights" in the LA dim were accompanied by police helicopters and we actually took comfort when gunshots we heard were only single-shot, and not even a full clip, we learned the power's-out-fuse-box dance.  Strike up the microwave and the electric skillet simultaneously?  Shee-yeah!  What Bacchanalian madness is that?  But those bouts of darkness were typically short and fixed with a flip (albeit with some electrocution anxiety) of the fuse.  Neighborhood outages were surreal because suddenly everyone's loud music, basketball and video games went silent, and we'd all sit in hushed anticipation wondering which would pop up first, power, gunshots or sirens.  I never got in on the action, but I'm sure someone somewhere was taking a ton of bets.

So you'd think I'd have some perspective.  But, no.  Last week, whilst yon household was enjoying the throes of flu, fever, and vomit, our power went out.  And I felt actual panic!  Suddenly, nothing could charge, no cable could be viewed, because we've bundled everything, our hardline didn't work, and since we're so i-phonic around here, I don't even have a watch that keeps time!  I felt like a hiker whose compass suddenly starts spinning willy-nilly.  Aaaaaa!

With this most recent outage, the first thing I did was try to calm my preschoolers (who couldn't have cared less having already moved on to other toys).  Then I went outside to confirm the outage was more than our building and even crossed the street to address neighbors I'd never seen before to confirm -- YES! horror of horrors, theirs was out, too!  No one could turn on their lights!  And in a scant six hours when the sun went down, that might matter!  In pajamas and slippers, sniffling and snuffling, about to fall over from influenzic paralysis, I scuffled back inside to announce, with a distinct note of tragedy, the outage had crossed the street, and we were...

What, doomed?  I have no idea what I was afraid of because the TV was already on again (kiddos still unconcerned, having abandoned cartoons to be superhero princess pirate doctors in their room), and the clocks, laptops, kindles, cell phones, home phone...all was charging, functioning, whirring away.  And I have no idea why I felt so panicked, or why my first thoughts were of electronics and not on how best to maximize the perishables in the fridge.  Where have my survival skills gone?  Or is it that I've been so caught up swimming intellectual property waters I've forgotten that the rest of me is firmly anchored in the material here-and-now?
  
I'm not a wuss.  I come from serious stock with deep, dark roots.  I'm foothill-hardened and ghetto-tough.  I don't just know how to put them on, I've made snow-chains!  

I plead the flu.

Family Ties and Bindings

I know a very talented composer/song-writer.  Like so many in the music biz who blow my mind, he is versatile and able with a whole mess of instruments and can, all by himself, compose, arrange and record a full score's worth of music all by himself, playing every part, with a little home-recording equipment and mixer.  Amazing.  Because he insists on having ridiculous extravagances like uninterrupted health insurance and paying his bills in a timely manner, he teaches and manages in addition to composing, but he longs for a day when he a score gig, theme-song or recurring jingle pays well enough that he can devote his working days to music full time.  

He landed a commercial, a national commercial, which doesn't equate to suddenly living in a beach house in Malibu but is, nonetheless, a monster big deal, especially to those of us still on the breaking-in side of any creative industry.  He excitedly shared this fantastic news with his family, explaining that he'd sold an original song that would then be recorded and played, nation-wide, on multiple channels, etc.  Very exciting stuff.  Through it all, his mom uh-huhed and smiled and listened, and then said, "I don't see how this makes you money, though."  He explained again about copyright and pay-per-play and rates varying by channel and exposure and repeated play.  "Uh-huh," she said, still confused.  "But why do they pay you for that?"


His big news fell like a stone.  It was kicked around a little through dinner.  Finally, he stopped trying to make his mom understand not only that he would earn money every time the song was used but that he deserved to be paid for each use.  He returned to SoCal and LaLa Land  a little heart-broken.  


Family is such a funny thing.  Nothing means more or is harder to get than a ringing family endorsement, and no rejection by colleagues, friends or strangers stings quite like an unenthusiastic, "it's nice but--" from a relation.  It's especially problematic when your work is outside the familial expertise or taste.  Help-books and friends tell you to harness these feelings, channel them into your work, because they are potent and real and universal, feelings rooted in the deepest love and respect --

These are the feelings that make lifelong careers!  

For therapists.

ba-dah-dah-dah!

Hero of My Own Story--Sort Of...

 
Whenever I'm cleaning up or putting away or scraping poo off my daughter's rain boot, I try to remember I am the hero of my own story.  This is my saga.  My time is now!  So is yours.

Try This

It's the year of the black water dragon, and I'm trying new things.  Like applying my skills to self-promotion and networking, reconnecting with the old, introducing myself to the new.  Like writing every single day, even if the result isn't worth the virtual page it's printed on.  Like getting up an hour early to get my behind to the gym.

Yep, did that today.  Yep, was awesome.  Yep, feel like a super-something-awesome and the endorphins are only just now wearing off.  Here's to the year of the dragon and not letting life get in the way.

True Lies And Non-Fiction Fiction

I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "film is a lie at 24 frames per second."  Well, that's true, of course, because a film is not life, it's a construction.  Even a documentary cannot be anything other than a construction.  But in openly-admitted fiction that is in no way trying to be True, how much is true by necessity?

A common debate you'll hear throughout the humanities centers on how much of the artist is evident in the art.  How much of what's written is the writer?  There are whole schools of criticism that take up variations of that one question.  You can build a whole career in critical studies just exploring auteur theory.  Way back when, one of my professors (also a novelist) was deeply annoyed we (his idiot students) kept making assumptions about an author based a novel he wrote.  For instance, one of the characters was quite perverse which prompted our creative interpretations of what the author believed about sex and women and sundry accoutrements.  The discussion got pretty detailed, and gross, and my professor ended up throwing a chair to get our attention back.  

I had yet to brave the admission I was, myself, a writer.  Publishing cartoons and writing all the time were my hobbies and side-lines, things I knew I would do for the rest of my life, but only in addition to a real career.  Because no-one writes books or draws cartoons for a living.  Those rare exceptions I saw in the newspaper or magazines or bookstore were freaks of nature or products of nepotism or luck.  They were not regular, real people from no-where like me.  Regular, real people from no-where go into law or medicine or other linear careers of easily measured success (apologies to the lawyers, doctors, and others laughing at me right now, but  these were the assumptions of my juvenile mind).  I had not yet faced the fact that I was headed for a creative career, so I didn't yet realize having any sort of audience meant I, too, was going to have to brave being exposed.  As a multi-panel cartoonist, I joked I was a "stripper" by trade.  I didn't realize at the time how very accurate that would be.

Creating anything--even if you couch it in lies and call it fiction--is a kind of personal striptease.  Naturally, everything we "create" on some level reflects who and what we are.  Even intentionally avoiding subjects, settings, events, or characters from personal history is revealing.  No wonder it's such a daring and nerve-wracking thing to do.  I get nervous as bathing-suit weather approaches, I certainly don't feel any more confident showing my insides as well as my outsides.  When I started considering a creative career, I engaged in ridiculous fantasies to keep myself hidden.  I'd write under pseudonyms, use caricatures instead of photos of myself, hire an actor to stand in for me at public functions:

"And the award goes to...Jody Lindke.  Playing Jody this evening and accepting on her behalf, please welcome Vin Diesel." 

What's almost worse than feeling so self-conscious is the counter-impulse of feeling supremely vain.  Creative expression strikes the insecure me as a narcissistic act of screaming on paper, "look at me!"  My inner-critic is fat and happy as it goes to town mixing low-self-exteme with guilt-generating shame, and the result, I've discovered (as it was recently pointed out to me again) is I chronically hold back in my work.  


I'd been dealing with rejections and couldn't help asking myself over and over "what do they want?"--they in this case being publishers and producers and agents and readers and every level of gate-keeping in between--and I did this within hearing of a friend who reminded me, "what they want, really, is a piece of your soul."  Did you feel a chill?  'Cause I sure did.  If I didn't want to share my visage with others, I certainly didn't feel any more confident exposing any fraction of my soul to derision.  I wasn't gonna do it.  There had to be a way out.  I had to be able to pretend convincingly enough to keep myself separate--and safe--and still create compelling fiction and films.

Not so.  

Looking at the stories I revisit most, the shows and films and books I turn to, I realized it's not only true, that bit about the soul, it's right that it's true.  It is just.  It is good.  


It's also really, really, really intimidating...

Whether you're consuming art or creating it, you're engaged in an act of sharing, and what you're sharing is yourself, your humanity--y'know, that thing supernatural or immortal creatures always envy in us, that thing we always recognize in friendly aliens from other worlds and never find in the ones who want to eat us.  That thing is what makes a good story great, that makes us laugh and cry and feel we not just engaged with art but experienced it.

I thought I was done with a particular bit of fiction.  It does all the things it needs to do.  It's funny, it's moving, it's got a plot, plants have pay-offs...but some parts feel clipped, some opportunities lost, because I'd approached it as a story about "those people" in "that place," and kept myself away from it.  So what could be great is only good.  If I dig in and let that bit of soul I've been hoarding show, if I scrape down to expose the raw, real emotion and pain of what I'm writing about, it could be one of those stories you can't look away from or forget, the kind of story that becomes as real and personal as lived memory.  Drama is action driven by feeling, and I hadn't wanted to feel what drove the actions I'd written about.  I'd written about death and fear and lust and love and joy, but I'd protected myself, kept my clothes on, kept my humanity to myself.  It's intimidating to think of an audience seeing this and saying, "this is Jody's fear and lust and love and joy," reducing me to what fragments of myself slipped through.  I don't want the censure or humiliation.  If I invest myself and the work is rejected, I lose the self-soothing, "well, that wasn't really me."  However much I give any piece of writing, it is by nature a construction, but if I only ever play it safe, my work can never be more than artifice.  

Striptease may be an art, but making art is a striptease.  You can't hide and create. 

I often say story lets us live surrogate lives, but I realize now that's only possible when the teller is courageous enough to give real life to it.  That bit of soul they want is where Truth with the capital "T" resides.  Art doesn't give us feelings of strength or courage or empathy or solidarity or love or loss or hope.  Art stimulates real feelings because real feelings were put into that art. Feeling is the heart (note the phrase) of story.  That's what gives it the power to teach, to reveal our humanity, to cement our connectedness and acknowledge our fragility.  Dismissing it by calling it "fiction" is kind of naive.

Casting Vampires & Other Film School Cliches

It's awards season.  Festivals, viewer and professional award nominations are flooding the industry news, getting everyone excited and anxious to do new business.  For those in the rapids, congratulations and hang on tight!  For those on the shore, use the lull to gear up for next time.  And for those in between, do your best to stay afloat.  When it comes to scripted entertainment, sometimes just not going under deserves recognition and applause.

This season is always bitter sweet for me.  It brings to mind past projects:  the surprise when something you didn't realize was kinda good got some recognition, the suffocating silence when something you thought would do better isn't noticed at all.  It's a funny business.  

I had the great privilege of screening short films I worked on at festivals, at school, and at the DGA.  Like with writing anything, when you're involved in the making of a film, it's difficult to get the perspective and distance you need to actually see the film.  It's tough to see the edit for what it is when you're bogged down by memories of the making of the thing.  Maybe you can't see past the actor who seemed fine until he got drunk on set and felt-up half of your some-still-slightly-under-age, all-volunteer crew.  Or maybe you're stuck staring at the actress who swore she'd cut her hair to get the part but then refused half-way through production so the final third of the film doesn't make any sense.  Or the scene that should have had the hunky guy you already filmed for the plant scene but who didn't show up to shoot the pay-off, and you couldn't afford re-shoots so you never re-cast and what should have been a comedy isn't funny or even all that dramatic, so you're generally screwed.  Yeah, sometimes it's like that.


Like every department or component in any scripted entertainment, casting is crucial.  I won't say "casting is king" because we've all seen counter-examples and scripted entertainment, whether for the stage or the screen (of any size), is a team sport.  Quarterbacks and pitchers can't win by themselves, and a cast is nothing without a crew is nothing without a writer is nothing without a financier is nothing without...  Well, if financiers find themselves without, at least they have the means to buy it.  But I stand by the rest.  Back to casting.

It's a strange thing to be on the choosing side of casting.  I feel a little unambitious admitting I never used the "casting couch" as an opportunity to fleece someone for money or favors or to solicit border-line illegal "personal contact."  Talk about lost opportunities, right?  I found it challenge enough to just be at that table because I know what it's like to be on the other side.

There are many, many, many reasons I'm not an actor.  One biggie, I took theater in high school, where I learned that the anxieties typically associated with the audition side of a casting session pretty far exceed my anxiety threshold.  I'm always impressed when I meet (I'll add sane or happy) actors because what they do is really, really hard, and I don't mean performing.  Performing is an entirely different brand of difficult.  I mean auditioning, walking in cold, doing your thing (or their thing if there are sides), and walking out with no expectation of hearing from anyone, ever, about how you did or why you didn't get the job when you later see the film or show or program or commercial or print-ad or whatever.  That's really tough, and I find the people who can embrace that life and stress and remain whole with family and sanity intact are beyond remarkable.  Kudos. 

Though it is really important in film school to work on as many of your classmates projects as you can (every project is a massive learning experience and every crew position, no matter how unglamorous or seemingly unimportant, will teach you buckets about producing and getting the most from yourself and your work), one of the best things about film school was the push to make us cast real actors.  "Don't rely just on your classmates," soon became, "you will post ads, you will audition, you will cast real actors, or you will fail this class," and thank goodness it did, because nothing less would have gotten me to do it. 

There are several things you can expect to see in indie- and student films that scream cheap and cliche but which can be great if done with some exceptional flare or skill:  major scenes shot entirely on a couch, games of chess or prominently featured chess boards and pieces (often to indicate intelligence otherwise lacking in the character, writing, and film), protagonists running alone in metaphoric pursuit or metaphoric flight, over-use of close-ups, flat space, ridiculously severe stripy lighting justified by window blinds, no apparent ceilings coupled with obvious set-seams, twinkle-lights and generic neon signs...  Actually, it's a pretty long list and probably deserves a post unto itself.  Anyway, one of my shorts (prominently featuring too much flat-space, too many close-ups, and no ceilings whatsoever) embraced the reformed vampire cliche.  It's one of my favorites.  I don't like bullies or human predators, but I love a good redemption tale, and vamps typically have a lot to answer for.  

My film was about a latch-key kid who finds a vampire, knows what it is, and adopts him.  It doesn't end well.  Subtle, right?  Since vampires are heart-and-hand with sex and violence, I wanted to cast a very attractive grown man as my predator and a bright-eyed, prepubescent girl for my latch-key kid for added yet subtle tension.  Sh'yeah.  Okay, not subtle at all, but that's what I was looking for, and I tried to keep an open mind, and I found it!  The girl was terrific, inside and out, with a wonderful "stage mom" whose first and only priority was her daughter (not always the case with child performers and their moms).  For the vampire, I was torn between two actors.  One was fair, the other dark, one lanky the other beefy.  How to decide? 

When you're casting, you try to keep an open mind, partly because what you think you're looking for might not exist, and partly because preconceived tunnel-vision can blind you to discovering something great yet unexpected that an actor might bring to the role.  Every project lives for those moments, those hidden and inspired opportunities, and as a filmmaker and story-teller you struggle to keep yourself open enough to recognize them.  Both actors were easy on the eyes and willing to commit the significant time for rehearsals, shooting, sitting for mouth-molds so I could get prosthetic fangs made.  But one just had more of a "killer" vibe.  The other was a good actor, very personable, kind, smart, funny, with a terrific, easy-going smile that just lit up the room and made me (and by extension, would make my audience) want to know him more--a very charming guy.  I knew at once he'd be easy to work with even on long, long shooting days.  But the other guy--and it's magical when this happens in casting, when you stumble on that "it" factor, that "wow" moment where an actor just becomes or is exactly what you're looking for even though you didn't know until that very moment that's what you needed and wanted and can't do without--he just had this perfect and ominous je ne sais quoi that screamed "I'm a predator."  He was perfect. 

But when I prompted him later to improvise a scene where he's "cheering up a sad child" at, say, an airport or doctor's office, his same je ne sais quoi also whispered, "I might gut you between takes just to see the color of your insides."  And that was for "cheering up a child."

I cast the smiling Mr. Personable.  I was instantly rewarded by my instincts being confirmed.  He took the job seriously, was prompt and punctual and we got the prosthetic teeth molds and he was really supportive and friendly in the best possible way with the ten-year-old on set.  The prosthetic fangs were perfect and very believable in proportion, color and size.  Mr. Personable was so great, I was able to focus exclusively on the billion other problems that is shooting a student film, including re-writing the script almost from scratch mid-way through shooting because between lost locations and time there was no way what I wrote could be shot.  

Through it all, Mr. Personable smiled beautifully.  Because he couldn't not smile.  

Not even when he wanted to. 


This discovery was not made until dailies, which for this project meant half-way through production.  We'd shot the "temptation" scene, a dirty close-up of our killer face-to-face with the vampire-buffet that is a healthy little girl's pulsing throat.  He played it well, all in the eyes, and we could even see the flutter of her artery -- the shot really worked -- as his lips part and we see...no fangs.  Couldn't see the teeth.  Over and over, close-up after close-up, all burned film, all losses from budget and time, weeks of time and money in the one and only custom-prop, but not one shot, not once were the fangs visible.  Something I hadn't noticed about Mr. Personable until dailies was his mouth had a naturally smiling shape to it, lifting quite pleasantly at the corners, but also dipping slightly more than I anticipated from the corner to the mid-quarter of the lip, a dip perfectly suited not only to completely cover his incisors, but the extended fake fangs as well.

Back to set we went knowing what we had to do--maximize exposure of those fangs.  Without fangs, the character just looked like some creepy, pale guy following a ten year old girl home.  Without fangs, the tension was less predator vs. meal and more imminent child-rape, which is still evil vs. good in theme, but a noir of an entirely different shade and one I had no intention of re-writing to accommodate.  So, I laid it out, and he agreed -- we had to see the fangs!  

That's when we discovered he couldn't grimace.  The particular shape of his mouth and the development of his facial muscles which made him look so pleasant meant he could not sneer or snarl or bare his teeth in any menacing way to save his life.  And he tried.  He really worked at it.  Dude was totally committed to the role (and only working for copy and credit!  God, I love actors!), but he couldn't not smile, and teeth-gnashing of any kind was impossible.


Back went the fangs, priority rush, for modification.  Back to the edit bay, emergency panic, to figure out what was usable and what wasn't.  Back to the computer, frantic revision, because the film we started shooting wasn't possible, even with the changes we made to deal with the lost locations and time remaining.  Duly regrouped, we completed production...by embracing additional student-film cliches:  ridiculous make-up, over-use of music for lacking transitions, reveal-it-was-all-a-dream plot re-shuffle, and the classic we-can't-resolve-this-story-in-a-satisfying-way suicide ending.  

Obvious block-buster material.  It's how I made my first million.  [insert laughter here]

We finished it, the culmination of half a semester of overwhelming amounts of work and a life-threatening lack of sleep.  I think it's six minutes long.  Including the credits.   

Two years later, having finally saved up enough money to have my "negative cut" (this sucker was shot on real, physical film, mixed and screened off a telecined work-print), I enjoyed one final surprise student-film cliche:  lost negative.  Somewhere between the school and the film development house, exactly one reel of my film negative was misplaced, making it impossible to cut the negative and produce a finished film complete with (drum roll, please) optical mono-track sound transferred from hand-cut magnetic film!  Yeah!  

Personable as ever, Mr. Personable would've done re-shoots in a heartbeat -- a consummate worker and just that kind of guy.  But my latch-key kid went from ten to twelve, and in girl terms that's something like six inches taller, plus braces on her teeth--no way new footage would cut.  There ended any possibility of a formal screening, of festival submission, of cutting DVDs.  Not my favorite take-away from the student film-making experience, but a valuable lesson in blind trust, film storage and archiving.    
  
Aside from some seriously bitter disappointment at not being able to "time" and complete a finished print, I've never once looked back on this project and been sorry, especially about my cast and crew.  I got to shoot some stuff I'm really, really proud of, even if almost no-one will ever see it.  When I say I learned, I say it with major italics.  Ultimately filmmakers are just viewers who also happen to make films, so it's no surprise that what makes for a great movie or show viewing experience also makes for a terrific production experience.  Writers sometimes like to say, "it's an important story," or a "valuable tale," but good stories really boil down to the people in 'em, whether they're part of the action or the telling.  It's the people involved that make a story meaningful and the time communicating it well spent.  

I've gotten to work with some supremely kind and diligent people who gave their absolute all.  In this case, it was just to help tell a six-minute story pre-loaded with problems and cliches.  And it's still one of my favorites. 

Kobolds, Dragons, Resistance--Oh, My!

A friend of mine asked me for a favor, which earned a grumpy grumble from me because the favor request was right in the middle of my writing time (which is precious and rare enough these days), to which he said the following:  "I'm doing you a favor, I'm giving you every writer's dream: an excuse not to write!"  He was kidding of course, being a writer himself and very well acquainted with the throes and agonies of coming up with original creative content.  Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance in his book The War of Art, which I've found equal parts inspiring and comforting.  Pg. 22, check it:.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit.  We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget:  This very moment, we can change our lives.  There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.  This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance.

This second, we can sit down and do our work.

It sounds very Churchill, actually, and when it comes to bearing down on the task at hand, you can't do much better than Winston:  "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."  Overwhelming enemy, thy name is Resistance.  Time to kick you in the teeth! 

Sketching out the kobold was a welcome diversion, but I find there's no shortage of diversions  and today is necessarily a writing day.  Gonna give myself a couple Take-Ten launches, then jump into the new script.  As always, starting in one direction has sent my brains in a dozen more, so in addition to the new and very essential spec (which I don't have a plot for yet) is a feature I've been kicking about, two novels, and a super-raw scripted TV pilot that just began to percolate yesterday.  It will be interesting to see which wins out on the keyboard today.  I'm hoping it's the spec, as that comes with a hard and fast deadline and it's a script that might actually get read before anything else.

So fingers crossed, start your engines, and let's tackle a writing sprint.  Check back for an update about how it went today or tomorrow (along with a new cartoon!).  In the mean time, type hardy, type long, and edit not at all!

Lizard-man With A Dash of Color

My, aren't we feeling visual today.  What is it?

Why, yes.  Thank you for noticing.  It's a lizard man.  With a toothache.  

I see.

Care for a dash of color?

Please.

Thanks.

My pleasure.  

How about a 'toon?

Certainly.

...just that kinda day...

Pattie Kaiks and Self-Destruct Buttons

Growing up, most of my creative endeavors were pure rip-offs.  Stevenson's Kidnapped inspired me to write some really hacked high seas adventure tales.  I attempted a rendition of Watership Down except with kitties on a roadtrip.  And cartoon-wise, I knelt at the altars of Charles Schulz, Berkeley Breathed, Bill Watterson, and Pat Brady, and as I got older Kevin Maguire, Adam Hughes, Brooke McEldowney, Patrick McDonnell...it gets to be a pretty long list, actually, but if you look, you'll see them in there. 

In the Arts (note the big "A" on that), you're supposed to study from others with the aim that eventually imitation will yield to talent and originality.  Pattie Kaiks was my first attempt as a cartoonist to generate something entirely my own.  Of course it was necessarily influenced by everything I'd ripped off and imitated before--you are your past as much as you are your present--but unlike everything I'd done before, I didn't "fall into" Pattie Kaiks.  I designed her.

The opportunity fell from the sky a little--I'd been doing cartoons for some local papers and talking with my editor about applying to syndicates and trying to branch out with a comic strip.  He suggested I develop one for his weekly paper, something that would be relevant to local and current events, and I sat down to build Pattie.  Unlike my earlier work, this would be a comic strip of adults for adults!  (That didn't quite stick because...well, because I was writing it, and as a friend of mine likes to point out, if the world were slightly more forgiving, my outfits would likely be a mix of primary colors--all three, every day, like a walking, living Legos set.)  Kid stuff eventually sneaked in, but I did my best to keep the perspective focused on Pattie, a tea-drinking, single, childless, self-employed C.P.A. in the full bloom (and physical slide) of adulthood.  I loved her instantly.  She's a woman's woman, a worker, tenacious and unapologetic, both proud of and frustrated by her physicality that was (and is) so expressive and really fun to draw.  

I submitted samples of Pattie for syndication and got a lot of positive feedback.  But I got bogged down in other things (teaching and graduate school and the like), and I suffered from a rather crippling case of rejection-depression that made it difficult for me to see ways to address the criticism without overhauling everything and starting again from scratch.  It's a stupid, useless, and totally derailing response to an editor's letter that essentially says, "I like you and I want to see more!"  And it lasted just long enough for me to whip out the classic, "it's been too long, they'll have forgotten me," self-destruct button.  I didn't re-apply.  What a wuss.

Pattie would have some sharp things to say to me about that.  You might glean from the bit above, the woman is no faint-hearted stranger to frustration.  She has little tolerance for self-pity and none for failure rooted in giving up.  And since going back and looking at my old submissions to syndicates, agents and publishers, I can see so much better now how to tackle many of the revision issues.  At the time, hot off the frenzy of creating it in the first place, when I looked at something like Pattie Kaiks, I already saw the hundred incarnations it was before I inked it so changing one more thing seemed impossible.  Skillful revision takes distance and perspective.  

One of my screenwriting teachers was a strong advocate of the "put it in a drawer" technique.  You write something that doesn't seem quite right, or even if it seems flawless, he advised we "put it in a drawer and forget about it."  Well, I can't really do that.  Put it in a drawer and obsess about it, done!  Done all day!  I've been developing a "put it in a drawer and make something else" technique, and I'm having rather profound success.  Once you close that drawer, create something else, something totally unrelated.  A key element here is you have to throw yourself into it with equal fervor for it to really work.  If it's just an exercise, give yourself a time-limit, but I have to say devoting yourself utterly to creating even a reeking heap of not-at-all-useful can do wonders for divorcing you from your previous work and getting you the "fresh eyes" you need to see, and revise, clearly.  The multitude of incarnations, left-overs from your first frenzied creative process, will pale before what's actually on the page and revision is possible again.  If you consider every submission you send as a slightly modified "put it in a drawer" moment, you could be neck-deep in a new and even more exciting creative prospect when the rejections or calls for revision roll in, bracing you for the first, preparing you to work if it's the second.  

As a friend and colleague reminded me just the other day, "This is the job."  Being a creative professional beats you up and knocks you down and sometimes doesn't pay anything at all.  But you get up and invest yourself and infuse your work with your best effort and genuine love in the hope others will recognize it and want more.  I've developed some better tools since Pattie, skills Pattie would be proud of, to keep me from sinking in the tempestuous, subjective seas of creative work.  My pity-parties now have strict curfews, and I keep a good number of drawers handy.  Some stink.  Some don't.  That's the job. 

What Goes Up...Keeps Going Up...

Why is it there's always some mean-spirited smarty-pants on any given set ready to mock the deeply-indebted for attending film school?  

"Film school?!  What a waste!  Shoulda just made your own film--costs the same and you'd learn more!"

Well, if you could borrow federal financial aid to make a movie, that might be true, but for me and most of my classmates "just doin' it" was never an option.  And actually runaway amateur productions can cost a lot more than a good film school, especially considering projects that fail to get proper insurance and lock up in litigation for property damage or on-set injuries.  And unless you're already stacked with industry connections, going it alone doesn't give you any particular access to the experience, advice and equipment film schools offer.  But on every set I've worked on, there was always at least one meanie eager to knock me down for believing in myself enough to take the leap and the monumental debt of film school.

It's not easy to work without sleep for "copy and credit" (and craft service meals, though they can sometimes be more threat than incentive), harder yet with people lining up to rub it in.  But every new business tends to lose money in its fledgling years, right?  So really, my 25 year mortgage with no home to show for it is a mark of professionalism.  A colorful aside for my 15-year "overnight success" story.


Boy, I'm looking forward to telling that in total!

Pre-emptive Fear Blows

Worrying is expensive.  It’s like emotional interest attached to any given event.

I don’t care how big or small, all features struggle with budget.  Whether you’re working with a hundred thousand or a hundred million, no budget ever seems like it can be enough, you’re always gonna struggle with costs, always going to push for more money. 

Getting a film financed has never been easy, but it’s particularly tough now with so much uncertainty in the US and world economies, especially since large-venue distribution (movie theaters) has steadily shrunk for as long as I’ve been alive.  Independent feature films not completely funded by pre-sales are a GIGANTIC financial gamble, but there are some hold-outs who do sometimes find the film equivalent of venture capital – cash with strings – and use it to make their films. 

I worked on one feature that had such funding but a big chunk of it was coming from a nervous source who stalled production day by day for weeks instead of releasing the funds.  Delays of any kind drive up costs, and this extended push lost the production some of its committed talent as their windows of availability closed and they went on to other projects.  The film was eventually a month past its start date and well over budget before a single frame had been shot—caused by the investor’s withholding of funds—and this only made that same investor even more uneasy to commit.

Can you say Catch-22?  Meanwhile, everyone held their breath and kept working, clinging to the hope they’d be able to pay their department employees and vendors.

Production finally started, but the financier insisted it stay within the original budget numbers, thereby eating the costs of the delay, and that meant there was no money for music.  At all.  None.  A script composed to modern published songs with references to at least one published song and shot in a way that begged a hip and trendy generation-defining collection of pop music to accompany its embedded array of meta- and pop-culture references—by necessity—went without.  It wasn't a silent film, all involved did their best "in post" to make do with little means and tied hands.  But the editing that needed music and sound design to help the scenes live and breathe, to punctuate performance, to build subtext or ease transitions – all that was sorely lacking.  It hurt the film, and it’s excruciating to see a hundred or more people give their all to something only to have it flounder.

Sounds Like...

My husband noticed my attention to sound a long time ago on a road trip.  My mood varied in direct relation to whatever was playing on the radio, and I didn’t seem to know it.  He started skipping angry or sad songs to play energetic, peppy, or sincere and happy material, and I was effectively pleasant the rest of the trip.  I can’t say I caught on as much as one day he just decided to show me it was true, and the experience was so surreal I couldn’t even get mad at him for 1) demonstrating I’m pre-wired for audio manipulation like Pavlov’s dogs for treats, and 2) he’d been actively manipulating me with music. 

I focused on sound in film school for a lot of reasons.  I was beyond broke and needed a T.A.ship to have any hope of finishing with a thesis film, which I did.  And sound work begins in pre-production and is the final step (the mix) on any project, so working in sound gave me a great vantage of the entire life-cycle of a production.  It’s also THE way to sell a film.  Shoot a good script with a good cast, good camera, and crappy score or poor sound design, you get a kinda crappy film.  But make an okay script with descent actors, and add great sound design and score, you can get a blockbuster.  In fact, I defy you to name any block-buster that skimped on sound and music.

I won’t go with the obvious example, like what if Darth Vader spoke in a lilting Southern twang instead of that big, beautiful, base?  Stepping out of voice and performance, think of Stormtroopers giving chase through the Death Star but instead of the clinking armor-on-metal steps you hear the tubby, thumpy reverb of plastic costume boots on plywood?  Or instead of the Michael Bay KA-BOOOOOMS of explosions and gun-play you got only the comically hollow “pop, pop, pop” of real dispelled-in-atmosphere gunshots?  I can tell you from years of living in Crenshaw, even lethal use of firearms sounds like almost nothing in real-life open air.

Interestingly, any sound-designer will tell you the most disturbing sounds are human made.  Tense scenes, you might hear the barking dog in the distance (a universal and classic sound of loneliness and/or alarm), but listen closely you’ll likely hear an embedded baby cry.  Whether that sound annoys you or strikes your innate urge to protect, humans are hard-wired to react to the voices of small humans.  Our brains register human voice even when it’s so low and obscured by other sounds we can’t consciously parse it out.  But if its there, we feel it.

Way back, Nike introduced Shox running shoes with springs in the soles that were visible from the outside.  They’re pretty common now, you’ve probably seen them, but when they were new Nike did TV commercials to introduce them.  The commercials featured varied people running with joy on treadmills as “boings” emanated from the shoes with each footfall, as if every step in those shoes was a spontaneous boingy party.  Initially, the shoes said the word “boing,” and Nike tried a whole bunch of human vocalizations of the word “boing” against the footage.  It made the commercial creepy.  Horror folk might think it’s intuitive, but Nike was surprised to learn disembodied human voices are creepy.  The more cheerful and happy the voices they tried, the creepier the commercial got.  Remember that tiny, round woman with the child voice from Poltergeist?  Cheerful, high-pitched, and creepy. 

Nike finally opted for cartoony “boings,” and their shoes were suddenly fun again!

Power of the human voice, people.  And cartooniness.  Use them responsibly.