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.

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.

 

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!

Killing Babies with Pilar Alessandra

Our honeymoon was a spectacular and rather spontaneous road-trip up the Pacific coast that almost crossed into Canada except the money ran out and we beat it back home in a single marathon drive praying we’d make it and running on fumes.  But before the coffers went from crinkle to jingle, we spent a few days walking the entire city of Seattle, which closes promptly at four p.m., and stopped in at the Seattle International Film Festival.  Didn’t even know it was going on until we got there, and how perfect for a pair of flick-philes?  We shocked the Canadian-adjacent by tipping for our frothy coffees and sat down for an epic viewing session that included Ulysses Gaze.

If you find yourself facing the end of your life, consider spending your remaining time watching Ulysses’s Gaze.  It will be the longest four and a half hours you’ve ever experienced.  Feel free to drink loads of frothy coffee, too, for while the filmmaker provides about a half-dozen perfectly satisfying endings, the film truly goes on forever.  You can escape for a potty break or a scone or what have you without missing any action whatsoever.  When you hit the melancholic journey by barge with the huge stone head of Lenin, you have oodles of time to step away and come right back to enjoy (believe it or not) at least a quarter hour of slightly different angles of that same rocky noggin.  We didn’t know that at the time.  We don't usually walk out on movies, no matter how bad.  They’re not easy to make and almost always have some redeeming quality somewhere.  So though we squirmed miserably after drinking (apparently) way too many coffees, we concluded they had to still be filming Ulysses’s Gaze and simply streaming the raw footage into the theater as we sat and suffered.  (It did feel that unedited at the time.)

I don’t mention the flick to bash it to bits.  As I said, if you have only four hours, that’s one way to really stretch ‘em out!  But it’s an object lesson in failing to do the work of creative production, what some call “killing your babies.”  When you get too precious about your film or your writing or your cartoon or whatever, you lose objectivity.  The result can be “creative masturbation,” which sounds a lot racier than what it is.  Remember in Meet Joe Black when the young couple who just met over coffee part ways and look back at each other something like seventeen times?  At some point, it’s just too much.  SPOILER ALERT—just run Brad Pitt over with the car already, the scene ended six minutes ago!  You know that feeling.  Maybe you’re reading a novel or watching a movie like A.I.—over and over you get that sense of natural resolution but the yarn spins on and, when it's a movie, 100 minutes of awesome become a 260 minute exercise in bladder control.

This comes to mind because I did indeed find ten minutes to commit to one of Pilar Alessandra’s Take Ten exercises.  I have to say, I like the book so far (I’m up to page 8 now!), I love the idea that it’s possible to crank out a sound screenplay working ten minutes at a time, but the key to Pilar’s book and prompting questions is, as is often the case, the hardest part of creating anything:  making decisions and sticking to them.  It isn’t difficult to write a screenplay.  What’s beat-your-head-against-the-wall difficult is writing only one.  I don’t know about you, but writing on any one story always triggers creativity in at least a half-dozen other directions.  Right now, I have the project I’ve begun, two novels I’ve been toying with, a feature I that wants revising, and two others I haven’t started yet.  All are populated with characters who clamor for my attention and the narrative spotlight.  They distract me with great dialogue totally inappropriate or irrelevant to what I’m working on.  And the most frustrating thing is if I submit and turn the spotlight on any other project, those chuckle-heads scatter and everyone else chimes in.  It makes getting to sleep a serious challenge.  On the other hand, I’m rarely lonely.

And maybe just a skosh mentally ill as I read that back over…

One tight screenplay detailed enough to surprise and stand out and structured with the precision of a Swiss watch—that’s the goal, that’s what gets budgets and green-lights and movie-goers to open their wallets and fork over that especially-hard-earned cash.  And it’s really f-ing hard to do. 

Deciding is easy.  Being creative is easy.  But committing to it, knowing when to leave it alone—for me, that’s the toughest part of writing anything.  The curse of spec-writing is the soft deadline—self-defined and too often lenient.  The second best part of working for hire (just under getting a paycheck on delivery) is never having to let go of a project because the Suits who cut the checks rip it right out of your hands.  Then it’s on to editors or publishers or studios or directors or production companies to torture themselves with how to cut sixty-eight shots of circling Lenin’s head by helicopter.  Seriously, pick two and move on!

So, Take-Ten exercise one--focused on the main character (Pilar calls it the MC--already sparing me a big stalling habit I have of obsessing about names--I've wasted days worth of valuable writing time trying to name a character that needed, let's face it, a great deal of work on a few other little areas, like the plot) and the basic points--what's the problem and what's MC do about it.  Amazing how sticking to the basics and just focusing for ten minutes can really help you cut the hooey and get to work. 

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!

Perfect Assistants

According to the housekeeper in Gosford Park, what makes a great servant is anticipation.  “They feel hungry, and the food is ready, they feel tired, and the bed is turned down.”  I’m kinda paraphrasing, but you get the idea, and she should know what makes a great servant, as she herself is a self-proclaimed great servant, a perfect servant, and who’d contradict her anyway?  The woman—SPOILER ALERT—poisoned her employer to keep their son from stabbing him to death… 

The perfect servant.  Want her running your house?  Eek.

Being an assistant in the industry is something like being a perfect servant.  It can truly be (or at least it certainly seems like) life-and-death, but I’ll see anticipation and raise you creative-impossible-problem-solving.  After all, whether you’re assisting a director, producer, writer, creative executive, manager or agent, there are always too many hands in the pot brewing trouble for your target employer.  I think great assistants would probably make great spies for the CIA and the like, because problems must often be identified, assessed and addressed in a kind of clandestine manner.  The Industry works with a lot of subjective material that costs a lot of money sometimes involving extreme personalities, so it’s understandably nervous and any whiff of a problem just makes confidence, and sometimes shows and related careers, plummet. 

The job is typically to be an entire office and support staff while also being a perfect dictation machine, electronic organizer, and all-around human computer for an overworked, completely stressed-out person.  But most assistants I’ve met who keep their jobs past the first month or so are no where near as obtuse, whiny, or incompetent as what I’ve seen in their on-screen counterparts.  Take the “pink and blue” artificial sweetener scene in Swimming With Sharks.  OF COURSE IT MATTERS what kind of sweetener someone takes, and it’s absolutely true that no-one who uses BLUE would EVER use PINK in their coffee.  That’s just a fact.  That the agent tosses a few packets in the assistant’s face is apparently really humiliating and dehumanizing, but do you know how many deals and clients can be lost over the slightest perception of being ignored or details being dropped?  And then there’s the chance of allergies or cross-medications, maybe not something that would involve artificial sweeteners, but dairy versus non-dairy creamer?  I can’t watch that packets scene without hearing Gordon Ramsey in my ear from Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares shouting, “you could kill someone!”

I thought I’d see better in The Devil Wears Prada, but when finally given the chance to run the ball, to act as a First Assistant and get her boss from Florida to New York when a hurricane canceled all flights, I was appalled that all the character seemed to do was call airlines.  Is she trying to get her boss killed that she’d hook her up with a flight in that kind of weather?  Her only burst of enthusiasm is to ask if the military might step in for her.  I couldn’t believe it.  Money was not a concern, she could have hired the woman a private car and driver, put her on a train—not to disparage those who would disagree, but the East Coast is just not that big.  When the job is to move a body from Florida to New York and you have over twelve hours to do it—do it.  And maybe it seems trivial to an outside eye, but the Devil in this case is a hard-working career woman with a crumbling marriage and twin daughters who will be grown and gone before she knows it.  If you don’t think it’s life and death for a parent to see their kids’ recital, you clearly don’t have kids and should call your parents today to say you love them.  Even the rotten ones.

To be fair, both filmic examples are of new assistants learning the ropes, and in both cases the characters harbor a kind of resentment about having the job at all.  I have seen some of the best assistants in action.  You may not—it’s often their job not to be noticed.  Having been raised by one of the classics who helped set the bar (my mom put the “Executive” in “Secretary”), I can tell you they will see you, and they will remember as much about you as is possible to learn, right down to the collar preference of your neighbor’s dog.  So be nice to them, ‘cause you might run into a perfect assistant, and they’ll remember that, too.

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.

They'll Get You!

I love horror stories – in theory.  Like in thumbnail form, interrupted by commercials on a muted TV during the day with at least four hours between final credits and sun-down. 

It’s not entirely my fault.  Fear and self-doubt are kind of constants with me.  Boost either one, I’m hyperventilating under the covers (because if even a toe is exposed, THEY’LL GET YOU!).  I know it’s ridiculous, but it feels true.  I guess I’m “highly impressionable” when it comes to horror.  Example?  The Original Star Trek episode “The Man Trap” had me leaping from my door to my bed at night throughout junior high lest the suction-cup-fingered, salt-sucking, shape-changer “get me.”  The first time I tried to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I freaked out and threw the book under the bathroom vanity, where it remained for over three years before I forced myself to retrieve and read it.  Great book, but human malice, even fictionalized, really disturbs me.  In high school I wept uncontrollably through The Shining and spontaneously burst into traumatized tears again years later when I glimpsed a tiny fraction of The Shining embedded in the movie Twister – it’s what’s playing on the drive-in theater screen as the “finger of God” level five tornado rip the scene and screen apart.  Tornadoes, straight-forwardly threatening and therefore not scary.  Fathers carving up their families?  Simply terrifying.

But strip away the tension and gore, I love the genre.  Horror is rich in extreme characters and story lines and plot twists.  There’s little I enjoy more than a good horror-story re-cap.  As a kid, I did a lot of eavesdropping on the bus or quizzing friends to get the gist what horror movies or shows were out.  My husband often indulges me by re-telling the stories he knows I’ll otherwise avoid.  He doesn’t seem to view my shying from horror as a weakness.  But I do.

In film school, I stupidly decided to “push” myself instead of focusing on my strengths.  I shot a horror short film about a woman finding a dead body in her trunk only to realize she’d opened the wrong car…and the killer was still there!  It wasn’t very good, or subtle, and since what little horror experience I do have was viewed on “mute,” I didn’t realize until my classmates burst out laughing that I’d chosen the very distinctive score from Halloween, so it played like a parody.  The smart play would have been to pretend it was always a comedy, but I’m a terrible liar.  Instead, I accepted that horror was not my strength and chose a dramatic scene with an element of horror for a directing class.  Because practice makes improvement at least, right? 

Stupid, stupid, stupid me…

It didn’t help that without time to audition I went begging for actors, so the guys I cast had less than no respect for me and sort of resented the time-commitment.  The scene was one guy intimidating the other with status, which turns as the other offers a bodily threat of imminent, extreme harm while the dialog remains pleasant-sounding.  I loved the writing – tense, packed with subtext, rich language – plenty of room for an actor to play, I thought.  But my guys were grumps and I was beginning to think the whole thing was a wash when one got annoyed enough to do exactly what I’d been trying to get him to do.

Except he did it to me. 

Right in my face, a foot or more taller than me and something like fifty pounds bigger than I am (and all muscle in his case – ah, actors).  I don’t think his anger was real.  I’d pushed him and he was pushing me back.  But he could tear my arms from their sockets, and for a good 30 seconds, he made me believe he might.  He stirred all the fear I could ask for, and he knew it, and he smirked about it. 

As if scaring me instead of effectively performing with his scene partner proved he’s a better actor than I am a director.

Well, obviously he’s a better actor than I was a director, especially then!  The scene was for a class, and it was only my second directing effort EVER.  While he was supporting himself as professional actor and had been for a couple years already.  So when that merry Andrews had the gall to ask me if I was scared, I barked, “Who cares?  It’s easy to scare me!  Anyone can scare me!  Salt-sucking, shape-changers on Star Trek scare me.  I’m not in the scene, dumb-ass!”

Okay, I didn’t really say “dumb-ass” at the time.  Sometimes I think I’d really like to be one of those fearsome forces on a set who can do things like call big guys dumb-ass and reign them in with a blood-congealing glance, but that’s not me.  Thumper’s parental mantra “if you can’t say something nice—” rings like tinnitus in my ears.  But I did say the other parts, and he kind of listened and we finished rehearsing. 

I didn’t flunk the class, so I call it a success.  And actually, I didn’t cry in front of that guy.  I didn’t cry until I got all the way home.  So in that case, it was.  

Does it Really Matter That...?

 

When the just-right-and-conveniently-available actor 

who has a fan-base and flare enough

to generate the buzz you need

to get a meeting

to pitch and sell

your sweated-blood-to-write original TV pilot

suddenly

lands a re-occurring role on some other show,

does it really matter that, 

"if water was whiskey and I was a duck,

I'd swim to the bottom and drink my way up" 

doesn't actually rhyme?

Goblin with a Bow

I’m typically an excellent student, one of those predominantly “A” grade over-achievers begging teachers for extra homework (not an exaggeration – I’ve actually done that many times) and even gave one teacher a lump of coal before one Christmas break for providing lax instruction (again, not kidding).  But in the few art classes I’ve taken, I was a horrible student, and that probably accounts for the gigantic holes in my technique. 

The thing is, drawing was always an intensely personal thing for me, and I didn’t really understand that for the longest time.  I rarely showed anyone my work, and when I did I made sure to have a ready, enthusiastic, and kind audience, like my mom.  Really, I was that insular.  So, it’s kind of nuts that I ever pursued it as a career or source of income.  I’m terrible at “networking” and have to battle my inner critic near to death to engage in anything smacking of self-promotion.  “Braggart,” hisses that tiny, vicious voice in my head.  I’m afraid I let minor setbacks and rejections too often cripple my efforts, so you can probably imagine what even nurturing criticism did for me in a classroom setting.

On occasion, I bumped into extraordinary people, often gregarious and excessively kind, who grabbed me by the hair and ordered me to “draw, damn it!” with such gleaming enthusiasm, even my nasty little inner-critic couldn’t say no. 

One such person got me in such a vice grip of loving faith and merciless encouragement, I married him.  If you knew him as I do, you would, too.  But before I met my husband Christian, another such person found me:  James Wellborn, who gave me my first official cartooning job (for cash money, y’all!), and who was such a naturally unflappable and positive force, I put myself through college cartooning and became the first woman ever to receive the Charles Schulz Award from Scripps Howard.  Mr. Peanuts himself could sadly not be in attendance, but I got to shake Snoopy’s hand!

James was a big guy, in every way – big heart, big sense of humor, big in stature – an over-all huge individual.  And me, being the hermit-ing burrower I tend to be, never told him how much he changed my life and how deeply I am indebted to him for believing in me and bolstering my utter lack of confidence.  James was my first real, professional editor, my first big promoter, and my unwitting matchmaker, because thanks to his unrelenting, irresistible enthusiasm, my husband got to see my cartoons in the newspaper, and the poor guy fell in love with them and me long before we met in person. 

But just as I seem to reserve courage for others instead of myself, when it came to seeing to his own happiness, James fell short.  He was the sort of person who gave everything he had to those he cared about and believed in, so when he faced his own battles, sometimes he didn’t have enough left to keep himself going.  I wish I’d given him even a fraction of the multitude of thank-you-Jameses I’ve been silently storing in my mind since he first looked at my work and said, “sure.”  I can’t remember if I ever truly thanked him, which tells me whatever I did say was no-where near enough.

James ended his life last year.

I’ve thought of James, and will continue to, every time I sit down to draw, and I do my best to listen to the little voice he added to my brain, often imagining his big, broad smile, as he tells me, “Draw anyway, Jody.  And show it to someone.” 

So, here is something that I’ve been working on, and the path I took to get there.  It’s a goblin with a bow.  He looks a little worried to me.  Maybe he’s lost his friend.