I'm guess I'm sticking around.

This marks one of the bigger lulls in posting I've had.

The past few days are fuzzy. By the blog, I posted here on Thursday, but that was likely Thursday morning. Though I don't remember perfectly, somewhere around Thursday evening, from some combination of insomnia and general malaise, I hit a pretty deep blue funk, and fought what I affectionately call "rolling panic attacks" until sometime around four or five Friday morning. I vaguely remember feeling more than a little unnaturally high Friday night after about ten hours plus sleep that day. From there, I think I mellowed a little bit, but with the exception of those few hours of feeling really chatty, the entire weekend and well into this week I've felt quite like crap about... most things. Spent the majority of the past several days watching "Death Note" on Hulu, thinking, and feeling like I should crawl into a hole somewhere for an extended stay.

I'm still pretty much there right now. But spending so much time on self-loathing tends to also mean that some self-reflection is had, and I feel it's important to scrawl a little of that down here. Also, a lot of my friends have done internet things, and I really needed to do a link dump post while it was all present in my mind.

Links first; principally, work links first. Justin is doing something a little bit different with his blog. I'd also like to point out that if you click on the picture of the word "BIFF!" [M. R. C. R. W.] on the right-hand toolbar on his blog, you can see sketches of the pages he's working on for "Calamity Cash." It isn't always the same page, and he's not archiving them, so check early and check often. The work he's doing remains as exceptional as ever, with each page getting better and better as he goes. He's been under the weather for some time, but still manages to bang out pages. Now that he's feeling better, I can only imagine how things are going to turn out.

Kyle has posted a few times on the "Trendsetter" blog, but he's keeping busy with school and with the intermittent snow storms we've been having, so there isn't much in the way of new information right now. My hope is this has given him some time to decide what tag lines and movie synopsis he likes the best -- as I've put a little more work in on them, but gotten nothing new that was as good as what I posted earlier.

Other links of interest. My friend John, who hates arbitrary constraints on literature and would never demean his work by limiting the exact number of words he could use, say to 55, has a really funny 55-word piece of micro fiction up here. And this other one I liked enough to read to my dad on his birthday this past Sunday [Dad turned 51, by the way].

Sam's returned to her blog. She's been working on paper a lot lately, so updates are less frequent, but what she recently put up is just amazing.

And finally, one of my friends from college, Zoe, recently got a half-sleeve tattoo, and posted it up on her livejournal. I don't really think a blog's a blog until you've linked to someone's ink.

Something I have to get to soon, other than meeting and seducing Cote de Pablo, are blog related; it's shameful I don't have a perma-link to the movie's blog yet, and something temporary will be going up soon. That will be the short-term. In the long-term, I think I'm going to start bugging my artist friends to produce some logos for me, something in the comic book "bullet" style, like Sam's old Creepy Bean logo was. I don't really know exactly what I want for them yet -- but my plan is to have one for comic projects, which will feature this blog's address along the bottom, and will be bordered with "W. A. S. P. - U. L. M. C." around the top. Center design, I still don't have a clue. The film one will be similar, but ringed in movie film, and with the Trendsetter blog address in the place of mine. I'm thinking like "presidential seals of the Mojo Wire" meets the old DC Bullet kind of stuff, but beyond that, haven't got a clue.

Next thing is "Calamity Cash" related. I annoyed the holy hell out of a dear friend to figure out I needed a two-to-three line re-write on something that comes late in the book's script. I still haven't tackled that yet, likely because it is both a big job, and a little job, and I was hoping just sitting on it for a bit would bring me some burst of inspiration. No such luck. Bigger problem is, Justin is really coming along on the book, and he'll be on those pages soon, which means I really need to get my ass in gear and fix them. It is always the small stuff I put off to the very last minute. Every time.

"Trendsetter" news. Much like from Kyle's end, there isn't much. I need to get started soon on the new pages, but as I've stressed here before, I am no longer as sure of what those pages will contain. It is my hope that by the end of this week, a little more feedback will have come my way. I also just need to start thinking about the script more, talking about it more, engaging with the material again. It is difficult to find people willing to put up with my process though, and I'm not exactly... pleasant, while working, but I might just wind up annoying the piss out of more than a few people before this is done.

At least on some level, I'm pretty much thinking about "Trendsetter" all the time now. The pacing is what I've been stuck on lately, though not in a way you might expect. Not to tip my hand, but so little actually happens over the course of the film, which is something of a hobby-horse of mine. I tend to like movies where not much happens, because in life not much tends to happen, especially when those really important things are going on. And I think a lot of the doubts I've had, as far as how to proceed with those extra pages, come from the fact that all the ideas I've had have rested on some gimmicky event -- an anniversary party, a bachelor party, etc. And on some level, I feel that yes, that would work -- it makes sense for something to happen that draws the characters away from the incessant talking. But it also feels like I'm betraying what most people like about the script as is, that the nothing that happens, and the scene after scene of these people... dealing, as it were, is the good stuff.

It's a hard call. Admittedly, all the things I like the best have as little happening as possible. My favorite Shakespeare plays usually happen after what most would consider "the good stuff." The best of the Smith movies have almost nothing going on. And the comics, both Japanese and American, that I've liked the most tend to have a nice, slow pacing, and lots of conversations, with very little big adventures. They're all character pieces. Anything else in them is mostly setting, and setting is usually incidental.

And since I wanted to write comics like that, I tend to have about the same pacing that my favorite things do, and would write or outline single issues of things revolving around one incident [that we may not have even seen], and one point, usually voiced by the character. "Trendsetter" also follows this formula -- if it were a comic, I guess it would be about six issues long. Maybe twice that with some clever, but not largely important, filler. And since I don't want the extra 30 or so pages to just be clever filler, I've got to make whatever I add good. And pertinent. Strengthen the story, not just lengthen it.

I also come back to the fact that number of characters as of right now is not huge - Brandon, Tess, Faye, and Eddie, with a couple of little parts here and there. Brandon's in the whole damn thing, but when I look at it, the other three seem like they could do for some extra time. Which makes me wonder if just more with them is all I need.

Ian said something to me about it recently -- that the script was really only one big scene away from being finished. And that's actually struck me more than anything else I've been told about it thus far, but it was also a little maddening to hear, because I still have no idea what that once scene is. It'll probably have Faye though. I think she's set to be our star.

On the upside, I did have time this weekend to read through TS again, and I don't think it'll be as hard to open it up from two days to the three or more I think I'll need. Looks like it might not be much more than a dialogue fix.

Ah. And the dialogue I have to fix. But more on that later, I'm sure.

Cheers.