Postcards from Arizona, Ink Stains, New SMAF...

I got this in the mail from my friend J'aime Chatfield just before the weekend:

The picture on the front is the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona. J'aime has recently landed a sweet gig which provides for plenty of travel, and she was sweet enough to think of me and drop me a postcard from the state which spawned my favorite early-90s alternative bands, along with two of my favorite mad up-and-coming comic book geniuses, and a certain cake shop waitress who is way too willing to listen to me wax philosophically about Law and Order from time to time.

Not satisfied being just an extremely talented photographer and high-powered career woman, J'aime opted to give me a run for my money as master word-smith and world-class flatterer:

"Hi Pal, I hope everything is going very well with you in WV and I hope to hear from you soon (though I know you're bizzee). As you know, I'm in the west, talking to cacti and getting parties planned by the pool. When my life finally gets (rightfully) televised - I'll have you on team writing new, impossible scenarios. In between writing your own memoirs, bien sur! Affectionately, j'aime."

Man, if this was Earth-2, I would have some mad favors banked. Owlman would also be trying to kill me, though, so I guess I'm okay where I am now.

It was a really nice of J'aime to send me this -- I've been feeling disconnected lately, not getting much in the way of mail, not a lot of phone calls, bulk of my time has been spent writing or running errands. Most of my communications have been almost entirely online, which I am not complaining about at all, as I'm glad for the company no matter what the venue, but it's certainly nice to get a small reminder you exist outside of cyberspace.

Seriously, I heard someone say "mojo" in the grocery store checkout the other day, and turned my head as if I'd just been called by name.

And since I've already spoken to her, and thanked her as much in person as I can from here to Maine, I thought I might pass along some links. In the past, I'm sure you've all seen me name check her travel blog, in transito, in the past, but I also would be remiss if I didn't show off her tumblr delle altre cose [spell check is flipping out at this sentence], along with her online photography portfolio. It's all amazing stuff, can't recommend it enough.

I'm still writing, working on both the peep show script, and "New Hooverville." My grandmother's bulk nut orders weren't delivered today, so what looked like a busy Monday on paper wound up being a lot of "will-they-or-won't-they-show-up" sitting around. Which was just fine by me, as it gave me time to actually print off a copy of "Hooverville" and make some changes the old fashioned way -- with a Bic pen and a clipboard.

Honestly, this is how I prefer to edit, but I've been trying to go paper-free [or, I guess, "paper lite"] for some time now. With scriptwriting, a few drafts of a feature can easily blow through a ream of paper and a lot of printer ink, both of which are very expensive and not so great for the environment. Still, old habits, and three pages isn't so damaging. Hilariously, even with some of the tweaking I've been doing on the short before printing off, I still wound up with pages that look like this:

Click to enlarge. Not the best quality, but as you can tell, lot of fresh ink on those pages -- almost as much as I ended up with on my hands. Seriously, it looks like I got to second base with a printmaker's daughter.

Moving on before you realize that simile doesn't really make sense, while I've been sort of sequestered to my own projects, I've missed a couple of the Brainwrap crew's newest "Seth Martin and Friends" shorts. The first is "The Piano Lesson," where Norman gives the neighborhood kids some musical pointers. Norman's one of my favorite characters of the show, so I highly recommend this one:



The second is "Game Day," which has the eponymous Seth and his equally eponymous friends engaging in some good old sandlot football. According to the official SMAF Facebook page this is actually an older short which needed some last minute post work that was delayed, but I think it holds up just as well as its newer peers.




If you enjoy these, make sure you you add "Seth Martin and Friends" on Facebook, and subscribe to their YouTube Channel.

According to Kyle they still have several scripts in the works, so I haven't gotten any notes on the screenplay I did for them, and imagine it'll still be a little bit. I actually wrote a second for them recently, just scrawled out while I was running errands one day, that was a little Sesame Street-esque with Norman as a Sherlock Holmes-style detective and Seth as his Watson. The problem is, I've since misplaced it, another reason going paperless isn't exactly the worst policy. I've even tried taking a run at writing it over, but it's really hard to recreate the magic. Hopefully, it'll turn up on its own, even though I'm not sure it'd fit anymore, having seen some more Norman since writing it.

Hoping to have some solid final or close-to-final drafts of the peep show script and "Hooverville" in the next couple of days. Of course, a lot of this will depend on whether or not a hundred pounds of cashews are dropped on my door step tomorrow.

Cheers.

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