Anotherblog

Progress

Progress
You’d hardly know that I’d made any progress over the last couple of days, from the graph here…

Well, obviously, I haven’t made any progress. Between laziness, procrastination and tiredness, I’ve only done a wee bit of work on the novel, and it was all revisiting words that were already written, so no visible progress either. Bummer.

Johnny Deckchair
If you’re thinking of seeing this, don’t bother - we had free tickets, and went to see it on Sunday for a completely generic romantic-comedy waste of time. We had some fun afterwards trying to ungenerify it - my friend Paul looks a little like the lead actor (Rhys Ifens), and we could probably do some reshoots off our own bat…

Progress: continued poo

Progress: continued poo
I didn’t get any time to do writing on Saturday as well, crappily. In the morning I set up Anna’s computer in the study - we’re now a four computer household. Borrowed a keyboard and mouse from Anna’s brothers, grabbed an old 8G HD, bought an LCD monitor, and rebuilt the old 400MHz PII.

So, four computers - an old laptop, the study computer, the mac, and the PC. If you count the iPod, the palm pilot, and the PS2, we’re now a seven computer household. Aw, crap. When the computers rise, we’ll be fine - we’re officially collaborators now…

Anyway, we had a free pass to see “Bad Eggs” on Saturday morning, which we duly did, and then it was off to roleplaying in the evening, and thus no writing got done.

Bad Eggs
Another Mick Malloy/Judith Lucy film, and much like Crackerjack, characterised by a pleasant, gentle sense of humour unalloyed by such things as embarassment-based scenarios - at least, no really cringingly embarassing ones, unless you count the ’80’s references, which weren’t embarassing to the characters, so that was alright. The jokes were more along the lines of taking the piss out of police film conventions, and were pretty much in the background. They wisely decided to rely on characterisation for the big laughs. Good plan. Much enjoyed, though even as they parodied the cliches of the police film, fell comfortably into them as well.
In my view, there’s been a bit of a good run of Australian comedies lately. Crackerjack, Bad Eggs, You Can’t Stop the Murders - I’ve enjoyed all of them thoroughly.

Progress: poo

Progress: poo
Yeah, no progress on Friday. Anna and I went to see T3 instead, and I was going to try and do some work once we got home, but was too tired.

T3
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t expecting to come out the end of July with the third Terminator film being my favorite big action film so far this year. There’s been The Matrix: Reloaded, which was rather disappointing indeed, Daredevil, which was poo. X2 was satisfying and well done and clever, but didn’t really click with me, in reterospect. Finally, there’s the Hulk, which was excellent - I’ve seen it twice, and enjoyed it more the second time. Lots to like about it.
Better than all of these, for me, is T3. I know, I know, the ad was terrible, the advance word just as bad, and I guess I was expecting it to be kinda crappy so was very pleasantly surprised (which you may not be now, given how much I’m building it up). Well, it gripped me, it was well-written, it was pretty well acted, and the action was top-notch. Better than Reloaded. I think that I’ll go and see it again.

Editing Progress

Editing Progress
I had a bit of a chat with Kate on the phone tonight, which helped sort out further of the novels problems, and greatly helped reassure me that the new beginning of the book is not a foolish one. One of the things that she suggested, which I’ve picked up on, was to put aside the section that I’m struggling with and work on editing another bit. Hence, you’ll notice I made a bit of progress tonight - I didn’t have to do very much at all on this segment. Which was nice. The progress is probably a bit illusionary, because there’s still big chunks of to-be-done in the wordcount there, but that’s really a problem for another day. I figure I can keep doing minor updates to sections that work reasonably well already, get my confidence up, then tackle the evil bits of revision.

Novel, day 3

Novel, day 3
Better progress than yesterday, which isn’t saying much. Actually, thanks to a couple of email exchanges with Dave, I’ve made very good progress in one sense - he helped me work out some of those character motivation problems that I was talking about, and so I’ve gone back and revised from the beginning. So although the progress-meter only says about 1400 words in total, I’ve revised almost everything from the top. So it’s more than it appears. I’m hoping that I won’t have to revise so much when I get further into the novel, but at the moment, it’s really hard work, much harder than the first draft in which I had barely any constraints at all.

Further novel lack of progress

Further novel lack of progress
I didn’t make much progress with the novel last night. Partly it was because I played squash, and emerged tired and with a headache, and it was partly because I’ve got a difficult bit of rewriting. I’m struggling to find an important motivation for the main character, and I wasn’t able to come up with anything good.

Bugger. Anyway, here’s the chart.

Novel Editing Progress

Novel Editing Progress
Well, I’ve made my start. It’s a bit slow at the moment, but I’m relieved to have actually gotten some words done, and more that I was expecting for the first night anyway. Hopefully things will pick up later.

Weekend

Weekend
I had a good weekend, thanks. The guitar effects pedal is outstanding. I’m really looking forward to my guitar lessons now. Watching Ted and Ev play has just made me realise how far there is to go. Although the classical guitar lessons have been great, I kinda wish I’d started rhythm guitar lessons earlier. Anyway, it’s not too late (even for the latest Spit albums, for that matter - I added some more stuff to some tracks and have mostly done a whole other song, all by myself).

Played squash against Ted (some of the toughest and well-matched games I’ve played in a long time), roleplayed with Chris & Amanda & Andrea (and almost killed their characters with a single, very lucky zombie) and went to a Greek/Australian wedding on Saturday night.

Oh, and put on a heap of weight, so that I’m back on the no-sugar thing today. I’m thinking of going no-sugar for the whole week (it’s easier than doing the stop-start thing) to try and go down to 85 kg so that, hopefully, I won’t have to do it again for a while.

Film-making
Only two weeks to go until the short film with Tony L. I’ve really gotta get of my arse and start organising people for that one, or we’re going to end up with no crew. Carey has said she’ll help out on one of the nights, and Jon has said he might help, but that he’s very, very busy at the moment.

Writing
Right! *This* time I mean it - I’m going to write 1000 words a night until the first three chapters of Lotus are rewritten, starting tonight. I have Anna’s full support for this one, which made all the difference last November when I wrote the first draft. I really hope I can get stuck into it this time. I’ve tried setting myself a couple of deadlines before - telling Jon & Kate that I’d read it to them on various weekends - only to cancel. So the odds aren’t *great* that this time will be any different, except that I’m going to put up a chart, right here on the weblog, showing my progress.

Electric Guitar

Electric Guitar
…is run over by a car on a highway, and then apparently sold to a pawn shop, that I may then buy it. Actually, it’s pretty good. Except for the loose connection output jack connection, which requires that I sit rather still when playing.
I’ve been playing the “new” electric guitar every day since the Spit recording sessions, and I have to admit, it’s a whole bunch of fun. It’s a lot easier to form bar chords and make interesting sounds, and I have decided that I will go back and learn chords and strumming and stuff. First lesson next Sunday. In the meantime, I’ve been going over the songs recorded in the Spit sessions and trying to play back along with Ev’s original recordings. So far: well, I’m just beginning.
Ev suggested that getting a delay box would add fun and nifty effects to make the learning process just that bit more fun, so I started looking for a cheap delay box last week. After trawling the second-hand shops (and getting far too much mileage out of calling them “pawn shops”) I realised that delay pedals are in pretty short supply, and that the Boss ones are really too expensive for me to consider. Instead, I started looking at getting a multi-effects box, eventually settling on the Zoom 707II.
It’s the same price as one of the Boss delay pedals (alright, the expensive one) and has a large number of other effects, including a built-in simple drum machine. Groooovy!

I bought it last night, and was up until 4:00am playing around with it. Fun. Too much fun. Just so goddamn cool. I’m determined to add some extra guitar stuff to the Spit albums now - I can take a little bit of time over it to get something that doesn’t sound crap, and then send the results to Ev if he wants to mix them after I’ve done my simple efforts.

I talked with the folks at work today about doing a song for our project. I might have to swipe one of the Spit melodies and put new words to it, unless I can come up with a tune as good as Ev’s. Heheheh. Right. Anyway, we’ve all been talking about how on earth we’re going to get this pair of albums “out there”. The first stop-off is to get several select tracks onto a nicely printed CD and send a bunch of them to Marco, who wants to try and push our stuff on Townsville radio stations. Worth a shot! And, of course, if we can include one of the songs as an “Easter Egg” in the work I’m doing… all the better.

The end of Table-tennis
Table-tennis at work has come to an end. The room that we were playing in is no longer available, so the tables have been packed up - I suspect they won’t re-emerge. There’s a bunch of us at work who are just going to get less and less fit. I’m just glad I’m playing squash twice a week.
I ended my table-tennis-at-work thing on a career high, though - I just cracked 1050 points after hovering below it for a while. I could have been a contender, dammit…

Magic: The Gathering
The end of table-tennis has meant that I can play Magic: The Gathering at lunchtimes now, and it appears we’ve reached critical mass - I’ve played every lunchtime this week, and started sorting through my card collection and building decks. I may have mentioned before that I have brought my entire collection of cards into work. Well, by spending fifteen minutes after work every day, I’ve done a rough sort of the cards, and assembled a whole bunch of decks (including a very unpleasant discard deck). I’m very glad I’m continuing to get enjoyment from this thing. I’ve certainly bought enough cards…

Spit

Spit
Not had a lot of spare time lately to write all the things I oughta write… suffice to say, last week was fantastic, we got heaps done, and I’ve put up some photos here.
Since then, I’ve been mostly collapsed in a heap, completely drained of every creative impulse, which is a pity because it’s just over two weeks until I’m acting in a film… well, I’ll probably be fine by then anyway.
Actually, I’m mostly fine at the moment, just profoundly lazy - not answering email, not returning calls, that sort of thing.