Categorical

I love the refinements that Netflix has made to their suggestion system. If you haven't gone through the entire questionnaire, I recommend you do. It made me think about my interests in ways I had not. For instance, I'm interested in movies with a father-daughter theme, but not a father-son theme. Logical, I suppose, but not something I'd been conscious of.

The Sub-sub-categories it now comes up with for recommendations are also illuminating, and have me thinking about my taste in terms of my writing as well:
Visually-striking Suspenseful Psychological Movies
Dark Dramas with a Strong Female Lead
Critically-acclaimed Cerebral Movies from the 1930s
Scary Foreign Thrillers

It's been interesting seeing what comes up, but also seeing adjectives like "dark" or "gritty" or "scary" applied to categories I hadn't thought of attaching it to. Scary thrillers as opposed to horror, for example. I do love scary thrillers, perhaps better than horror. I also like horror films that have a thriller element, the anticipation and the chase. I don't care for the cheesy gore-fest that the genre seems to have been pigeon-holed in.

It's got me turning the kaleidoscope on some of my writing a little bit, twisting the colors and playing with how it looks.

ridiculous

I'm gonna create a line of salad dressings, and tie each to a screenplay so that when the dressings are optioned by Hollywood, I'll be ready.

Re- re- re- re

I just wanna say:
A redux is a remake.
So is a reboot.
There is no difference.
If they had to get the rights to the previous film, if the story and characters are basically the same, it's a remake. The other terms are just marketing. Don't be fooled into thinking they are any different. Some may be more well done than others, but they are all remakes. Just like Midol is the same exact drug as Advil is the exact same drug as generic Ibuprophen - a reboot is a redux is a remake.

A Rebound, on the other hand, well, that's a different thing altogether.

Amazon's response

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

Dear Amazon

I have had several authors tell me in the past that they would prefer I not order their books through Amazon, as they make a smaller residual through them than any other portal. But I've continued to do so for the most part, as a matter of convenience.

Now, however, I find out that Amazon has removed the sales ranking for several Gay and Lesbian themed books.

They use the excuse that they want to preclude Adult material from showing up in searches - but may of the works concerned do not have any graphic sexual content. From Young Adult novels like "The Filly" to classics like Erastes' Transgressions and modern works of literature like Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and the Well of Loneliness.

However, you can still find books with explicit heterosexual content, including photographs.

So I wrote t hem and informed them that I would not only be removing all my wish list content, and no longer doing business with them, I would not link to them when recommending books and I would not do business with their other websites.

Blatant prejudice is especially offensive coming from a purveyor of books.

Getting Frenzied

I'll be participating in Script Frenzy this year. I've filled in the points on the Blake Snyder beat sheet, and will be attempting to write an entire screenplay in the month of April.

Actually, my goal is even more ambitious. I plan to finish it in 20 days (6 pages a day is not unreasonable for me), and have time to polish it a little by the end of the month.

Working title: Spaz

A teenage girl hides her epilepsy to convince a former CIA agent to be her mentor, and ends up in over her head with the local Mexican mafia.



I've got the beats laid out. Now, time to write!

Write Badly

Billy Mernitt, you have just knocked my favorite crutch away. My best excuse for procrastination. The reason I end up spinning in circles and efficiently avoiding forward progress on my screenplays (or any writing, really.) I don't have to get it "perfect."

According to Mr. Mernitt, who has every reason to know, it's not only OK to break the "rules" of screenwriting, sometimes it helps you achieve the one goal that is paramount for any screenwriter: make them empathize with the protagonist. Get them to feel. If it takes parentheticals, unfilmable asides about the character's internal thoughts and intentions, or lots of ellipses, then so be it.

Thinking about it, I am reminded of something I learned when studying poetry in college. It struck me while reading Sonnet: On the Sonnet by Keats. The Sonnet is a very structured form. Not the most difficult, but still fairly rigorous. (I laugh when people complain about screenplay form being too limiting.) In this sonnet, Keats breaks the rhythm in one line - and does so with the explicit intention of making the reader pause, of drawing attention to the one line.

I learned two things from that poem: 1) Let structure serve a meaningful function. The actual rhythm contributes to and/or echoes the content. 2) Drama and meaning can be derived from breaking the form - but there has to be a form there to break for that to work.

So I think my feeling about using such things as internal unfilmables, is that they should be used consciously. They should be placed in essential spots, to break the form a little, change the pace, make the reader stop and think. But to achieve that effect, the rest of the writing has to be fairly clean and straightforward.

I know the examples on Mr. Mernitt's blog include a script that seems to go beyond the selective use idea... but I also found it a difficult passage to read. Maybe it reads differently in context.

Have I come full circle? Have I just proposed something even more difficult than perfection - perfection with intentional flaws? Shhh. I don't care. I need to go write.