Yod-17

I'm going ahead and giving you the working title for my latest screenplay (above) because it'll tell you absolutely nothing about what it's about.

Yes, I hate the title, but it was all I could come up with and I have to call it something. So, I settled on this.. Hopefully something better will suggest itself to me as I get deeper into the first draft.

It's basically a ghost story set on a space ship--which, I am well aware, is also an apt description of my favorite film of all-time, Alien. This is sort of an homage to that film, without being a rip-off of it. It is to be hoped, anyway.

The first draft is coming along pretty well, I'd say. I'm almost at the end of the first act, which is almost the point at which I can say I'll probably finish it.

It's unabashedly a horror story with science fiction-ish trappings. The basic, underlying motivation for this is to scare the ever-loving shit out of the audience. That's really all I want to do with this bad boy.

What else have I been up to? I've been indulging myself in another, new passion, and that is film.

Yes, I know I write screenplays, but I've never spent much time thinking about the language of film, the history, the context. Over the past few weeks I've developed an obsession about this subject, and I've been working to fill the gaps in my knowledge.

To that end, I watched the entire series, The Story of Film, on Netflix, and I heartily recommend it to you, too, if you are so inclined. I'm also planning to watch some classic films I haven't seen--today it was Taxi Driver. And I'm going to make an effort to see some newer films, now showing at my local theater--last week I saw Trainwreck, which I enjoyed a great deal and also recommend to you.

Reading material is Simon Callow's two-volume biography of Orson Welles, someone I've always found fascinating but knew very little about. I'm sure my library will contain several more books on influential filmmakers or history and critical analysis of films ere much longer.

I'm having fun, and seeing possibilities, getting inspiration from what I'm learning, and finding all sorts of interesting material to use to bore the hell out of anybody unlucky enough to be in close enough proximity. I'm sure I'm about to become a major hit at parties. If I ever went to any.

Anyways, that's what I've been up to, over the past few weeks. How about you?