The week ahead . . . and a little bragging . . .

My beautiful and perfect goddaughter, Talyan, has been cast to appear in an episode of one of her--and her mom's--favorite TV shows, Criminal Minds. She's already began shooting. Of course I'll post it here when the air date is scheduled, so the one or two of you who sometimes read this can watch it. Yes, I'm very proud of her.

That's the bragging mentioned in the title.

It just so happens that I'm heading out to Los Angeles in the next few days to visit Talyan and her mom. She'll be done shooting by the time I get there, so I won't get to go on-set with her, but I'm cool with that. It's going to be a blast.

I'm planning to shoot a video of my trip and edit it together when I get back into sort of a documentary. This is mostly for the practice--I may never show it to anybody, depending on what I come up with. Of course I'll be taking a ton of stills, too, especially of our overnight trip to Disneyland. I'm going to ride the monorail! I've always wanted to do that . . .

I've been rereading this screenplay I wrote a while back, Too Many Tonys, and I've been a bit shocked to discover that, to me, anyway, it reads really well. I remember not being all that happy with it when I finished the first draft, but now, coming back to it after putting it down for a month or so, I'm forced to conclude, "Not bad . . ." There are one or two things that need some more work--a couple of the characters are still a bit off, and I'm not completely happy with the ending--but, overall, not bad, if I do say so myself.

What I'll be doing over the weekend is using Power Point to come up with something kind of like a storyboard (thanks to my old friend Regina who mentioned that when I told her about this--I hadn't thought of it that way until she said something!). This will be a little different from the usual storyboard, though. Typically, a storyboard is created for a director to figure out camera angles and camera movements--this one will be more to help me find areas of the story that aren't working, or could work better. So, I'll create a series of slides representing the scenes in the screenplay, then step through them, in the hope that any false notes will be revealed to me as I sort of watch the movie in my mind with the aid of the slides.

When I'm done I'll also have something other people can look at to help me pitch the idea to them, too. Two birds, one stone.

Of course, I've also got the usual things in store for the weekend--laundry, mostly. Also, it's championship weekend in college football so I'll be watching the games. Or at least have them on while I'm working on the movie thing.

It's shaping up to be a really pleasant weekend, in other words.