I swear, I had a bunch of good ideas to write about in tonight’s blog entry. But now that I have finally sat myself down to write the dang thing, poof. Gone.

But I should tell you a few things that are “up” in my life.

Starting with today. Today I had my first one-on-one consultation with a VFS prof about the first 25 pages of my movie script. The idea is that instead of presenting chunks of your script to the whole class and getting a ton of opinions on it when you are in the middle of writing it and wrecking our already frazzled nerves, we instead consult with a prof whose only job is to give us a little light feedback and help me with any problems I might be having.

I’m not having any to speak of. I hate to admit it because I resenting having to make it so much, but having that detailed outline I did last term is SUPER helpful. Whenever I get lost and can’t remember what happens next, I just pop over to that file and presto, ici est la! It lets me concentrate on the details of writing the actual screenplay without having to keep the entire plot in my head in order to make sense of what is going on.

So I guess I have to reluctantly admit that VFS knows better than me.

Not sure if I will write detailed outlines of things I write in the future. I will hopefully be writing comedy, which tends to have a minimum of plot. Still, it might be helpful if I am writing for a sitcom and want to pull off some Arrested Development type fancy dancing. Or if I wanted to do a particularly intricate kind of skit.

My desire will always be to dispose of the preliminaries and just write the fucking thing already. I have a very demanding and impatient muse and it wants to get in there and get busy as soon as possible, or it starts to lose interest.

Anyhow, my one-on-one with a prof I’d not met before, Jenny Siddle (not a typo), went very well. We spent the first twenty minutes getting to know one another, and mirciale diablo, it turns out that she spent a summer living in Summerside! She was 19 years old and moved there to follow her boyfriend and ended up spending the summer working for the Summerside Golf Club tending the greens. I told her I was an Acadian, and therefore related to all those Arsenaults, Gaudets, Gallants, Cormiers, Gautiers, and all the rest.

I referred to it as a “rich genetic tapestry”, which sounds a lot better than “not as inbred as that makes us sound’. My people, the Acadians, pretty much just have one family tree. Or rather, it’s like one of the forests where the trees grow so close together that the branches are all tangled together.

And like such a forest, it’s all very cozy but it’d damned hard to get in, and not a lot of light gets through.

But enough about me. What did SHE think of MY script?

She loved it! Said she couldn’t wait to see what happened next. That is, approximately, exactly what I was going for. She was so interested, in fact, that I had to explain the entire rest of the plot of the movie to her in order to satisfy her curiosity. Also said she really liked my character descriptions, which is good, because they don’t come naturally to me. I think in terms of works, ideas, emotions, minds, conversations, and so forth.

As opposed to, you know, height, weight, eye color, what the wallpaper looks like, how the room is laid out… you know, the boring stuff.

She told me that what was good about my character descriptions is that they concentrate on what the character is like, not what they look like. After all, if I put in a lot of physical description of the characters, then they have to find an actor or actress who looks just like that, and that severely limits the talent pool.

Far better to concentrate on what their personality is like. How they present themselves, how they talk, that sort of thing. Then whatever very talented actor/actress they hire will have something to go on.

and that’s fine by me because it suits the way I naturally think anyhow. I am perfectly content to let others ply their trade and figure out what the character wears or how they do their hair. As long as it loosely fits my idea of the the character and doesn’t get in the way of the good stuff, I am a happy camper.

So that was a highly positive experience, that little one on one meeting. Coming home was not so nice.

Why? Because I forgot my keys. first time in a long time. I am such a doofus! Totally forgot my keys, and didn’t realize it till I got to the school and went to wave my card at the reader in order to get access to the elevator and whoops, it was not there.

Don’t worry, I didn’t lose them or anything. They’re right here. I just forgot them.

The smart thing would have been to call Joe and tell him to be ready to let me in. But I have the darnedest time remembering things I am supposed to do before coming home. Once class ends, I just want to leave and go home.

So I did not do that, and it probably wouldn’t have helped anyhow, because like me, Joe sleeps the sleep of the dead and is very hard to awaken. I got home, used the buzzer system to call home over and over again, slipped inside the building and pounded on the door, yelled for Joe, everything.

But no matter what I did, it did no good. I got back to Richmond around noon. It was 2:35 pm when I finally got in.

So that was very frustrating and a tad alienating. But WTF, I got in eventually and I will not forget my keys again any time soon.

Or so I would hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.