Froggie’s Lilypad

In November 2003, I began blogging. I started out on Blogger as a way to do NaNoWriMo without actually writing a novel. The initial idea was to write 1000 essays, each at least 1000 words. It was 500 songs I loved and 500 songs I hated. Simple enough concept, but very narrow in scope for a sustainable blog.

Obviously, the blog has changed since then – I migrated from Blogger to Movable Type. I expanded the topics of my writing to include day to day life, ended the music project (though, I really should dig up those essays and repost them), changed themes at least 5 times (probably more) and eventually landed here – to the WordPress powered blog you see before you.

I’ve had good times here – I reconnected with old friends I hadn’t heard from in years. I made new friends that I would not have now were it not for this site. I’ve broken this blog more times than I can count, but took great pride in fixing it myself. I’ve made people laugh. I’ve made people cry happy tears. I have made genuine connections with people that, despite being via the internet, are every bit as real and meaningful as anyone I have known in my off-line life.

I’ve had bad times here, too – there were two server crashes (one of which left several posts lost to the ether forever). There was one successful hacking attempt (the fault of a shoddy webhost who failed to update). I’ve hurt people I care about with insensitive things I’ve written here. I’ve been hurt by people who… well… they know what they’ve done and why they’ve done it – I still get links in from “check out the worst blog EVER in history!!!” websites/forums/blog-posts designed by those that think they have been clever and anonymous.

Recently – very recently, in fact – someone called me on hiding behind theFrog. It stunned me that someone I barely knew, someone who has not been a long-time reader of this blog, someone who does not know me off-line, was able to pick up in such a short period of time exactly how much I was relying on theFrog for my personality. Granted, I might be reading too much into what was actually said, but it was significant to me because the fears I had been trying to cavalierly brush aside and ignore were suddenly right there out in the open.

Thing is, it’s been weighing on my mind pretty heavily before I was called on it, but once it happened, the previously still, small voice in my head turned into a roar. YES! the voice practically screamed at me. I’m not crazy for thinking that theFrog persona is a crutch! I’m not crazy for thinking that theFrog persona is holding me back! He sees it, too! There’s more to me than just theFrog and until I embrace the Real Me, I will never climb that Everest.

The problem with being theFrog rests in the fact that because I don’t have my own personal face on every single thing I write, I don’t make any effort to put any quality in the things I write. Hell – sometimes, I didn’t even have to write… I post a meme or quiz or some other lame blog thing and continue to hide behind the happy little frog face. I could be content in the knowledge that if what I write here is crap, that’s ok – it’s not me (the real ME) writing it.

That, of course, is why I haven’t been writing much here lately. It’s the conflict within me that what I write here is purposely trivial, but I’m in a mind-space now that I want to write more than trivial things. When this site got started, I had no delusions of the fact that I would never get a book deal from any of the content here. I never questioned that my hit meter would stay low. I would never be quoted on CNN or MSNBC or FoxNews. I would never be called for an interview on… whatever bloggers are being interviewed about nowadays. I’ve been debating myself about what to do with this site for ages and… and always just getting so overwhelmed that I would decide not to post anything rather than have to post something fake yet again.

Just prior to being called out (literally, like 2-3 days before), I did something. Something I’d been thinking of doing for a long time, but always put off. I bought me. I staked my own claim in my own name. I was in the process of setting up that site and compiling the content for it before I launched it or made any announcements. I had just made the bold (for me) leap of changing my twitter pic from my cute little frog face to… well… my own. Then I got called out and I realized that I was doing exactly what I always do: get so bogged down by the minutiae of change that I don’t end up actually doing any changing.

So, I did it. My website is me. The writing there is mine and I have no one to blame but myself if the quality of the writing is not up to snuff. I won’t lie – I’m scared to death about it, but it needs to be done.

I don’t know what will happen to this site yet. I may roll it into the other one. I may just let it die. I haven’t decided yet and I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

Feel free to stop by the new diggs. There’s not much there yet, but give it time. You may like what you see there. You may hate it. You may find out that theFrog you’ve always known is vastly different from the person behind her… but at least you’ll be finally seeing the real me.

It appears that even though the application is available and submissions are being accepted, the web application is not yet up and running. I could go ahead and print out a copy of my script and send it off to them, but I’d just as soon save the postage, paper and printer toner and e-submit it.

So, I’ve been given a reprieve on submitting to Nicholl for the time being, which is just as well because I have to write a short treatment for it (about 300 characters, to be exact). For some reason, I always freeze up on those things.

In other news, TPO has figured out how to use comments (finally) and has made his first EVER appearance on the blog. You can go say hi if you want, but I wouldn’t count on a prompt response. I don’t know if he’s mastered the subtleties of carrying on an e-conversation

The Nicholl Fellowship application is up.

Now, I am really shitting myself.

I did something today and now I wish I could undo it, but it’s a good thing, so I shouldn’t undo it. It’s good.

I submitted The Soup Storm to Scriptapalooza and the PAGE Awards script competitions.

Now, I am shitting myself. Totally totally shitting myself. What if it’s not good enough? What if I don’t even make it past the quarter-finals? What if I :::gasp::: DO succeed, but I’m to naive or stupid in the business of screenwriting to fully capitalize on that success? What if all my dreams get dashed and I find out that the thing that I’ve been pining for all these years is something I should not have been wasting my time on at all?!

What if I’m just a stressed out ball of energy and I am freaking myself out needlessly?

It’s out of my hands now. It up to the judges to determine if what I wrote is good. And even if I do bad, it’s still good, right? Because then I’ll get feedback on how to make it better from actual professional movie people who know these things and aren’t worried about not hurting my feelings¹.

I’m still shitting myself, though. This is suddenly very, very real.

1. Yes, I did spring for the extra “judge’s feedback” [↩]

It’s actually not much of an update… my life without TPO is sadly uninteresting. What can I say? I’ve always known that he was the more interesting one in our relationship.

I’ve been obsessing about each new episode of Living With the Machigenga (scarily obsessing, at that) and watching more episodes of Clean House than can possibly be good for my mental health.

On the work front… it’s… going. Gearing up for our busy period, which is always fun. Amazingly, I got the “Employee of the Quarter” award – I still don’t know how I accomplished that given the level of contempt I have for “certain people” I work with. I won’t elaborate, but… TRUST ME.

I know I am saying nothing interesting – at the moment, the most interesting things that are happening to me are imaginary. That’s not as pathetic as it sounds (and believe me – I am well aware of how pathetic that sounds) because the “imaginary-ness” is in the form of fiction writing. Yes, I have done much much editing on the script and have gotten excellent feedback on it¹, but I’m also working on a couple new projects.

I’m trying a new approach to writing right now. In the past, I would write one scene or chapter (depending on what type of story I was writing) and then fill in the pieces of story that came both before and after that scene/chapter². It might be the way I think. I’ll get an idea for a story element – usually one little piece of dialogue or one small bit of imagery – and then start exploring what was happening with those characters that led them to that moment… or what would happen to them immediately after that moment. So, I’ll write that scene or chapter and, from there, start outlining the basic elements of plot.

That was the old way. As you can well imagine (and if you’re a writer, as you have probably experienced yourself), that’s not a very efficient or effective way to write a story. What I’ve learned is that, if anything, that’s the surest way to keep a story in a perpetual half-written state on your hard-drive for years.

What I’ve been working on is doing a basic chapter-by-chapter (or, scene-by-scene, depending on the format) outline. From there, I’ve been detailing all of the elements that each chapter/scene needs to accomplish. As a side document, I write out details about each main character and their story arc(s) as well as detail some of the major locations if needed. It’s a lot of  work to put into pre-writing, but I think it will eventually help the writing process in the long run. In the past, I’ve skipped the pre-writing and I can tell that old stories have suffered for it because I tend to get to a certain spot where I have no idea how to get the characters from where they are to where they need to be.

Ooops – I sort of went off on a tangent. This post was mostly just to say “hey – no G-news is good G-news.³”

1. by “excellent” I don’t mean that people have been telling me non-stop how great it is… I mean that people have been taking time to point out things that I didn’t notice and could improve [↩]
2. Very rarely would the particular scene/chapter I started with was the beginning of the story [↩]
3. You are AWESOME if you know what that is from! [↩]

It’s weird… I’ve been waiting 15 years to have a finished screenplay to submit to the Nicholl Fellowship. I’ve mentioned that (ad nauseum, I’m sure) in previous posts, but now that it’s done and I want to submit it?

Well, the Nicholl peeps don’t have their application available yet.

I should be patient – I’m still waiting for some feedback from a few people who are kind enough to critique it for me. I should proof-read it a few more times, perhaps edit a few things – make sure the fat is cut and the formatting is spot on. But I’m chomping at the bit and I REALLY want to submit it. Now.

You’d think with a wait as long as mine, a week or a month would be just a drop in the bucket, but I’m finding myself growing more and more anxious as May 1st looms just ahead and there’s still that damnable “The 2009 application will be available soon. Please check back here for more information.” message on their site.

I hate lessons in character building.

I got one of my three refund checks already – color me surprised that of the three returns we had to file, Hawaii was the one that processed the refund the fastest. Two weeks! Amazing.

Now, of course, is just a matter of hoping that California gets its act together and gives me back my money… STAT.

UPDATE: After reading the full thread on the Guardian message board, I’m about 85% sure that the guy is, in fact, Petty Guy and not just some random person who saw my site. It is far too coincidental to be random, especially since he STARTED the thread, poked at people to keep it going, and then seemingly disappeared once he linked to my site. This will be the last I ever say on the subject because… well, I suppose giving him even this much attention was too much attention.

Recently (as in last night before I went to bed), I decided to check my stats. I hadn’t done that in awhile and I don’t exactly know what possessed me to do it then. But I did, and I noticed that I was getting a LOT of referrals from The Guardian website. If you don’t know what that is because you, like me, are United Statesian, it’s a British newspaper.

So, I checked it out because I have no idea why a British newspaper website would be linking to me. When it comes to Globalization, I’m nobody and I’m fully aware of this fact.

Color me surprised to see that it was a guy on the website’s message board talking about his lack of understanding for why certain blogs exist. Obviously he used this site as an example of “there’s no explanation for why this exists.”

I’m ok with that… I’ve written before (feel free to dig through my archives) about the fact that I don’t really care if people throw around the “banal and useless” tag to describe this blog.  This blog is obviously not for them, nor for the people who agree with them. I’ve also talked before about my reasons for blogging (again, feel free to dig through my archives), so rest assured that my justification for being here has been documented.

What got me writing about this is that I’m a little… confused(?) as to why THIS site is on the radar of anyone in the UK who would be discussing blogs on a British newspaper’s message board. If you don’t know me or anything about me, you may not know that I have friends and “ex-friends” in England. There is a small handful of people there that have known me IRL and either don’t like me or know I don’t like them¹. Relationships can be tricky things, so I don’t blame that small handful of people for feeling the way they feel about me… so long as they understand that I have a right to feel the way I feel about them.

I’m digressing, though, but I think I’m making my point clear enough. The guy? The one that linked to this site randomly and seemingly out of the blue? Well – I have to wonder if he’s one of those people. Bit petty if it is, but… well, there’s a prime example of why I feel about him the way I feel².

If it’s not him – if there’s just some guy in the UK who just happened to stumble onto this site by accident and decided that I was the PERFECT EXAMPLE of “why the hell does this exist?!!?!” I suppose I’m a bit flattered. There are millions of examples he could have used, but he chose mine. He could have just used my title and not linked to me at all, so as not to boost my visitor stats. Instead, he chose to give me a full link.

Either scenario, though, I just want to say “thank you.”  If you’re the Petty Guy who is doing this out of spite, thank you for reminding me of the reason I think you’re an asshole (or, should I say “arsehole” so you could understand me better?). If you’re the Random Guy who just chanced along this site and gave me a full link, thank you for boosting my readership – no matter how briefly it was done. In both cases, thank you for giving me something to post about… thereby giving the Guardian’s forum users something new to look at when they click by here.

1. ABritishGuy – just in case you’re reading this, rest assured that I’m not talking about you. [↩]
2. I’m using “he” as a generic pronoun here – it could easily be a female and still be just as true. [↩]

It’s finished. I completed one of the longest-term goals I’ve ever had in my life.

What now?

Well, for starters, there are rewrites. Copious amounts of rewrites at that. I’ve already completely overhauled my first draft to be more compliant with “standard” formatting rules (something with which I allowed myself a good bit of leeway while I was writing the first draft because I didn’t want to get too caught up with the formatting and not end up finishing the story itself). In fact, the few of you whom have read all or part of the first draft would hardly recognize the current draft.

At this point, I’m waiting on story critiques from a couple of people and working on tightening up what I have now to reduce the page count (which is now up to about 104 or 105).

But, since that story is done – all I have left is polishing up and maybe cleaning up some confusion about the story time line – I have all the stories I had put on hold coming up and crawling all over me trying to get out. Four of them, to be specific.

It’s a bit overwhelming. These stories have lived in my head and in hastily written notes on my hard drive for so long that I am dying to work on them. All of them. But I know me. And I know that I need to focus on just one for now… and I don’t know which one I want to work on first.

I think perhaps I’m going to try outlining each one in much more detail than what I currently have and see which one seems to speak loudest to me.

1. What was the last movie you saw in a theater?

Double feature with TPO – Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire. Both of them very good.

2. What is your favorite movie theater snack?

Movie Popcorn… mmmmmmmmmm. Delish. It will be the death of all my fitness goals.

3. Have you ever snuck in ‘outside’ food into a theater?

Yes, but not in years because TPO is a wuss and gets all weirdly squirmy and nervous about getting caught. He genuinely believes that we are stealing from the theater if we bring in outside food. Despite heartily disagreeing, I have found that it’s best not to argue. Besides, as above, my favorite movie snack is popcorn, and I have no intention of sneaking in “home” popcorn.

4. Have you ever made out in a theater?

Who hasn’t?

5. What is the ‘farthest’ you have gone in a theater?

I must politely decline to comment. Take from that answer what you will.

Bonus: What is one of your favorite movie sex scene?

American Pie’s “pie” scene.