Bad Family: 100 words a day

The re-writing of Bad Family (*) has been warming up over the last week or so (although it'll have been just over a month, by the time this entry is auto-published).

(*) My game about dysfunctional relationships, family sit-coms, and the struggle to get what you want by the end of the episode before your big sister screws you over.

Really, it feels like the writing is happening at the intersection of seven personal productivity hacks that I've been using for a while:

1. I've set up the home page of my browser so that the Google Docs page where I'm writing Bad Family is right in my face whenever I go online. Using Google Docs also has the advantage of making it easy to work on it anywhere.
   
2. I have started a Seinfeld chain - basically, the idea that if you can see you're making progress every day, you don't want to take a day off (and break the chain). You can see my chain for Bad Family here.
   
3. I'm using an idea from Mark Forster called the Current Initiative, which is that you choose one project that you want to make progress on, and make it the very first thing you do each day. So, when I wake up I write on Bad Family for 10 minutes. I also make it the first thing I do when I get home.
   
4. After reading 'In Praise of Slow', I'm putting less pressure on myself to complete this game RIGHTNOWASSOONASPOSSIBLE. By taking the pressure off, I'm trying to make it more fun.
   
5. I'm writing it with a specific audience in mind. This is a hack suggested by Jonathon Walton - writing it to a particular person gives it a more personal voice. Hopefully it also makes it a more enjoyable read.
   
6. I'm making this my main writing project for the next two months (till the end of July). I'm now alternating a period of serious, focused writing with two weeks of playing around with various projects, finding out what's fun.
   
7. I'm writing 100 words a day. Again it's a suggestion by Jonathon Walton, in this thread on Story Games.

Basically, I'm looking forward to 'finishing' this thing. Not only will it tie off the last Old Thing I've been working on, but it'll also allow me to release Matt, Karen, and Gino's artwork into the internet.

EDITED TO ADD: I've also been 'gameifying' my writing - finding easy levels (sections) to complete and working on them; gradually I'm working my way up to the harder levels.

Open thread

What are you up to this weekend?

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Be with your audience)

Presentation Zen (PZ) finishes up with some simple advice for actually delivering your presentation.

First: practice. The aim is to know your material so well that you can present it without referring to any notes. As PZ mentions earlier, the act of developing your story is going to help you develop this mastery of the material.

Second: be fully present when you give your presentation. Focus just on this moment; don't allow yourself to be distracted by thoughts of what happened before you arrived, or what you need to do afterwards.

This advice goes even further - it suggests focusing entirely on the act of presenting, and not on how your presentation is being perceived.

Garr Reynolds, the author of PZ, suggests a few things here:

• "Don't ask 'Will I be appreciated?' or 'Will I win them over?' Ask 'How can I contribute?'
• Think of mistakes as fascinating. Think of mistakes as opportunities to learn (to grow). Let the mistakes go and move on; dwelling on the mistakes will disconnect you from your audience.

Reynolds says, "Once you begin to judge yourself, or wonder how you're being judged, you stop being mindful."

This quality of 'mindfulness' is, I think, a way of delivering the best possible presentation. You're focusing on conveying the material, which (hopefully) leads to a stronger connection with the audience as they see that it's not about you, it's about what they're learning.

Third: Aim to be as interested in your material as you hope your audience will be. Again, mindfulness helps you share your passion for the material in your presentation with your audience.


How to connect with an audience

Reynolds points out that people's concentration tends to flag after about 15 to 20 minutes. Keeping your presentation as short as it can be is an excellent goal, as is trying to finish before your time runs out.

He also suggests reducing the number of barriers between you and the audience:

• Don't use a lectern
• Don't sit at the back of the room by the projector
• Don't sit behind a desk
• Keep lights on, so people can see you.

Gerald's Game

by Stephen King

I like to re-read books. After my difficulties reading Garden of Last Days, I went back and re-read one of the lesser-known Stephen Kings. It's also one of the books I've been consistently tempted to adapt, probably due to its simple premise: Gerald's Game is about a woman handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere. No-one is coming to rescue her, and if she's going to survive she's going to have to think her way out.

The handcuffs are the most obvious of the two antagonists in this book. The second antagonist is the lead character's own mind; Jessie Burlingame experienced something genuinely horrible 25 years ago, and has spent most of the intervening time repressing it. That's led to her mind not only creating a bunch of different voices to represent different aspects of her personality, but also a deeply self-destructive desire to undercut her own achievements, make her screw up, and ultimately kill her (because she 'deserves it').

These voices rise to the fore once Jessie is handcuffed: without any way of escaping, she finally has quiet time to listen to her thoughts without distraction. The truth of this really hit me; it's a phenomena that's been experienced by me and a few people I know recently as we've been dealing with some unpleasant mental crap.

For me, this idea of the antagonist being your own thoughts is the strongest idea of the book and oddly under-developed.(*)

(*) I've now realised it also has a lot in common with one of the new things I'm playing around with.

Instead, the psychological complexity that I admire in Gerald's Game threatens to go completely out the window once King introduces a psycho-killer with pallid skin, sharpened canines, and a suitcase filled with human bones. It becomes a little difficult to focus on the idea of an enemy inside your own mind when you're afraid that Leatherface is going to come back and kill you the next night.

At least, that's been my memory of this book over the last 15 years. However, I realised during this time through that, to his credit, King does play with the idea that the killer is imaginary. In fact, he does more than play with it -- by the end, the killer is not only real, but it's also how the self-destructive elements of Jessie's own mind have chosen to manifest themselves.

Still, my scriptwriter voice kept yelling out while reading it that the idea of the killer was a bit lame. That he's there to motivate Jessie to escape, putting a time-limit on her actions. To 'Scriptwriter Me' there's already a character in this book that serves this purpose: a scared and hungry stray dog. In my hypothetical adaptation, I'd up the threat from this corner, and bring out Jessie's 'Inner Antagonist' voice more strongly.

I'm not even sure it needs the killer in the book. The reliving of Jessie's repressed memory is horrible enough - visceral, repulsive, banally evil - and King takes his time detailing the aftermath of it, as much as he would with any other thriller setpiece. Reading these sections reminded of conversations with some of my exes, in which we've watched a movie (like, True Romance, for instance) and they've been baffled at what I could have seen in it. Questions have been asked like "Why would you want to watch something like that?" "How does it make the world a better place?"

After reading the icky repressed memory sequence, I'm beginning to see their point.

Re-reading it, I was suprised to find that the repressed memory at the heart of the book is pretty much openly acknowledged about 1/4 of the way through, and vividly [shudder] dramatised at about the halfway point. And just when I figured that it was all done with, King does something really exciting: he ties Jessie's chances of escape to her ability to remember by hinting that there's something else that she's repressing, something that we haven't been made aware of. This inverts the value of her memory - making it something she has to use rather than push away from her.

Later, King pushes the timeframe of the story forward, much further than I expected him to. It had the effect of pulling me out of the book, but after taking a break and pushing on, it actually seemed quite natural. King used the flash-forward to demonstrate massive character change in Jessie, dump a whole bunch of exposition on us, and dramatise her final triumph over her mind (through the act of finishing a letter).

After finishing it, I realised that Gerald's Game might be another one of those books that I've long wanted to adapt but subsequently realise that I don't (Phantoms by Dean Koontz also falls into that category). If I were to push myself to articulate why this is, it'd be something like: there are things about this book that I find compelling, things I find easy to visualise cinematically, and especially there are things that I would like to do differently. The question is: would I like to spend two years doing them?

And maybe the answer is that, for me, Jessie's transformation is satisfying but not quite meaningful enough. She goes through hell, she triumphs over some really nasty adversity, but the emotional bang isn't quite there for me. And I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure how to make it happen - and THAT is what any adaptation of this story really needs.

Random thoughts:

• Gerald's Game is a companion piece to Dolores Claiborne. I seem to remember it was written at a time when he had come under a small amount of criticism for not being able to write women as psychologically deeply as he did men.
  
  
• Actually, re-reading it made me realise how influential this novel was on me: the precision with which King deals with describing how Jessie tries to get out of her predicament. It's something I drew on when writing The Limit (in fact, that script contains a woman in a very similar situation).

New Media: State of Play 2009

It's been a while since I posted about the state of media - how we create, receive and make money from making stories.

In that time:

• the mainstream has disintegrated (at least for me) (*)
• the noun I use to describe watching a movie or a DVD is changing; I've started to saying
  I'm watching a 'show' or an 'episode'. I suspect someday I be saying I'm watching a file; the activity is being detaching from something physical like a tape or a disc.
• the US writers' strike led to the creation of internet shows like Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog
• someone I know has filmed a web-series
• editing software and vid-cams are so widely available now that I have one.

(*) I no longer watch TV. I now have to have careful conversations with people when discussing shows like Lost and Supernatural to make sure we're not revealing spoilers to each other, because we're out of sync with our viewing.

And check out this comment from an anonymous commenter on Kung Fu Monkey, describing their set-up for downloading shows. Key quote:

If I'm out with friends and they recommend a show or movie to me, I can go to a public search engine with my smart phone, enter in the name of the film, and when I get home, that movie will be waiting for me to watch in blu-ray perfect HD.

... I'm a reasonably well-seasoned techie in my early 30's, and I set this system up in a weekend with a terabyte of storage for under $600. That means in 1 year, 18 months tops, the price will have halved, the installers will be polished, the software will STILL be free, and this sort of thing will be taking off in homes all over the country.

So, yeah, the situation has shifted.

Obviously, distributing and replicating shows is basically free.

Creators are now producing their own high-quality material, independent of major studios. Leverage, a heist show was shot and post-produced using domestic equipment. It has no major studio financing. It was successful enough to get renewed for a second season on TNT, a legitimate, well-thought of network.

Revenue? Well, that's still the issue - Leverage (I assume) is earning money through screening on TNT - and the basic rule still applies: the moment you release something, it will be available for free on the internet. If you're in this to make money, you need to confident of making it before that happens.

We have entered the era of DIY stories, pulled by readily available tech, and pushed by market forces and outmoded business models.

Bill Cunningham, over at Pulp 2.0 lays out a bunch of relevant links, which I summarise here.

Ted Hope over at Truly Free Film provides a list of 38 problems with the American independent film scene. Here are the ones that stuck out for me:

• Too many leisure options for film to compete without further enhancing the theatrical and cinematic experience.
• Too many "specialized" films opening to allow such films to gain word of mouth and audience's attention.
• Too many films available and being distributed to allow films to stay in one theater for very long, making it more difficult to develop a word of mouth audience.
• Distrib's abandonment (and lack of development) of community-building marketing approaches for specialized releases (which reduces appeal for a group activity i.e. the theatrical experience).
• Distrib's failure to embrace limited streaming of features for audience building.
• Reliance on large marketing spend release model restricts content to broad subjects (which decreases films' distinction in marketplace) and reduces ability to focus on pre-aggregated niche audiences.
• Recession has reduced private equity available for film investment.
• No new business model for internet exploitation at a level that can justify reasonable film budgets.

Recently, some of my friends (Winged Ink) have been telling me about how Kristen Hersh runs her music career now - from home, communicating with fans via the internet and providing them with customised products. It's very much in the spirit of the 1000 True Fans model. That fits with this article by David Byrne, describing a spectrum of business models that musicians can apply.

The 360, or equity, deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. You achieve wide saturation and sales, while becoming a brand, owned and operated by the label.

The standard distribution deal. The record company bankrolls the recording and owns the copyright to the recording; the artist gets a royalty percentage.

The license deal. Similar to the standard deal, except the artist retains the copyrights and ownership of the master recording.

The profit-sharing deal. The artist gets a minimal advance from the label, and they share the profits from day one. The artist retains ownership of the master.

The manufacturing and distribution deal. The artist does everything except manufacture and distribute the product. The artist gets absolute creative control.

The self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed. CDs are sold at gigs and through a Web site. Promotion is a MySpace page. Within the limits of what they can afford, the artists have complete creative control.

For me, the key quote from Byrne's article comes here:

Radiohead adopted this DIY model to sell In Rainbows online — and then went a step further by letting fans name their own price for the download. <snip> ... As one of Radiohead's managers, Bryce Edge, told me, "The industry reacted like the end was nigh. They've devalued music, giving it away for nothing.' Which wasn't true: We asked people to value it, which is very different semantics to me."

Stories, created in a bunch of different ways, released into the wild, and then valued by the audience according to a business model that you decide on.

More on exquisite corpses

Just wanted to draw your attention again to the previous entry. It's an on-line story (told in 250 word installments). If you're interested in writing the next chapter, check it out.

According to Wikipedia, this sort of exquisite corpse (aka "exquisite cadaver" or "rotating corpse") was invented by Surrealists in France, just after World War 1 (and holy crap, was surrealism a reaction to World War 1? That seems completely reasonable now I understand the time frame). When Surrealists first played the game, their story contained the phrase "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.")

Anyway, calling all bloggers. Here's a chance to have some fun.

The Sleep Dep On-Line Exquisite Corpse

This entry is part of an on-line exquisite corpse - a short story told in 10 installments by 10 different authors. My 250 word installment is below; if you're interested in writing the next part, scroll down to the bottom of this post for details on how this all works...

--- --- ---

2.

whistle three times if you find anything.”

“Anything, like what?” said a man Dianne didn’t recognize.

The officer explained, and by about halfway through her explanation Dianne had begun to recognize the dread of the situation, of what could’ve happened and what it could mean for who they were looking for. None of this stopped her from maneuvering her way into a group with Peter, but it did make her feel self-conscious and vaguely shitty about herself as they set off.

At first there were no words - just a focus on the task, taking seriously the idea that you had to search behind every tree, peer into every bit of the dense foliage. Added to that, the path up through the bush was slick from last night’s rain, and people’s attentions were divided between the search and just managing to stay on their feet.

So Dianne’s first words – “How did you find out about this?” - felt like they were violating the culture of diligence that had started to emerge in their group. But it was obvious that despite the awkwardness, no-one felt in a position to chastise her, and after a moment Peter realised that she was speaking to him.

“My mum called me last night. I had to get up at four to drive down here, but … yeah.”

“You had to come.” She finished his sentence and saw on his face that he wished she hadn’t. She started to apologise and then realised it would only


--- --- ---

This is part 2 of 10. You can find the other installments here (but DON'T DO THIS YET if you want to join in):

1. www.sleep-dep.blogspot.com (26 June 2009)
2. www.multi-dimensional.blogspot.com (27 June 2009)
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

WANT TO READ IT? Jump back to the previous entries using the links above.

WANT TO JOIN IN? This exquisite corpse operates on a first-come, first-served basis. If you want to write the next installment, FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS:

1.IMPORTANT - Don't read any of the previous entries! Read only the one you see here.

2.ALSO IMPORTANT - Post a comment here, saying “I claim the next entry”, followed by the URL/web address of your blog. If you don't do this, we'll never know where to find you.

3.Copy the text of this blog entry into a new post on your blog, but DELETE THE CHAPTER and write your own as the next installment. Start with the chapter number as I've done here, and start exactly where the last chapter left off (in mid-sentence if necessary).

4.Your entry should be EXACTLY 250 words long, unless you are writing chapter 10, in which case you must bring the story to a conclusion in 250 words or less.

5.At the end of the chapter, where the text reads: “This is part X of 10”, change this to the number of your chapter.

6.Add the URL/web address of your blog and today's date onto the list below that, so people reading later entries can jump back to your chapter.

7.Finish your chapter and post it within 24 hours of claiming your place. There – it's freaking easy! You can go back and read the rest of the story now.

8.IF YOU'VE JUST FINISHED ENTRY #10 and finished the story, DELETE THESE INSTRUCTIONS from the bottom of your post – they'll just confuse people. ALSO, let CG know by posting a comment on the first entry (on www.sleep-dep.blogspot.com), or sending him an email on squid.mohawk@gmail.com. CG will assemble a full version and send it round to all of the contributors.

Why I'm not writing - Damn you Chris! edition

Chris linked to this:



I spent 10 minutes after watching this (in broad daylight!) freaking out that one of my flatmates was sneaking up behind me with a big smile on their face.

To mellow out, I re-played You Have to Burn the Rope. Seriously, you should. And stick around for the end credits song. Portal's is better, but this is fun.

And if you liked YHtBtR, you could check out Fathom. Pay close attention to the fish.

I thoroughly recommend the Google Wave presentation by the way. Yes, it's 80 minutes long, but I especially the last 5 minutes, where the development team demo the app that's going to bring about world peace.

Here's a link to the highlights reel.

Presentation Zen: An Example (The Moons of Saturn)

Another presentation - this one comes from TED.com and shows us what it's like on two of Saturn's moons.



There's less reliance on slides in this presentation, more a focus on the passion of the presenter (Carolyn Porco).