Project Waldo

Reading right now: 20th Century Boys, by Naoki Urasawa Real, by Takehiko Inoue After spending the last month watching the entire run of Battlestar Galactica, I have only one thing to say: all the radness that was the show? You erased it with that finale.

Just so folk(s?) don't get the impression that I'm in some sort of suicidal confidence-spiral, let it be known that I had a pretty good day today. And the goodness of it was accentuated by the badness of yesterday. Alas, after three weeks of typing away on my new script, I showed it to Jiyoung yesterday. This is a woman who has learned to be very, very tactful in her critiques of my projects. The verdict? Well, she had something good to say about two of twenty pages. I went to sleep embarrassed, hopeless, feeling like I should throw in the towel. And then today, I charged back up the hillside and rewrote the entire thing. And though it's rough and first-drafty, it's not bad. So not bad that I feel comfortable starting concepts for characters. Tomorrow I'll do a polish pass. If that goes well, I've got enough script for the first issue of the comic. I originally intended to write the entire script from beginning to end before touching the stylus, but now I wonder...

Some advice for aspiring screenwriters: if you find that your scripts are needlessly expository or just plain slow, try imagining that you're writing for a self-illustrated comic. Ain't nothing gets you to the point faster than imagining that you'll have to draw the same two talking heads sixteen times. The other thing: pace yourself. Creating something elaborate is a little bit like gardening. Just get out there and water every day. And when stuff starts growing, just go with it. Pull weeds (or don't, if they're pretty). There'll be fruit and flowers eventually. But not if you stop watering. I'm so terrified these days. Terrified that I'll suck. Terrified that I'm wasting my time. Terrified that my depths will be plumbed, and they won't be all that depthy. Terrified that this is the weightless moment at the top of my life's rollercoaster. Terrified that everybody else won and I lost. Terrified that my money is disappearing. Terrified that if...

As I write the script for Project Waldo (that's the provisional title for the graphic novel), I'm doing my best to keep things loose. If one thing made Stareater hard, it was that I had to break through ten years of ossified preconceptions about the story. Project Waldo is exactly a month and a half old. Some of its ideas grew from what I saw as conflicts between the world of Gordon and the Stareater (which took place in the future) and the way our real future seems to be shaping up. GatS had no robots, no AIs (well, okay, one really huge AI), no biotechnology, no real connection to our experience at all. There are lots of exciting concepts that I just couldn't touch with that story. So Project Waldo gives me a chance to do some near-future dabbling. Here's the basic idea: (Redacted due to spoilers) This lets me play with two parallel worlds -- one is a dystopian technoscape, the other a baroque fantasy realm. I get to do swords and magical creatures, but I also get to ...

A couple of people have asked me what's going on with this project, so here's the latest: Stareater has been put on the back burner. I think there still might be something salvageable there, but I'll need some distance before I can come back to it. Jiyoung told me that one of the things she's noticed in talking to Americans is that we all have "personal projects." I hadn't realized this tendency defined us until she pointed it out. Everybody is writing a screenplay, working on an album, putting together a portfolio. I don't know what this says about us. In Korea, people don't have personal projects, they have hobbies. I was really confused about this at first. Right after they ask you how old you are, they ask, "what's your hobby?" What does it mean, that they have hobbies and we have projects? I feel like there must be some revelation there. I should mention that when Koreans pursue a hobby, they go all-in. If they say "Salsa da...

I have a plan now, but it involves not posting here for a while. I'll be back someday! Thanks for your help, everybody!

Since I received my first round of critiques, I've been doing my best to upgrade the screenplay in piecemeal fashion. About a week ago, I started to bog down. The revisions were improving the script, but I could see that no matter how hard I worked, I'd only be able to gain half a letter grade, at best. Maybe from C- to a straight C. This was a tough pill to swallow, given the time I've sunk into this project. So I've spent the last few days moping. I bottomed out on Sunday. After having a long talk with Jiyoung, I decided to shelve the project. It was an emotional afternoon -- I was angry that I'd flushed such a big chunk of our personal savings down the toilet. I also felt embarrassed to have failed in the eyes of my friends and family. The turbulence subsided a little the next day, and I wasn't as sure about tossing Stareater. I saw that I had three options: Try to salvage Stareater. Take what I've learned and start a new project. Get a real job. Fixing t...