Tuesday
Dec. 2
3:07 p.m.

Been trying—though not successfully—to push the clock around again so I can get back on daytime hours. Not that I like daytime hours, as I much prefer working at night, but with the shoot coming up this weekend for the medical training video, and having to get things arranged at the location on Wednesday and Thursday, not to mention my volunteering to bell ring for charity Thursday morning at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m., well, so much for going to bed at 5:30 and getting up at two in the afternoon for a while.

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving. Save for the Cowboys winning, the first turkey day here at the new place went great. Football all day long on the wall in my movie room, the whole family here, lots of food, had one of the neighbors stop in for a while, just perfect all the way around. The Giants beat the ‘Skins over the weekend, and I made good progress on the script for my next film project, which I’ll be looking to shoot in January or February. Probably February, as some of my crew is tied up early in January, and trying to cast now, right on top of the holidays, probably isn’t going to happen. But for the moment, I’ve reached the 80% mark on the script, and I’m happy as hell with it. Should have a draft copy out to my buddy Frank to read through sometime next week if this weekend’s upcoming shoot doesn’t entirely wipe me out, timewise.

Before I wrap this up, my old hometown made the news on Black Friday when scumbags gathered outside Wal Mart trampled some poor sap to death in a rush to get, I dunno, maybe a TV or DVD player or $9 copy of The Incredible Hulk on DVD. Shame, but Valley Stream was going down the shitter when I left, and parts of it (namely the Green Acres Mall) had been shitholes long before I bailed on the place. Valley Stream and Christmas have a history, too, you could say, when it comes to crime. The infamous Godfather 3 theatre shooting happened at the Sunrise Multiplex (which developed a number of unflattering nicknames over the years, perhaps the most apt the Scumrise Multiplex), which also made national news. Killings in movie theatres on Christmas Day usually do, infrequent as they are.

So, a bunch of lowlifes trampled some guy, tore the doors off the building, and crumpled a piece of metal bracework, according to the NY Daily News, until it resembled an accordion. Nice, huh? Used to be the dirtbags from Cambria Heights, having soured their own commercial shopping areas, rolled into Valley Stream, generally turning the Mall into a cesspool and increasing the crime rate, pushing out the locals until we wound up shopping at Roosevelt Field or the Massapequa Mall. I can only imagine how lousy it’s gotten since I split, if worthless losers like these maniacs were willing to not only trample a man to death, but injure a pregnant woman, and then refuse to get off line when they closed the store, telling workers, “I’ve been waiting out there all night. I’m not going anywhere and nobody’s making me.” According to the AP, shoppers continued to stream past the fallen employee–even getting in the way of emergency medical personnel who were trying to save his life. Sorry, but how the fuck do you step over a dying man to try and beat the person behind you to a $59 digital camera?

It’s unlikely police will be able to prosecute anybody, so here is my solution. Take the video, put it up on YouTube, and identify everybody you possibly can, and let the media rip them to pieces. Show the fat woman with the clutch pushing and shoving in her effort to step over a dying man and let the world see her for who she really is, even if she did manage to snag a cheap Blue Ray player before the store closed. Show the guy running over a door torn off the hinges in his frenzy to snag a cheap high def plasma screen TV. Show everybody you can, and give their names and where they live, and let their communities do the rest. Ostracize these assholes. Embarrass them publicly and make them objects of scorn. You need the public to do it, because obviously, none of them was embarrassed enough on Black Friday, hoofing over the back of a man who would be pronounced dead within the hour.

Remember that broad a couple of years back, caught on videotape beating up her toddler outside a department store? How that video spread and she got villified nationwide? Time for a replay. Time for the power of YouTube and the mainstream media to make a difference by absolutely crucifying these reprehensible shitbags. Time to go into full-on Grinch mode and make their Christmas—and hopefully their lives on the whole—miserable for the foreseeable future. No way should these folks get away with what happened, although legally, it looks likely. To those who contributed to the death of a temp worker just trying to make a buck, I hope the sagging economy costs you your jobs. To the couples who were shopping together and put your heels into that poor guy’s flesh, I hope your spouse starts abusing you, or fucking around on you behind your back, and that you’re homeless by Christmas Eve. To those who helped tear the doors off the hinges while a man lay injured with no care for his plight, I hope you find out your last two sex partners are both HIV positive. I hope your identities are stolen and your savings accounts are wiped out beyond recovery. I hope you’re caught with drugs, thrown in a cell while the jail’s short staffed and you earn a little prison justice via rectal pillaging. I hope the worst of you are hit by cars and buses. I hope the ones who *knew* they were stepping on a fallen human being and didn’t care wind up dying alone in a solo house fire sparked by crappy Christmas lights, and they’re trapped and debilitated by smoke to the point they cannot save themselves, and knowingly suffocate—just like the man they stole from his family mere weeks before the holiday.

Merry fucking Christmas, you human sacks of shit. I hope your conduct sparks the downward spiral in your miserable, hopefully short, lives.

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Currently listening to: Hollow, by Drowning Season

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Wednesday
Nov. 26
6:18 a.m.

Yeah, up in the wee hours again, but I’m in a groove and got a good amount of shuteye during the day before running out to grab some turkey day supplies at Publix and a late dinner at Mickey D’s with Pam. The egg nog shake is back, and we shared one of those while doing a crossword puzzle. I gotta say, I tried one of those crispy chicken wraps they’ve got? Things were freaking great. Of course, the Cape Coral McDonald’s is an upscale McDonald’s Cafe or some such, and thus far they’ve never screwed up the food, so I guess it goes to show you, you put a couple of competent folks on the grill and on the window and at the counter, things go the way they’re supposed to. Chicken wraps at McDonald’s…who’d’a thunk they’d be worth a damn?

So anyway, got home after that, and dove right into the script for the new short. I had my freelance turned in, exchanged e-mails with the editor today (who appreciated me busting ass to beat the deadline by a couple of days given that Thanksgiving’s gonna throw the wrench into anybody’s mag closing schedule), and that freed me up to pound away on the opening and a few other scenes.

Fantastic. Everything just flowed. It wasn’t a monster session in the captain’s chair, but long enough to get a real good start. Couldn’t be happier with things so far. If the crew for this thing comes together the way the other elements of the project are, it’ll be more than I could ask for.

Speaking of more than I could ask (or hope) for, been talking with a guy who I might bring on board to work on the scene I’m probably gonna shoot for The Bunker after the first of the year. We’ve been going back and forth via e-mail and he’s a total computer jock, with an itch to get into CGI, but more important to me, he’s an After Effects guy with every Final Cut Pro goodie you can pack into the toolbox. Motion, Sapphire, some 3-D rendering plug in that allows you to whip a camera 360 degrees around an animated object, programs and filters I’ve never even heard of, all sorts of crazy shit. He plans to head for San Fran to go job huntin’ after the first of the year, but he may be around long enough so that once we shoot this footage, he can do what I want done with it to match the rest of the Bunker, so I can literally drive across town and go over stuff same-day, without having to send stuff back and forth across the country. Fingers crossed, that scene can go before the lens prior to him splitting town, because music I can worry about later, my main concern is this fitting seamlessly into what I have so far. May have the guy’s full sample reel when he gets back from visiting his folks this weekend (man, the holidays really do shut everybody down at some point or another), and Pam and I are anxious to go over what he can do.

Heard back from Frank Wales earlier today, and one of the side projects we talked about this weekend came up. We’re going to go over some of our previously-released material, and then begin utilizing craigslist to dig up some talent and sound people. I haven’t even begun to scope out the studio situation, but I have been thinking that somewhere around here with all the local bands I’ve been hearing about, somebody’s fixed up their own in-house (or garage, perhaps) recording studio, who could use a couple of bucks to let us set up shop now and then. Of course, Frank says it’s quiet enough around my place at night that you can hear somebody else’s thoughts, and since it’s cold now the frogs haven’t been sounding off all night long, but despite the eerie quiet that surrounds the hacienda when the sun goes down, who wants to get chattering teeth in the sound mix when we can find a cozy home-studio somewhere?

Should probably call it a night. Still got stuff to do during true business hours, still got some phone calls to make and gotta outline the proposal for some product placement opportunities the new short may offer. With Black Friday 48 hours away, Pam’s biz line will be ringing off the hook as a number of her clients’ll probably be freaking out about one issue or another, so I’ll likely be manning the phones while the sun is up on the 9 to 5. Not my preference of hours, but shit, at least it’ll offer me more time behind the keyboard, and right now, every minute’s a ball.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks, enjoy the tryptophan!

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Currently listening to: Navras by Juno Reactor (loud, very, very loud)

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Tuesday
Nov. 25
4:56 a.m.

Maybe not quite so killer as the guys at Summit Entertainment had with Twilight, but given all that happened, pretty damned good nonetheless.

Saturday I finished the edit on my last outstanding freelance, clearing the way for me to shift gears and devote the majority of my time to the video shoot we have going on Dec. 6/7. My client is stoked about it, my talent is stoked, I’m even getting my dad and sis into the mix, and the crew is ready to go.

This weekend, I cast a small role in the new short film I have in pre-production, I began working on the script in the few spare minutes I could scrape together, and the thing is all but writing itself. On Saturday morning, I talked about the possibility of shooting at a local school my brother in law and sis have ties to, and that looks pretty good, I should be getting more info come Turkey day about that. Then, Saturday afternoon, I locked down my main location, which puts me way ahead of where I’d expected to be at this stage. As I mentioned the other day, this thing is just gathering all sorts of momentum and is coming together not in little pieces, but in big chunks. Primary casting I am thinking about starting in mid-december, which should keep me on my late Jan./early Feb. schedule without problems. Even if the holidays bump things up a bit, no biggie. Late February is fine too, so long as the pieces keep falling into place.

Best part of the weekend (besides the Giants knocking off the Cardinals despite several injuries, and the Brett Favre-led Jets toppling undefeated Tennessee) was that Frank and Jacki Wales came out to spend Sunday and Monday at the new place, and it totally rocked. Frank and Jacki brought us a very cool gift basket (including some nuts and sugar free goodies for yours truly) as a housewarming gift, and for Frank’s birthday we took them out to dinner at a local restaurant Pam and I really like called Bubba’s Roadhouse. Great food, even better company. Catching up with Frank (the new managing editor over at Hacker’s Source, did I mention that?), was a blast.

Frank brought over (at my request) a couple of selections from his To Be Watched pile of vids (inundate him with your flicks, indie filmmakers, Frank never has enough to watch), and we caught a riotously funny feature called Into the Woods that really had us playing MST3K in the film room. Frank also brought a short, the name of which I cannot recall at the moment, which had some potential, and a pretty twisted payoff, although once it ended and you had time to digest what you’d just watched, the holes began to appear and the questions began to crop up. It kinda fell apart, but still, in all, entertaining across the board. I told Frank, given these two prizes, I expect him to pick the fare for all our future film nights—of which I hope there are many, many more to come.

Frank and I also talked some business, threw around some ideas for a tag-team creative project, and a set-visit to the aforementioned shoot early next year for Hacker’s. Lots of good stuff. Frank whipped up a monster breakfast on Monday morning, French Toast, eggs, bacon, and we wolfed it down and shot the shit all morning. I can’t say how glad I am that I got put next to Frank and Jacki at the Screamfest in Ft. Lauderdale a couple of years ago, where we hit it off and became fast friends. Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t live closer, much as I’d like to. We probably wouldn’t get a damned thing done, although we’d have a helluva time brainstorming the projects we *should* be doing.

Overall? The weekend couldn’t have been better short of having Saturday night’s winning Lotto ticket. Across the board, I wish it would have been a longer 72 hour span, but it definitely makes me eager for the next time around, especially with the holidays on top of us and Pam prepping for our first Thanksgiving in the new house. We’ve got the whole family coming over, we’ll be running the day’s slate of football games on the wall in the movie room in stereo, just about life-size, the whole nine yards. I’m not a big turkey fan, but I am looking forward to Thanksgiving. With so much going on, there’s a whole lot to be thankful for, especially as new doors open and new opportunities arise.

In the event I don’t get another blog up before Thursday, everybody out there have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving, you & yours enjoy the holiday and stay safe.

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Currently listening to: Dancing in the Light by Blutengel

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Friday
November whateveritis
4:00 p.m.

Lots on my plate, including a writing freelance, completing the primary shot list for the upcoming training video shoot, and working on the potential additional scene I am leaning towards adding to The Bunker, and if all goes well, by next Tuesday, beginning the script for another short film for which it’s looking like I’ve got access to a pair of killer locations. That last project really has me psyched, because the more outlining I do, the more it seems things just fall into place. I’ll be finding out about one location shortly after Thanksgiving, and the other possibly by the end of the weekend, as I’ll be hooking up with folks who are intimately acquainted with the property in question when I head over to my nephew’s 9th birthday party tonight, which is the only break Pam and I get until Sunday, when our friends Frank and Jacki come into town. We’ve each cleared the schedule for it, and though it’s a whirlwind visit, we can’t wait to catch up in person. Haven’t seen Frank and Jacki since February, so it’s been way, way too long.

Even with everything going full tilt, I can’t stop thinking about the new short. It’s based on a comic story I’ve written, though I’m not going to talk about which one quite yet. It requires little in terms of technical workarounds, (which The Bunker necessitated often), and is built for limited locations and a tense, dramatic build. I’ve always liked the story, can’t imagine why I didn’t think of scripting this one out before. Oh well, can’t look back, only forward, and I find myself looking forward to shooting this one often. The other thing that’s good about it is, it really doesn’t require a lot of dough (at least on paper) to bring to life. Which is key, since the economy blows, we’ve got the new house, and have to hold off on The Bunker until its Euro-release on cable TV before we can shop it to foreign and domestic distribs. But we performed miracles with the money we spent on The Bunker, and at times we needed miracles. This time out, with the ‘film school’ of The Bunker behind me, and without needing anything elaborate to pull this off, I don’t expect any of the same problems with reshoots, ADR, sets, travel, etc. Everything can be shot right here in my backyard pretty much, with true locals, and I can still bring in my fave crew from Miami for a weekend to give me the team I want in place. I’m even planning on speaking to some local businesses about product placements, which would help out in the micro-budgeting, but even without outside help, this thing should work out pretty good without any walking on water necessary.

Stay tuned for updates on that in the coming weeks. I’ll likely be craigslisting for people to come on board to help out, I’ll need a bunch of extras, etc. Oh, and did I say I plan to shoot sometime in February, if not earlier with some of our establishing shots? Yeah, I’m jumping into this one feet first, now that the momentum’s building, and if I can get things settled for the additional Bunker footage along the way, even better.

Hope everybody has a kick ass weekend. I sure plan to.

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Currently listening to: Missed Me by the Dresden Dolls (Lie version)

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Tuesday
November 18
5:29 a.m.

So much stuff to cover today I’m at the proverbial, “I don’t know where to start…” point, so I’m just gonna ramble on in whatever order the nutty events of the past few days occurs to me.

First, how many folks right about now are thinking, “Hey you know, Rush Limbaugh might have been right about something? The something being Donovan McNabb, who Rush saw as a flawed, underperforming quarterback for the Eagles, voiced his opinion, sexed it up with some comments about how there may have been a racial component in people pushing hard for him to continue to get chances and giving him a free pass, and for which he later got the boot. Well, here it is a couple of seasons later, the Eagles still haven’t won the big one, McNabb’s performance the one time the Eagles did get to the Super Bowl is sort of tainted by his poor performance down the stretch and the memorable Fred X having to call plays in the huddle on the Eagles final drive because McNabb was gassed and barfing and had taken some shots…but neither he nor coach Andy Reid thought it might be better to have a quarterback in there running the offense who was coherent. So enamored has Reid been, in fact, that despite McNabb missing important stretches of several seasons with a number of injuries (McNabb’s late-season breakdowns have briefly launched a backup’s career or two and certainly resurrected Jeff Garcia’s flagging career) that he even went out on the limb today to defend the indefensible. McNabb, after a stinker of a performance against the lowly Cincinnatti Bengals (1-8 at the time), with Philly’s playoff lives pretty much hanging in the balance, didn’t know that overtime lasts precisely one quarter’s worth of football, and compounded his duncery by musing on what the NFL powers that be might do in the event of a tie in the playoffs.

This is your starting quarterback? Hey, I’m a long time football junkie and even I don’t know all the rules. But then, being a fan, it isn’t my job to know the rules inside and out because I don’t play a part in wins and losses. Donovan McNabb does. Reid even tried to provide McNabb some cover, telling reporters that it didn’t matter, that it didn’t impact the game any. Is he kidding? Didn’t impact the game? If McNabb had known that time was running out and Philly wouldn’t be getting the ball back as overtime wound down, you think he just *might* have been more desperate to make a play with his legs instead of throwing incompletion after incompletion and giving up the ball? The only reason that the Bengals didn’t win this game was because of poor play calling and no guts, despite having nothing to lose…except maybe the first pick in the draft, for which they are one half game behind the winless Detroit Lions. Looks like GM isn’t the only thing on life support in Detroit.

Phillly talk radio today was bombarded with calls from fans tired of Reid’s unwavering support of McNabb, McNabb’s inability to lead this team to a Super Bowl win, and the excuses made for both when things don’t go right. You would think that playing professional football for the number of years McNabb has, he’d have picked up on the urgency of sudden-death overtime, and the double-urgency that perhaps is (was?) the Philadelphia Eagles playoff hopes. And, some of that blame falls on Reid and the coaching staff, as well. Somebody during Philly’s final drive should have looked at the clock and mentioned to Donovan on the second change of possession that, “Hey, Big guy, this is probably our last shot with the ball, we need to score or we’re toast.”

Apparently, nobody on the Eagles sideline felt the need to impart to their franchise quarterback it was the 12th round and they might be tied on the scorecards, but they needed the knockout. The tie was as good as a loss, even outside the division, because Philly’s already way behind in both wins, and crucial division wins, and will need help in both departments to reach the postseason. If this Philly team doesn’t make a run, and make it into January, this might be the last hurrah for both Reid, and the quarterback he’s attached himself to through thick and thin, through several NFC championship game losses, through all the injuries, and now through this latest fiasco. One or both men could find themselves looking for a job in 2009—it isn’t as far-fetched as you’d have thought going into week 1 of the season.

Okay, football aside, my great run barely lasted out the week, as Sunday night, having just arrived at my Dad’s to watch the Cowboys/Redskins game, I get a call from Pam. Gotta go back home, as the aerator tank for our water softening system has apparently blown up, and water has created a little lake by the street and water from the well pump is streaming out of the tank from areas never designed to be spouting H2O. Long story short, we hadda shut down the pump, tanks, everything. No water overnight, (though luckily the toilets were good for a flush or two each), but I went to bed (5:30 a.m. Monday morning) thinking…this is gonna be big $$$.

Fortunately though, the whole problem turned out to be minor, the guy who came to fix the thing had been out before to do some minor repairs on the unused system prior to our buying the house, and he doesn’t believe we’ll be billed for the repairs. Sweet, although even if we are, the cost of a service call to have working toilets and showers again by 1:00 p.m. would be worth the $75. I’m not gonna tell *them* that, but hey, maybe it’s either a new lucky streak starting up, or the continuation of last week’s streak with a minor bump in the road. Either way, I’ll take it.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, Fran, my mother in law has been staying with us this week, and we’ve been having a good time. Pam’s been cooking, we hit the Farmer’s Market over the weekend and picked up some fruit, veggies and Fran got this killer fresh salsa, we had my parents over to dinner Friday night, it’s been a great visit. Of course, with all the stuff we tried to cram in, I hadda put off shopping for a new hard drive until Friday or this coming Saturday, since I have no idea when I’ll be getting my big drive back, although, there weren’t any great sales anyway, so maybe this week, with Thanksgiving coming, there’ll be some Black Friday price cuts and I’ll just have to grab something that’ll work for what I need. Really had hoped to avoid this if possible, because since we haven’t been able to show The Bunker for months and I had hoped to sell it while the economy was still kicking like it was last year, money wouldn’t be a concern. But now, it’s not only a concern, we’re gonna be dealing with the double-whammy of a tight economy and even tighter-fisted distributors. There’s no way I’m going to get the kind of money I should have been able to get earlier, which sucks because I’d been expecting to have that money back by now, helping both to pay off some of the house and begin work on a new project. All that’s been put on hold for most of the year while we prepped things for the European broadcast, which I haven’t gotten any updates on in a while. Hopefully that’ll still be happening before year’s end, but if not, it’s definitely taken time from the best window of opportunity an money out of my pocket. Right after my next shoot, I’ll be looking to finish up what needs to be finished up to start the shopping-it-around process again early in 2009, probably with some changes I’ve been thinking about for a while,beyond just fixing some sound issues. I’ve also been considering adding some footage if I can pull the scene I want to together, which would probably make the film stronger, and wouldn’t present me with too many problems, but possibly open up some more doors if it’s put together right. Unfortunately, none of that can really begin until after the holidays, simply because everybody’s schedule goes nutso, so I’ve at least got breathing room for that until January. The best part of it is I’m really jazzed about the idea of the additional footage being available, although the drawback is I have some pretty important projects I will be getting going in early ’09, and I don’t really want to tie up more money in this. Pam and I have a couple of important things happening right now, so finally seeing a return on our investment in this is now my top priority.

My Microsoft WORD is now running right about 50% of the time, which has enabled me to get more of the spellchecking done for my crime novel. I hope to have it ready to hand off to my buddy Frank Wales this weekend, when he and his wife come into town to spend Sunday and Monday here at the hacienda. First my nephews, then Pam’s mom, and now Frank and Jacki. I think we had overnight visitors maybe 7 times in 7+ years in Miami, now we’re making it a monthly thing, it seems… Liz, Eric and Saskia will be coming in in December, crashing here as well. I guess I better start lining up a guest for January, huh?

Since Fran’s been in, I must say, I’ve been getting precious little snooze time. Nothing to do with her, per se, but I have been getting up by 11 whenever possible, had breakfast with Pam and Fran three days this week, got up early for my nephew’s soccer game on Saturday…you get the picture. But, with the training video shoot only three weeks away, and Thanksgiving in between, I’ve been getting into bed at the earliest, around 4:30 and more frequently 5:30 a.m. (or later). I’ve been averaging three and a half hours shuteye for the past four days, four and a half for the past 6. Thursday is looking like a sleep-in-until-3 p.m. day, without a doubt.

Man, the schedule just does not let up for the next few weeks. The run to the end of the year is just that–a run. Definitely too much work to do and not enough time, but I always manage to find a way to get it done, so not surprised that for the first Thanksgiving and Christmas in the new house, it’s probably gonna be here and gone before we can even really take it all in and enjoy it. But the pressure’s on, and it’s time to move. Time to make things happen.

Okay, now you can go back to ogling the gal in the Bunker tee shirt and click on the link to see not only more pics of her, but to figure out which friends’ wardrobes are gonna get an upgrade when they unwrap one of these for Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or a late-year birthday. Or for no reason at all. Hey, who needs reason to give somebody something cool, right?

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Currently listening to: See My Hate by C-Lekktor (thanks to Tom Gold and the Communion After Dark radio show for turning me on to these guys. I don’t know much about the band, but this track kicks ass and you can look up the show and download it and about a dozen other tracks, including new music from Funker Vogt and Das Ich at: http://communionafterdark.com

Thursday
November 13
3:14 a.m.

I’ve been grumbling since last night because a glitch in the MS Word main dictionary has stopped my spellcheck from working, just as I hit chapter 36 out of 50 on the novel. Sucks, but Pam and I are gonna tackle it in the morning, so I guess if I blow a word or type something like: shoott, that Jaws doesn’t catch for me, Ignore it. If it sounds good via my screenreader, I’m letting it go.

Been busy all day with my new client going over the details for the upcoming training video shoot. We were going over locations today, casting, availability, and dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s. I’ve been working out my shot list, breaking down the script for my actors, working out some options for a scene or two which will require cue cards, etc. I meet with this client on Monday to go over our main location, do some measuring for our lighting set-up, and how I want to take advantage of what the location has to offer. So far, so good. My female lead is jazzed and itchin’ to go, my cameraman and main editor are excited about hooking up again, and my wife is already plotting out the craft services for the weekend. On that front, everything’s going good. Only hassle is it looks like I need to go out and get another hard drive. One of my monster drives is still in limbo, and I haven’t gotten any word yet on when I’ll be getting it back. This is a pain because I really didn’t feel like springing for an unnecessary hard drive on my credit card, especially when I’ve been told the work that drive was needed for is done. I dunno, maybe it isn’t done after all, but now I’m down to two drives that each house the bulk of The Bunker master files and the American cut, the documentary, all my YouTube clips, etc. By the weekend, if I’m still up in the air, it’s off to hunt for deals at the local computer stores.

So, tonight, with the novel in limbo, my pressing film needs taken care of, and my mother in law in town, I bailed out for an early dinner of homemade fajitas and a chocolate chip cookie dessert. Good way to knock off for an hour or two and unwind, before getting back to work on some other things that don’t require spellcheckin’ or hard drive space I don’t currently have. (Which is also what’s keeping me from uploading a vid of me playing soccer—goaltending no less—because we gotta capture that footage and put it somewhere too. Maybe I oughta just shoot the works and go for a terrabyte drive. Seek and load time might be for shit, but at least space won’t be a problem for a while.

Had an idea for a short the other night, something that might break down well into a few 4/6 minute chunks, that would probably be good for webisodes. I’d been giving the webisode thing some thought several months ago before that project was put on the back burner, but this thing, if I can secure the location I have in mind cheap, would be a pretty easy thing to shoot, so I may be devoting a little more time to that once I empty my plate of the biggies on it right now. 1) finishing the novel, 2) directing this training video 3) turning in my latest freelances 4) writing my story for the Winterlands anthology 5) Revising and editing the text for The Soil’s Embrace portfolio plates and 6) completing the outline for the next book I’m planning to write, (which I should have locked down by the beginning of December). It’s a total departure from other stuff I’ve written in the past, and I’m looking forward to getting that on track. There’s also some screenplay shopping to do, and making sure we’re ready to hit the ground running with the American version of The Bunker to take around to distribs, but that’s sales, not creative. Lotta mailing, phone calls, and waiting.

Should give me plenty of time, then, for the creative stuff…right?

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Currently listening to: Combichrist: Destroyer by Static-X

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Sunday
November 9
2:20 a.m.

Holy shit what a week it’s been. Best one in several months in terms of one thing after another after another actually going right, and with the carryover going into this week looking even better.

First things first. Got a promo package and screener of The Bunker into the hands of a true, Hollywood producer, who also happens to be a big horror fan and indie film fan. Not some fly-by-night guy, either, not even close. Guy’s worked with a bunch of big-time directors, has a string of hits to his credit, and two of his last four films? Grossed about $160 mil and $450 mil, respectively. Only drawback is I’ve been sitting on my hands, waiting for my drive to travel cross-country so we could fix some minor sound problems, but since that hasn’t happened and this guy’s been asking for a package and screener for about a year, I said, “Fuck it,” and got it moving. We delayed on passing off this package first time because the film look wasn’t finished, then because of the sound issues, which have been addressed for the Euro broadcast version of the flick. But this guy’s been around the block more than a few times, and what we’ve got is all-but-done minus a few tweaks, so he’s getting a whole lot more than a rough-cut, which he also would’ve taken a look at. Even better? The guy likes looking for indie projects, and isn’t strictly limited to big-budget pics. So hell yeah, it’s not even time for the Giants/Eagles game, and the weekend’s already been kick-ass.

Bonus? One of the people involved in the middle of this handoff? Big time reader, loves to check out scripts, and also loves horror. How can you beat that? Not only is the flick in the hands of somebody who might consider giving it a quote, but can maybe open some doors. Holy Grail would be interest in talking to me one-on-one about who might be looking for a new idea or two, and a filmmaker whose story is so nutty and unique that Darin Scott (Waist Deep, Tales from the Hood) once told me, “Man, this story breaks, you ain’t gonna be able to keep the media away.”

Also, this same person is going to be passing along my press and promo kit to her talk show contact, so fingers crossed, sometime down the road they have a slow night, and I can fill a hole they have. Christmas Eve, anybody? Heck, I’d bust my plastic under the weight of two round-trip buy-at-the-gate-without-reservations plane tickets if the opportunity were to arise. At this stage, I really don’t care. I’ve missed out on too many opportunities to keep waiting around. We have the European broadcast coming up this fall (hopefully, no air date yet, and fall is waning), or maybe early in ’09; we have the tee shirts out (you can’t tell me you’ve ignored the images here, really, you and I both know if you haven’t eyeballed Tiffany sporting the Bunker attire you’re full of shit); Rob Granito is finishing up the artwork on The Soil’s Embrace portfolio, due out in April…across the board it’s full steam ahead. No looking back.

What else? Oh, last night? After playing soccer and wearing myself out with the nephews in the yard, I pulled an all-nighter and finished the crime novel. Yep, finis. In fact, I even wrote an epilogue that just wraps everything up perfectly. I’m sure the book is still too long for some publishers, and I’ll likely have to trim further if that turns out to be the case, but as it stands now the only thing left is another spellcheck to make sure I didn’t introduce *too* many errors, and then spitting out some printed copies for my growing list of test-readers. I’ve been pounding away the last six or seven nights straight on this, and I’m really pleased with where the manuscript is now. Of course, three drafts in, there’s undoubtedly work to do, but at this stage, I am probably too close to the thing to be counted on for any more revisions. Hence, the group of readers I am counting on to spot any glaring continuity errors, timeline errors, me mistakenly saying an event happened on a Friday and it’s only Thursday of the first week, that sort of thing. Once you’re *so* close to a piece of work, you get mental tunnel-vision, and I’ve already come up against that with some of the latter chapter continuity issues. While those have been fixed, my thought is, shit, if I missed *that* then, what did I miss after spending weeks revising several hundred (700+ first time through) pages and whittling the thing down by a couple hundred? Thus, time for others to step in and gimme a hand.

Okay, the other day I let the cat out of the bag on a project I have been invited to be a part of called the Winterlands. Well, I sent my rough (and I mean rough, it was pretty bare bones) pitch to the editor. Result? He freaked. Loved it. Didn’t have a negative thing to say or any change to suggest. Okay, it’s just a synopsis, not the full outline, but I’m not gonna lie and say it wasn’t a pretty good nite opening up his e-mail and finding that the editor on the book project was thrilled with the story I was planning to write, in a genre I have never really delved into (fantasy). True, there might be some things I need to rework to fit into the book’s parameters, after all, it’s his universe and I’m only getting to play around in it for a few thousand words, but knowing that the acorn that’s been picked is worth being planted kinda made the night.

There’s more, including Pam and I hitting the Cape Coral Coconut Festival and catching a pretty cool local band –The Mix, a hit-or-miss Journey tribute band (thank the music gods they didn’t totally butcher Wheel in the Sky) and, Survivor. Yep, Eye of the Tiger Survivor. Hey, for $3 we couldn’t pass it up. It was a night out we didn’t have to spend a lot of dough on (heck, one person can’t even go to a non-matinee movie for $6, and it was a helluva fun time. A buck a band for live music? Sure, I *will* complain next blog…but only a little, because the tribute band did quite well on a good number of the Journey tunes. Some others…?

Okay, enough gloating. Giants/Eagles tonight over at my parents’ place, some decent early games today on NFL Sunday Ticket, some time off I’m taking Monday to sit back and relax with an audio book (John Sandford’s Invisible Prey got here today, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a year).

Got no sleep last night, four hours this afternoon after catching my nephews’ soccer game (congrats to James on his first goal of the season), and then the festival, so time to grab some shuteye. Been working my ass off this week and the only breaks have been for football and when the fingers cramped too bad to continue at the keyboard.

But I think it’s gonna pay off now that I’m moving forward. Not looking forward to agent shopping with the book, but that’s something to worry about some other day.

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Currently listening to: Combichrist: Like to Thank My Friends/Enjoy the Abuse (Live)

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

Tuesday
Nov. 4
11:19 p.m.

Better late than never, right? Had to get these images over to my web guru and designer, Mabel, for upload, after a rather chaotic weekend. First Halloween with the kids, then playing catch-up with work for both Pam and I on Saturday and Sunday, heading over to my Dad’s to catch the Giants wax the Cowboys Sunday afternoon, appointments on Monday, voting this morning at 7:00…just non-stop since late Thursday afternoon, when we first shot the pics.

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.

For those of you new to the blog, and there’s always some newbies checking in, The Bunker is my first feature film, starring director/bad-ass actor Terry M. West and newcomer Saskia Gonzalez. We’re readying to hit up the talk shows with copies, and finally get back on track to take it around to distribs, after too damned many delays to even go through. So, with the flick scheduled to air overseas in Europe sometime in the fall, there’s a commemorative pair of tee shirts (with yellow ink on black cotton and red ink on black cotton) the fine folks at HollyWoodLoser.com are printing up for us for a limited time only, and the tees that will be available for a lot longer, namely the white on black tee designs, and the tank tops (baby doll tees for you gals or the guys with gals in their lives will be available soon, so e-mail me directly if you wanna get in on that action early).

What I plan to do with the proceeds is begin financing my next cinematic effort, currently under-wraps but as I continue to squirrel away a few bucks here and there, I’ll be announcing more on that front. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my big drive to arrive from CA, both since I have a shoot coming up and need the space for my primary cutter, Liz, but also so I can root through the raw sound files from the European TV cut of the flick. The American version is certainly not gonna mimic the Euro broadcast version, which will not be on a network that allows for uncensored/uncut content, but as soon as I get to review those files, I’ll be able to finish up the overdue work on the American cut and begin taking it around. Would have been much preferable to have been doing this at the end of 2006 like I’d hoped, but we lost production people, our original sound designer bailed out on us without warning, other things came up and presented logistical problems, so now I’m just looking to cut through the remainder of the leftover bullshit, finish my cut, and begin shopping it. Back in 2006 when things should have been completed, we had a kickin’ economy and things were looking pretty good, but unfortunately, since the mid-term elections, well, you see what’s happened since *that* debacle. Gonna be a lot tougher to move a film now given peoples’ shrinking budgets and tightening of the belts on product we had good interest in, even with our unfinished cut, but oh well, what can you do? Plug on, right? Which is the plan. Figure out when or if that drive is gonna move off a desk across the country and get here, or maybe just move ahead without it.

I’m down to the wire on my crime novel, which I can’t wait to wrap up. The final push is upon me, and it feels great to have the finish line a few steps away. Dropped my bud Frank Wales a note the other nite to catch up on some other stuff of import going on in my life, and I am sure he, too, is anxiously awaiting the final revised chaps to soak through with ink from his red pen. Thanks, buddy, I appreciate all the work you’ve put in for me.

Can’t believe both Thanksgiving, and my next shoot (for a health care industry training video) are right around the corner. The NFL season is in week 9 now, Thursday night football is about to begin and of course, the Christmas rush. Chaos chaos and more chaos.

That being said, I got a Nelson DeMille book (Night Fall) sitting in the audio book player, I’ve just whipped up a new 2-litre batch of diet grape drink, my fingers are a little cramped from editing and some prose revision, and I think I’m gonna pack it in for a while and chill out. Check out the tee shirts, and maybe think about picking up some inexpensive new threads for a soon-to-be-hot indie flick, commemorating both the Euro release and the first feature film ever directed by a blind filmmaker, and you’ll get some freebies to go along with it. Christmas is, after all, less than 60 days away, so shop from the comfort of your computer, pick up a tee and get some extra booty for yourself or for the gift-givin’ season.

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Currently listening to: Your Roses Will Burn by The Wounded

Friday
October 31st
1:50 a.m.

Man, Halloween already… Hard to believe, but it’s here. Wish I was up in Jersey, celebratin’ with Zach and the gang at the Chiller Theatre Horror Expo, but money’s tight and the move put us behind on some creative endeavors, so we hadda sit this one out. April, though, my pretties, I shall definitely be up in the Tri-state area again come April, when we’ll be releasing our first comic-industry project in more than two years, with the launch of The Soil’s Embrace, the sequel portfolio to Gardens of the Dead, which you may recall I partnered up on with Bernie Wrightson. Well, by all accounts, artist Rob Granito’s rough pencils are mind-blowing, and everybody who I’ve forwarded the sample pencils to agree—this one is better. Yeah, wrap your brains around *that.* Better? You damn well bet I wanna get this thing out for Chiller April.

Today was a damned good day. Spent the early part of it with my coffin sitting in the living room, half a dead body, and hotter-than-hell model Tiffany Upshaw stretchin’ out the new Bunker tee shirts. Pics’ll either be up today or tomorrow, so either you see ‘em here or you don’t. I send the text to my web guru, Mabel, separately, so keep your eyes open if you don’t see a sexy chick with a smokin’ hot body wearing yours truly’s merch on this page.

Still waiting on a date for the arrival of the sound design raw files so I can get to work on smoothing out the final wrinkles on the American cut of The Bunker. Haven’t heard anything about that in a couple of days, but finished going over the Euro uncut TV version. It’ll take some work to match up stuff to the American version, but with Hollywood closing down for the holidays right after the American Film Market, I should have time to lock things down to be able to hit the ground running Jan. 1. If not, then it could take a little longer, but hopefully, that can be avoided. Been waiting long enough to wrap this up and pimp it.

On a more upbeat note, I’m finally ready to announce that I’ve been invited to contribute to an anthology project one of my buddies is putting together for 2009. All I’m at liberty to say is that it’ll be fantasy oriented, which is pretty cool since I don’t often dip my literary toes into the straight-fantasy pool very often, but I like the overview of the project, I like the parameters I’ve been given, and I like the general concept. I’ve been working here and there when I can pry a few minutes loose on an outline for my story, which I’m tentatively calling ‘Raiders.’ The book title is Winterlands, and I guess it may be a while, but more on that endeavor when additional info can be revealed. I don’t want the guy behind the project to come and hunt me down. He comes from Minnesota, and it’s cold up there. He might bring snowballs in a cooler or something…

Crime novel: Two more chapters down. I had to go back and do some lengthy revisions on two previous chapters to completely eradicate all traces of a continuity error, so it took a lot of time reading backwards in order to make the build-up to a certain key event perfect. Or, near-perfect, as I’m sure I’ll find something to tweak later on after getting back the preview copies I’ll soon be sending out to readers.

There’s more in the works, but plenty of time to talk about that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it’s Halloween. I hope you’re curling up with a good spooky flick, or perhaps sitting beneath a lamp in an otherwise darkened room with a book and reading a spine-tingling tale (copy of Stuff Outa My Head handy?), or maybe going out clubbing in your fetish garb or masquerade finest, or planning to howl at the moon at an all-nite costume party. Whatever you do, enjoy yourself, and hey, why stop there? It’s Friday. Make it a 72 hour celebration, an all-Hallows-weekend. It is, after all, the best holiday of the year, no reason to limit it to one measly day, right?

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Currently listening to: Collapsed by Velvet Acid Christ

Tuesday
Oct. 28
3:38 a.m.

Pretty good day today. Got to spend some time on the blower with my fave actress, Saskia Gonzalez, talking about her involvement with this health care training video I’m directing for a medical staffing college. She’s gung-ho and ready to go on it, so we discussed what she would be doing, who we would be shooting with, the different attitudes she’ll need to exhibit for different clips, etc. All went great. Her current obligations end the day prior to shooting, so I’m catching her right in between her own projects and such, so it works out perfect. Also, got my cameraman and script supervisor/editor locked in for the dates, and now it’s on to breaking down each individual training clip, knocking out my shot list, visiting our primary location, and rounding up some extras. Lot of little details, but so far, going good.

Picked up a freelance, did some outlining over the weekend, passed some notes along to the editor, should know late today if the concept is a GO. Once I take care of business with that, it’s down to editing the final few chapters of my crime novel, and getting the sound design files from California out here so I can schedule work to begin on applying changes to the U.S. cut of The Bunker. Waiting to hear back on when that might be available so I can start scheduling people to get on this. Got my package pretty much ready for the talk show contact I have, only drawback is the DVD had some digi-glitches in it from the compression, so I can’t use the stereo mix. Still supposed to be a 6:1 surround sound mix coming my way, so I’m hoping I can get that mix and the raw files at the same time, because the minute the holidays are over, it’s time to pound the pavement and start knocking on doors. Of course, it figures, the sound is finally done and the economy sucks (thanks for your stellar work on Fannie and Freddy, Barney Frank, and all you guys in congress since ‘06!), which means we probably missed some opportunities while adding the spit and polish to the cut, but so be it. The material’s finally completed, in the very least for the full stereo sound mix, so if that’s what I need to stick with for the time being, it’ll have to do.

The crime novel’s shaping up great. Unfortunately, I discovered a timeline/continuity error, so that means tweaking a rather complicated section in one of the final four chapters, but I’ve figured out the fix, now all that’s needed is the implementation, covering each aspect of the remainder of the book that feeds off this one timeline/continuity element. This occurs right near the conclusion, and it’s when the pace is really picking up, so it was the kind of thing I nearly missed even now going through the draft, because it’s easy to gloss over something like the particular day/date an event takes place. And, in thrillers, time is always compressed. Cops need to make leaps and bounds progress that would never occur in real-time. You need to balance that fantasy-to-reality ratio. Sure, if your plot device is a tox screen, you’re not gonna wait four weeks to drop it into your protagonist’s lap, you gotta CSI it up a little bit when necessary. People are willing to suspend disbelief, but you can’t expect them to ignore gravity altogether. So that’s where I am. Making some adjustments and smoothing out a wrinkle or two. Gonna be happy to have this draft done and in the can so I can put it in the hands of the folks who have volunteered to read it. Fingers crossed, by end of November, agent shopping.

Giants showed me something yesterday (besides a very vanilla offense for the third straight game). Some grit and determination. Championship teams have these kinds of games, and they find a way to dig down and gut one out. Big Blue did that against Pittsburgh, their first big test of the season, in my opinion. They won ugly, but an ugly win in the win column is still pretty at season’s end. Sure was the highlight of an otherwise forgettable week. Hopefully, with the way today went, I’m turning the corner on various projects and irons in the fire. Although I’m still stuck waiting around for some things, I’m definitely pushing ahead on just about everything possible as the year is winding down.

Back to the grind…

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Currently listening to: D.O.A. by Bloodrock (yeah, there’s one to get ya’ into the Halloween spirit)