projects

Every time I try to outrun myself

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They traveled the open oceans by the light of the stars

and despite my path being laid clear

as though Siri was reading me the turn-by-turn

I feel lost.

Just as a stone thrown from the trail

becomes buried among the thicket.

A slight miscalculation is a critical error

when your dreams lay among the stars.

The answer must be somewhere,

In my children’s smile,

In the bottom of an empty bottle,

under the flashing lights of some

dark and dingy back room,

with a fake name and cheap perfume.

Madness is one hell of a drug.

An Adaptation

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For my media writing class I was assigned the task of writing an adapted version of a scene from a short story we read in class. I had group members, two of them actually. We didn’t swap phone numbers in class though so we had zero means of communication. Group projects are always fun.

7 paragraphs to 7 pages. The story is titled, “Love is a Fallacy” by Max Shulman.

Love is a Fallacy (Scene 4)

Flash Fiction: Writer’s Block

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It was on a particularly hot day in August that Timothy found himself struggling to concentrate on his work. What normally is just a nuisance known as, “writer’s block”, became a serious problem for the now desperate Timothy, considering the deadline for his current novel was only 72 hours away and he was nowhere near the end. The common reader may question why an author would have waited so long to finish his novel as to risk not meeting a final deadline? However, that question would also make the assumption that all writers get to write their novels at their own pace. Writing to meet deadlines makes money, it’s capitalism, people.

For whatever reason, Timothy could not seem to position himself in the seat at his desk as to avoid an annoying beam of sunlight from bursting through the slits in his shutters and into his eyes. He tried for twenty or so minutes, before deciding that there was no chance that he would be writing at his desk today. So, Timothy lugged his rather heavy type writer from the desk in his bedroom out to his kitchen table. It was hot there. At least the windows had provided him with a breeze; no matter how warm, a gust of wind always feels nice in the heat. The air was still, hot, and dry. Just as Timothy began to write, he felt a large bead of sweat forming at his hairline. Again, his concentration was broken, as he focused on this large drop of sweat that began to roll down his face.

Timothy began to think about how much he hated the heat. And he blamed living in the heat on the fact that he needed to move to Los Angeles to fulfill a job offer. His thoughts began to flow freely again: he hated the city of Los Angeles, the traffic, the people, the filth. But most of all he hated the heat. Timothy knew however that someday the source of this heat, the Sun, would die, along with all traffic, all people, all filth; and this made him content.

Timothy began to write.

A little bit more…

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One of the main reasons I created this blog would be to have a place to display my stories and projects. What projects you might ask?

This explanation requires some backtracking…

I love movies. In my eyes, film is the perfect art form. It combines all elements of art and produces masterpieces…some of the time. Unfortunately, those in control in Hollywood have become so befuddled by their own desire to make money, that much of what the average consumer can see in their local theater is only a small step above a heaping pile of shit. Thankfully, there still exists a group of people who are determined to continue sharing beautiful pieces of film with the world, independent filmmakers. This does not go to say that there are no longer any big shots in Hollywood that produce great films. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, The Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan…the list could go on for longer than I am willing to type. In fact, shitty movies are hardly ever the fault the artists at hand. The money hungry production seem to be the ones that have given rise to the endless sequels, receptive comedies, and flat-out boring melodramas that flood our theaters every week. I could rant for pages about what I call “Hollywood Bullshit”, but that would be moving away from the point of this post.

Back to my projects. I am currently finishing my first year at California State University, Long Beach, an institution I entered with the intention of pursuing a career in the sciences. It only took me one semester of strictly sciences classes to realize that the lack of creativity and passion involved in thermochemistry and the categorization of living organisms would soon drive me insane. It wasn’t the science of Biology I was interested in, it was aesthetics of Life. My mistake.

So I took the advice of every great man and woman before and began to study the thing I am most passionate about. Now I am enrolled in the College of Arts, with a goal of attaining a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Electronic Arts. The same degree held by Steven Spielberg. I guess my only issue is that I really have never explored making my own films, and quite frankly I really don’t know where to begin. Finally, this where my projects fall into place. This will be the home of the things I begin to film. So this blog is not only my perspective, but a beginning to what I hope will be the rest of my life, and that really is a terrifying thought.

 

” I dream for a living.”

-Steven Speilberg