A Field Guide to LgN Productions

Most catalogs get organized by year, or by genre, or by whichever award sounds best on a poster. This one doesn't sort cleanly that way, and it shouldn't. What holds LgN's work together isn't a category — it's a set of obsessions that keep resurfacing: memory that won't stay buried, complicity that hides in plain sight, and the gap between what people say happened and what actually did. 

A war anthem written from inside the mud. 

A weapons dealer whose real crime isn't the one you think. 

A public-access relic that turns out to be the whole company's origin story, thirty years hidden in a box.

This is a walk through that catalog by throughline, not by résumé.

Before the beginning. LgN Productions — originally "Last good Nerve Productions" — was founded in 1993 for a single public-access documentary about Lost in Space, produced on borrowed equipment with a crew of friends. Films now on either YouTube or at the LgN Screening Room.

JZ Murdock served as its uncredited executive producer, writer, and editor. 

The LIS documentary aired twice on Seattle cable in early 1994. During postproduction the tape editor at the Viacom studio on Roosevelt Street in Seattle, broke mid-post, most of the music dropped out on broadcast, and then the company went dark for over two decades for a variety of reasons, mostly personal.

When Murdock started making films again decades later, he didn't start a new company. He picked LgN back up. 

Everything below is what happened after that.

The Features

Pvt. Ravel's Bolero (2022; remastered 2025) is the anchor of the catalog, and its festival run — 80-plus wins — is the reason there's now a deliberate policy of not listing all of them. A visceral anti-war meditation, it imagines composer Maurice Ravel forging the relentless rhythm of Bolero while serving as a truck driver amid the horror of World War I. Built from archival imagery, surreal overlay, and Ravel's internal reflections, it refuses the polish of a conventional documentary in favor of something rawer and harder to look away from — a tribute and a warning at once.

The film has its own footnote in history: in February 2022, a Ukrainian festival selected Murdock's horror short Gumdrop as an official selection days before the invasion began, and within a week a Russian festival nominated Bolero — an anti-war film — for Best War Film. Two governments moving toward war; two festivals, on opposite sides of it, choosing the same filmmaker's work. It's the kind of coincidence that says more than a mission statement could.

"Gumdrop," a short horror (2020) picked up 17 awards of its own, and it earns its place next to Bolero on theme, not just as a genre pairing. Sampson, a meticulous underground weapons supplier, moves product through clients using a coded word — "gumdrop" — while flashbacks from a fractured childhood bleed steadily into his present. What looks at first like a portrait of a damaged middleman turns, in its final act, into something rooted in crimes that once existed outside of fiction. It's a film about what a person can normalize when the alternative is remembering. From the short true crime story, "Gumdrop City" (2012).

The Frontier

Two of the newest additions to the catalog don't fit the fest-circuit mold of the shorts above — they're closer to experiments in how a story gets told at all.

Light Snowflakes: America's Second Orbit (2026) builds an entire immersive documentary around a single object: a rare 1962 vinyl record carrying the unedited audio of astronaut Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7 mission. Restored footage, research, and context surround that recording, educating the viewer so thoroughly that by the time the raw audio plays again at the film's end, it lands differently than it could have for anyone listening in 1962.

Travels (2025) is the outlier on purpose. An experimental short built from AI-generated stills and an AI-composed score, guided by a screenplay Murdock wrote at university in the early 1980s, it follows a woman moving through shifting, dreamlike landscapes where memory, technology, and selfhood collide. It's less a departure from the catalog's themes than a stress test of them — the same questions about identity and buried history, run through tools that didn't exist when the script was written.

World Explorers Program (2026) goes back further than any other title in the catalog — to a set of records Murdock received as a child in the 1960s, part of a monthly series that introduced kids to different countries through vinyl, printed materials, and small keepsakes. He kept them his whole life. 

The film doesn't illustrate them with new footage; it turns the original audio itself into the image, using oscilloscope-generated waveforms so the sound becomes something you watch as much as hear — voice, music, and narration rendered as a moving trace across the screen. It's restraint as a formal choice: no modern imagery standing in for a childhood that arrived entirely through listening and imagination. As a kid, Murdock never knew whether these recordings captured real travel or a studio reconstruction of it; decades later, restoring them, the honest answer turned out to be both at once.

(LgN's catalog isn't limited to film — Murdock also publishes prose under LgN Press, including the award-winning Death of Heaven. That's a separate story for another day.)

Unproduced

The Teenage Bodyguard, a screenplay grounded in a true-crime basis, has picked up 17-plus awards on the strength of the page alone — proof that a script doesn't need a camera behind it to prove itself. It's the clearest evidence that LgN's throughline lives in the writing first, production second. Two producers are interested if the money can only be found. It would have been made three times with three different directors that one name producer found, but they just didn't have the right...vision.

What's Next

Three shorts are currently under consideration at Life is Short and HorrorHound TV: 

Eagles & Crows, a Fable (a 4 min allegory), "Gumdrop", a short horror, and The Rapping. 

Eagles & Crows is a minimalist allegory — loosely drawn from the symbolic roles of eagles and crows in Native American traditions — about a forgotten act of kindness between the two birds that calcifies, generations later, into a ritual no one remembers the reason for. 

The Rapping, shot in stark black and white and built partly from real NASA InSight Mars lander audio, follows a man alone with an insistent, rhythmic sound he can't place — inside his house, or inside his head. Elements of it were later folded into Gumdrop, linking the two films into a shared psychological universe.

Alongside the submissions, a film companion book to Bolero is being considered at a UK publisher — expanding the film's found-poem approach to Ravel's war into something longer-form.

A Body of Work, Still in Progress

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

America, A Love Story — Why I’m Thinking About Finishing It Now

In 2011, I was working with Hollywood producer on a screenplay titled America, A Love Story.

A woman...an outsider, a kind of “traveling angel” in the classic film trope sense...arrives in a small American town with no memory of who she is or where she came from. Unaware of her own purpose, she enters a community in quiet crisis...one that does not yet understand how much it needs her, but gradually comes to realize just how desperately her presence matters.

The project came out of a much older impulse. My original title was America, The Beautiful. I meant that literally and philosophically. The protagonist was beautiful inside and out—not flawless, not symbolic in a heavy-handed way, but recognizably human. Producer Chris pushed back on the title. After a long discussion, he convinced me to change it. Looking back, I think he was right. America, A Love Story left room for contradiction, tension, and earned meaning.

At its core, America is a woman.

She is in her thirties. She is a traveler. A witness. Something close to a “traveling angel” trope, but grounded and contemporary. She moves quietly from town to town and, in this story, finds herself in a small American community at a moment when people are being tested—politically, morally, emotionally.

She goes by the name Lucy.

Lucy appears to have amnesia. Or something like it. She does not fully know who she is or where she comes from, but she has an unshakable instinct for when something is wrong. She listens more than she speaks. She notices what people say when they think no one important is listening.

The story follows Max, the town’s mayor. He is not corrupt in the cartoon sense, but he is worn down. Pressured. Pulled between civic responsibility, political compromise, and personal doubt. Max wants to do the right thing, but the right thing has consequences—financial, political, social—and those consequences don’t fall evenly.

Lucy’s relationship with Max is not a conventional romance. It is revelatory. She reflects back to him what leadership actually costs when it is real, and what happens when compromise quietly becomes abdication.

Around them is a community under strain. There is an old Vietnam veteran. There are children watching and absorbing more than adults realize. There is a powerful local employer, a respected community figure whose greed and self-interest threaten to hollow out the town while being publicly justified as “necessary.”

The film isn’t really about patriotism in the chest-thumping sense. If anything, patriotism sits below more fundamental values: community, friendship, empathy, responsibility. It asks what love of country even means when it is separated from care for the people who live in it.

Lucy does not embody power. She embodies conscience. Compassion. Quiet wisdom. And unresolved promise.

The ending is unapologetically hopeful. It leans toward a Frank Capra resolution. Some people would call that trite. Maybe it is. But I’ve come to believe that hope, when it is earned rather than declared, is not naïve. In moments like the one we’re living through now, it may be necessary.

I don’t think America has needed a film like this more than it does right now.

And that’s why I’m giving serious thought to finishing it.

Not because it would be easy. Not because it would be fashionable. But because stories that center community over spectacle, conscience over power, and people over slogans are becoming rarer—and more necessary.

Some stories wait for their moment.

This one might finally be there

Author’s Note

This screenplay was initially composed and mostly written during a very different moment in American life. Revisiting it now has been less about nostalgia and more about recognizing how certain questions never really go away. If anything, they sharpen with time. I’m sharing these thoughts not as a promise, but as an acknowledgment that some stories wait until they are needed.

— JZ Murdock

FYI, I'm going to go back to once a week blogs for a while as I'm busy with projects. Two small documentary films and a much bigger one.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

The True Crime Prestige Limited Streaming Series - The Teenage Bodyguard?

In 2013 I wrote a screenplay based on a true crime story about a teenager who was asked by a terrified woman to protect her for a week until she could leave town. She needed to avoid her former boss, a captain in a local mafia family. It's won 17 international screenplay / film festival awards.

I've now worked on it with a script consultant and a producer. I'm not talking to a UK writer/director who got me thinking about it in a different direction. Rather than a screenplay, it could be two films.

Or a prestige streaming channel limited series.

I hadn't considered that so I did some research and it looked like my best bets were Netflix, which I was leaning toward, HBO, which seems more difficult, or FX, which I liked that idea a lot. And so I've been working up materials for that.

Why did the woman need protection? Because she had witnessed a murder.

There is a newspaper clip about it. She gave it to him to read. 

But she said, that's not what happened. They had killed their own. She knew that, she said. She didn't see it, although she was in the parking lot when it happened, but they thought she saw it and that...is the problem.

All she needed was for someone to help her get through the week. to protect her from them. What she didn't tell him was she also needed protection from herself. And an emotional support person to keep her from breaking down...or just turning herself in to them. 

Go to the police he said.

They own the police, she replied.

Oh, shit, he said.

Yes, exactly, she despondently concluded.

So yes, it's a fascinating tale. A seventeen year old protecting a 20-something woman from the local crime family who was looking for her, over a murder. And how do they typically deal with that kind of thing? Another murder? Likely so.

So you get it into shape, first. I entered contest, used their reviews and suggested corrections (some obvious, some occluded, some just wrong), then I used a script consultant. Years later I worked with a known producer to rewrite it in better screenplay format, with budget in mind and for a lower budget production. 

He got me three working directors who wanted to shoot it. But they didn't have my vision. I'd heard many times from processionals that it's better to wait than go with production if it's not your vision. Sure, shape your vision, don't be unrealistic (and that's where "they" get you). But also stick to what you know in your gut is important, or important to you.

And so I have.

It's been a journey, writing this story, in screenplay format. It's hard for fiction authors to adapt to, but I had studied this decades before at university. So I had a leg up. Still, after years of fiction writing, you want to write fiction in your Action sequences in a screenplay and that pretty much is a bad idea. 

A good Action element in a screenplay reads like fiction, it's interesting, engaging, even fascinating, but it's in Action format, not fiction format, which takes up far too much space.

And that's why I bring this up today. One of the things you do as a screenwriter is to get help. You can enter contests, but only ones that offer help. A conversation. A review. A critique. Or "coverage". 

Screenplay coverage is a written summary and opinion of a movie script that helps producers decide quickly if it is worth developing or passing on.

I only have two projects on The Black List website

One of the well thought of coverage types is The Black List. IF you can get on their list, you're doing really well. But you can also get on their website, you can pay to be a member, and you can pay for their coverage. Which I've done several times. I cleaned up my screenplay, and resubmitted. 

As I say above, I only have 2 screenplays there. I have more on Script Revolution and Film Freeway.

And so, that's why we're here today. Something about one of those coverage reports.

It is in sections. It rates your screenplay for Overall, Premise, Plot, Character, Dialoge and Setting and then offers a summary via Era, Locations, Budget, Genre, Logline and Pages.

Then there are three major sections of Strengths, Weaknesses and Prospects.

I'm going to share what the Prospects section said in one of my Black List coverages from years ago. I've since gone through multiple rewrites. Why? Because of a mistake by the script reader — also known as story analysts or coverage readers in the industry:

"There are a number of sequences in this screenplay where the pace of the dialogue really stands out.

When conversations move quickly - as the exchange does between Gordie and Sara from page 44 to

46, for example's sake - it keeps the reader's (meaning prospective buyer's) eyes moving down the

page and gives the scene an energy that can translate to the screen effectively. (But, be sure that those

characters have distinct voices; a character's personality really comes to life on the page when their

voice is unique and idiosyncratic.) There are some useful details early in the piece as well. For

instance, the fact that Gordie doesn't pull his backup parachute during his skydiving malfunction -

because he's wary of the $250 fee - is telling. Similarly, Mark laughing with Deputy Fiori on page 9

alerts the audience to the fact that the mobsters and police have a working relationship, which is

important later in the story (when Sara fears going to the corrupt police for help). Gordie's discomfort

with Marlon's suggestion on page 74 is a memorable moment; Gordie's hesitance with Kelp is

authentic, and we get the sense that it stems from his feelings for Sara. Finally, it's interesting to see

on page 113 that there was a serious reason Sara never called after landing in New York."

OK. I bring this all up because in the screenplay, "Gordie" says he cannot afford the emergency parachute repack of "two fifty". 

The script reader took that to mean two hundred and fifty dollars, when in reality it was two dollars and fifty cents.

Why bring this up? Because of a vast change in tone and meaning.

IF it's $250, most even today would think, 'well, I can see why he'd at least hesitate." But if it's only $2.50, then one might wonder what the hell is wrong with this guy today. While back in 1974 one has to consider that gas was 30 cents a gallon, if not less.

Getting past a belief that this guy must be nuts to avoid deploying a lifesaving emergency chute when he "main" had failed, we get to his embarrassment that he did not have that small amount of money on him. The fact however that he might even consider that as an issue in such a dire situation (which to should also be noted that he did not see it as dire, but that's another issue entirely), one needs to know that character's mindset, and history.

It had already been exposed that he had emergency services training in search and rescue, landed his first plane at twelve years old, and started fighting in Karate tournaments in grade school and so had fasted fear in multiple venues over a period of a decade by time this story unfolds as he was plummeting to the earth at around 90-110 MPH (terminal velocity is 120MPH but a streaming parachute would slow that down due to drag forces). 

So, again. Why bring this up?

Mostly because it's an interesting story for an audience.

But also for aspiring screenwriters. Yes, coverage is important. Especially very good and relevant coverage. But they aren't always right, certainly not about everything.

You have to "follow your gut" so to speak. You have to know when to, as Kenny Rogers put it in the song "The Gambler":

knowing when to hold ’em

knowing when to fold ’em

knowing when to walk away

knowing when to run...

Use whatever tools you can get your hands on, but use your brain first. Do not buy your way out of thinking. Spend money only when it earns its keep. Free beats stupid every time. Trash what does not work. Learn what does. Learn when it does.

If you start something, finish it. Put a real product on the table. But also know when a thing is dead and cut it loose. That is not quitting, that is survival. Yes, it is a contradiction. So is life. You get better at it by screwing it up and learning.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!


Pages: Start Here | About JZ Murdock | 

Timeline: Heather Cox Richardson and the Roots of Today’s Political Crisis

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Walkabout Thoughts #97b - Screenplays

 Nope, didn't walk again today. Feeling better after the air cleared yesterday. 

The third day of adding to my walks with strength training, some weights, and sit-ups, and I'm a bit sore but less than yesterday, and feeling pretty great from it. Looking forward to more.

First off I'd just like to mention something. I've been watching Orlando Bloom: To The Edge show. 

"Synopsis: Actor and adventure enthusiast Orlando Bloom embarks on a physical, mental and spiritual journey of self-discovery as he undertakes three extreme sports -- wingsuiting, free diving and rock climbing -- to push himself to the edge of what is possible. With family, friends and his spiritual Buddhist practice guiding the way, Orlando is trained by experts who help him overcome obstacles, face his fears, and discover valuable lessons about himself."

I lean Buddhist. I've been a skydiver, & parachute rigger in the USAF, I've done rope work and climbed cliffs, more tactical than technical but some technical was involved in search & rescue. He takes a week to learn and achieve more than is reasonable in skydiving, free diving, and technical climbing. It's an interesting show and experience and reminds me of how it was doing those things for the first time and the difficulties mental and physical. And to see him really struggling but never giving up. You don't quit. 

You do more than you know you can, and then you do it. You may know you can't do it, but you keep pushing and then..you've done it. Life is good. Unless you die, or worse, don't and are just broken. I've been lucky, with good reflexes, and learned from the best. So does Orlando. He's been lucky, with good reflexes and a normal for him, intense workout. But here he's pushing himself beyond his limits (and mine from my past) and in his final episode with climbing, it makes for a good final episode. It's pretty impressive and somehow cathartic. 

And nostalgic...

Moving on. I received a win today for my screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard", a True Crime/Drama. My 13th international award for this screenplay.

That led me to update this award on my IMDb page (they suggested that, so nice of the thought I would look into it if it's an award IMDb allows). Looking at three of my hosts on my screenplays and updating all the loglines and synopses on all of them. Took me all day. Kind of (boring and long) fun and cathartic. Why cathartic?

This all turned into an interesting situation.

See, IMDb is basically, the "Internet Movie Database". Movie. Not screenplays.

When I won my first few awards for a screenplay, which I think was THIS one, I didn't realize I could put it on IMDb. When I realized that I tried to add it to my profile there.

They refused. I was confused.

The festival said, "We're IMDb Award certified (or whatever) and you can add your award there."

But they would never let me add a screenplay. I tried until frustrated some years ago, I gave up.

But today was different. It said on IMDb when I was adding the award (and tried to add a screenplay that didn't exist), that I should add it using the add reform. I've used that many times for my films. Frustrating, and miserable the first few times but a breeze once you're used to it. Just not for screenplays. Apparently.

Anyway, I pushed through today and went around and around and kept trying until finally, it clicked...and went through. Which only means I got it into the queue until they could examine it and, deny it, or accept it. This has taken weeks before. In recent years it's been faster though.

Within about an hour it was approved!

Cool. 

But that got me to thinking. I updated my logline and synopsis for it. But then I had to do it elsewhere too for compatibility Then I should probably update my other scripts and screenplays.

That took all day. I had to update the new IMDb page to add all the awards that IDMb would accept. I had to update the synopsis on IMDb. I needed to update that on Script Revolution and Film Freeway (and a counterpart of theirs, WFCN), and I just got a notification from MovieBytes' WinningScripts to update or lose the screenplay's accessibility. Probably should do the BlackList, too.

WinningScript may not seem like much, or much now, but that little free site has led me to some very interesting connections and networking. From that site, I got a job to do an adaptation of an author's novel to screenplay format. Then a second author. Also to the publisher of my first two books. 

You never know where your efforts will pay off and it certainly hasn't been to the efforts that charged the most or cost me the most money. Not that all of those are a waste of time. But you have to be smart and manage your money, time, resources, and efforts.

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu...and leave you with that.
It’s nowhere near noon time or lunch. It's 8:20PM Saturday night.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Walkabout Thoughts #54

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts… July 17, 2023, Monday

Weather for the day… 63 degrees starting out,

Podcast Marc Maron with Felicia Michaels

I Instagram for the day, this just seemed appropriate with comics on the podcast... Also.

OK... I’m walking on my 1st mile for the day. I spent the entire day yesterday editing my true crime biopic “The Teenage Bodyguard“. Big history with that, and all the work I’ve done on it, including with producer/actor Michael Douglas' producer Robert Mitas on some films (one of my favorite being, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so fun talking to him on the phone about it from time to time), and who I worked with on this project. Really nice guy to work with. He helped me rewrite it into a shorter, tighter, screenplay format. But it's just not the original which is the actual story. Likely more sellable. I’ve sent it to screenplay festivals over the years and the ones where I got notes back on it, I fine tuned it, ignoring the notes as you do, where appropriate. Usually when they don't get something and are wrong on something, you still need to do SOMETHING. Because if they don't get it, something wasn't clear. Clarify it! I entered one festival recently and got some good notes back. So yesterday I did all the obvious fixes on mistakes and a tiny bit of re-ordering of scenes, which I admit are better now. I thought, hey those were good notes, maybe I should send them the Mitas version? But the festival is now in waiver only status. So I took a shot and emailed them and explained the situation. Couple of days of no response and then, sure enough, yesterday they sent me a waiver to directly email them the screenplay and then pay $40 on PayPal which is like 56 Canadian. So they're in Canada apparently. I wasn’t gonna bother with update using their notes, until I thought about sending it to some other festival that I came across this weekend. So thought might as well give it a shot and first few notes were good so I kept going and updated it all and submitted yesterday to the new festival. Along with my "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Since I’m in a situation where I have other things going on, it’s hard right now for me to produce a new film. So I thought I have all these screenplays sitting around, I might as well send some off. 

I then went and looked at my "International Screenwriters Association" profile at ISA.org and it needed updating. So I added my horror/comedy screenplay, “Gray and Lover The Hearth Tales Incident“ and this updated Teenage Bodyguard screenplay. My "Gumdrop", a short horror film was already up there, so I added "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Oddly enough, for anyone to see my screenplays I have to pay for a monthly or annual subscription. At this stage of things I might do that. See as a rule, since the 1980s, I had decided back then, as things like AOL we’re around making difficult Internet access...difficult, that I refused to pay for the Internet, partly because that I was broke in the 80s, until I got my first IT job. I tried to do everything cheaply, "on the sly" (According to Etymonline, the word sly has been used since the year 1200 in Middle English as sley. This comes from the Old Norse sloegr or Old Norse slœgr meaning cunning or crafty). So while I could’ve thrown thousands and thousands of dollars down the drain over the decades, I really spent very little, but probably learned a lot more than I would have otherwise. Because I had to do it with brute force and in the hard way. I had to study, I read a lot of books, I researched and... here I am. It's ironic because when my wife and I split up, part of the complaint was I wasn't making any money, much money. Not a big complaint, but it was there, mostly put upon her by her parents. Before we split when she said they'd mentioned it, I pointed out I was working all the time. I worked on a mainframe at nights at the University of Washington Medical Center for their Radiology and Pathology (and the regional trauma Harborview Med. Ctr, affectionately nicknamed, "Harborzoo" by many) and that I was studying manuals and books on PC design and IT issues, and learning all the software (sans manuals) I could get my hands on. Which all paid off years later. I ended up making a good deal of money and had she stuck around...while she never really did and built a much more difficult life for herself and by association, our son. Which I didn't know about until he became a young adult.

Anyway, I got a lot done yesterday. Probably more than I’ve done in a long time on any one day. I got all these blogs up-to-date and edited in the last one to get out this morning. Now I’m creating another damn one, here. But I got that entire screenplay updated, except for some of their more serious structural notes. They hate my SUPERS. Which I do keep hearing from everybody, but this is that kind of film where you need to be oriented in the moment, because it jumps around in the timeline. Yes I could do a linear format as this guy noted, but…the thing is, part of the reason everyone hates SUPERs now a days (text on screen in a movie, also called, "cards") is two fold. I do like how you have to guess you made a jump in time forward or back in a film and it's notable by elements within the frame. But it also has to do with people watching movies on their pads and phones. You'll notice some series and movies now have GIANT writing on the screen indicating location, mostly. Well? It's easier to read on a cell phone.

I’ve always liked Marc Maron, and I’ve been dabbling in his podcast lately more and more. Especially the ones where he has on a comic from back when he started out and what they were doing then and today and reminiscing. Too fun.

Listening to Marc’s podcast with his old friend, who started out in comedy before him Felicia Michaels. He got me thinking. She kind of started out as a stripper, and you have to hear her story to appreciate that. The type of person I'd always avoided. Maybe that was a mistake. I mean a lot of them were not having their shit together to be sure. you know? Maybe I needed the stripper who had her shit together a little and was just doing this to "get her degree" or something. But I always seem to end up with more conventional women. Not when viewed back then in the moment, but when you look back on it. Yeah. My oldest son‘s mother was the least conservative in being an artist and a partier. Weird relationship in a way. I kept trying to get away from her and kept not being able to. We started working at Tower Video in Seattle, Mercer Street store. I was a supervisor and she got hired one day. But that’s another story. Apparently she was a blossominkg alcoholic not until after we got divorced. Then she moved to Portland while I remained in the Seattle area. So I didn’t know what was going on in her household for years. I mean, knowing her for who she had been, from her upper middle class family, a woman who could just sit at a piano and rip off a classical piece of music. While I came from a lower middle class that grew into maybe middle, then I heard from my son, how things were there with beer bottles all over the house all the time… Oh, my. Well, she ended up only having him from age 4 for 18 months because their family had money and threatened me with lawyers (she did not them but I assumed they put her up to it) and I figured as I was a dad in 1992 little chance I'd get the kid. But I tried until I had to give him up after she left (I tossed her out for kind of reasonable reasons). But then she gave hi up and I brought him into my new marriage with a young child I adopted a year or so later at age 2 (as birth dad was an alcoholic). When I had married that very sweet woman, a horse trainer, who turned out to be seemingly building into some kind of mental issues which led to a rather abusive nuclear family situation for I guess. all four of us. I know that woman’s entire family doesn’t like her much now because apparently she’s cut them all out of the parent's will and took everything after the they recently died. But in mental illness, narcissism and megalomania, I’m sure she has a completely rational and normal view on all that. That was oddly enough, ironically enough, the story of my siblings and our mother who needed mental help, but exhibited an appearance of sanity just enough to where you couldn't do anything about it to help her (or us). So I started off life serious about that never happening to any of my children should I ever have any (that was up for question for years until my oldest's mother just took that choice away from me) and then, it all came to be as if I had planned it or something. But then, when you’re attracted to mental illness because you’ve lived with some form of it all your life and don’t know that yet, until you’re blindsided, until it's too late, well... I'd thought I had a sort of intellectual armor since I’ve got a university degree in psychology. I was at the top of my class, according to my professor. But there's a joke that was around the psych department that was pretty standard across all psych departments most likely, that psychologists make the worst parents. You could probably synthesize that into other associated issues. But when you know a discipline like that and help others, you have a kind of blindness to it at home.
Anyway, did my kids turn out OK? Well? Better than me, and worse than me, in different ways. Which sounds like childrearing in general I guess. Basically, I’d say they’re both happy people.

I was going to skip over, since Marc’s podcast ended. to another one of his, but Felicia mentioned her podcast. She’s on, "The Liars Club", they mentioned it several times, so if I check it out, though I was going to another Maron podcast, anyway, in going to Marc's podcast, up popped The Liars Club podcast and I saw one with Bill Burr. I like him, friend of theirs, they talked about him on the last podcast, so I thought, well, check out some of this and see how it goes…

So, The Liars Club podcast starts and Felicia starts talking and they introduce themselves and she says what they do there is, they invite one of their friends on, another comedian, who has to tell two stories, one true, one a lie, and then they try to figure out which one's a lie. Well, that sounds entertaining.

Fascinating. I"m editing this later in the day today and had to go downstairs to get my sheets out of the dryer. Ever wonder what my basement/house looks like, it's detailed pretty clearly (most of it) in my film, "Gumdrop", a short horror. I got into the basement sometimes and look around and remember "killing" people down there (for in the film). Anyway, I put on Marc's new podcast with an Irish actor I've been enjoying on screen for years, Cilian Murphy, and they're talking and said they both had the Sears Silvertone guitar with the amp built into the case. Cillian says he only has the guitar. I had both, given to me by my older brother who had a band and at some point in the late 60s pulled my sister into it. I can't count the number of times I took that amp out of its case and put it up on my ... ok, yes, true...gun rack on my wall in my bedroom growing up. I had a .303 British and a breaking single shot 20 gauge shotgun, and shells. My brother got that when he was 16. He gave it to me when I was 16 (he should have kept it for his son someday). So I gave it to my son when he was 16. One time I was putting that amp into the case again and I accidentally forgot to unplug it from the wall. I had been plugging it in and unplugging it multiple times in trying to figure something out and got confused. So I put my hand on the wires to crimp them down flat and the power shot into my hand and up my arm feeling like an iron rod going up my arm. I couldn't open my hand. I just stood there being electrocuted and began to fear for my life. I couldn't figure how how to stop it until I realized the freezing effect hadn't gone to my knees (yet?). So I relaxed my knees so I was fall from a standing position and it pulled my hand off the amp, ending the shocking event. Guess what? Never made that mistake ever again. I was the one in my early teens who changed out the house electrical on/off toggle switches and I never turned off the power. It just wasn't necessary. Only go shocked once doing that, very briefly. But after this experience with the amp (I told my brother and he explained amps to me in a more comprehensive way), I never did that again. Naw, I'm lying, I still don't tend to turn off the power today in swapping out a switch.

I was really liking the noise cancellation function on these AirPods, because I never had that before and I’ve always been curious. Yesterday I started being disappointed because so much sound was coming through. I thought maybe they’re not in my ears correctly or something? So I just checked on the Settings on my phone just now and it was turned off. I turned it back on. And now it’s weird silent again, except for what I’m listening to, obviously. Especially cool because there’s some landscapers who are trimming a giant hedge and it's so much quieter now. So that’s cool…

About talking about these AirPods… If you back up in my blogs to when I got them the other day, I was calling them "air buds". Nope. Then I started calling them by their correct name only lowercase and separated, "air pods". Now I find if I say it correctly, they transcribe correctly… "Air pods". I tell ya, AI maybe scary and it maybe gonna destroy us, but so far it’s actually pretty cool.

So far, my only complaint with these… AirPods… is they keep rotating out a place and you have to slightly twist them back in, moving the bottom forward towards your chin and that’s really fucking annoying. But as I had discussed, some of that probably has to do with sweating. So having some way to hold them correctly in place at all times would definitely be a bonus. Maybe they should ask the AI how to fix it?

Speaking again of AI… as I said, before, my oldest son has my book “Suffering Long Covid“ in his brick and mortar health food store in another city that he manages. But it’s sitting there by the door and although people will pick it up, it’s not yet been selling. Why? Probably because you have to have long Covid. Which isn’t everybody. And you need some advertising material to sell it. So I thought I might take a second today and produce a one sheet to put by the books. If I hadn’t grown up when I did, the cool thing about this now is I can do it quickly. I don’t have to design it, draw it up, cut and paste it together and make a copy of it, then mail it to him. I can whip it all together in a few minutes and just email it, or stick it on Google Drive so my son can grab it and print it out at work [which is what happened today over the course of a couple of hours rather than a couple of days]. Which is where I keep a pitchdeck/lookbook for my "Teenage Bodyguard" screenplay (on Google Drive) which was made up professionally, cost me a couple grand and it’s so big in file size, that I can’t email it to anyone. But they can easily just go to a link and download it if they want. Or I can upload it to a website where it says to upload your pitchdeck here, or something.

On another topic, I just sent this to my son, and I’ll share with you:

So I was thinking of paying for a year of "International Screenwriters Association" account again. Which I haven't done in years, just to have my screenplays up there and then it suddenly occurred to me. While we are having problems here in America today, and we have a writers and actors strike going on right now,  that the industry says could kill them. Because tech companies like Apple and Amazon have gotten into making movies and they're killing it and have way more money than Hollywood… But by putting my screenplays into where an international audience of producers and investors around the world still have a group of money out there! It's a bigger audience for one, Some of those people out there are so rich they just aren't so concerned about small amounts of money to make a film. So maybe it's worth the $100 to make my profile fully live again. Am I dreaming? Isn't that what filmmaking is all about?

I usually start this walk with a light short sleeved shirt because it’s cool and then gets hotter before the end of the walk and as I said yesterday, I took off my shirt leaving just my kind of soaked T-shirt and life was better. So today I’m starting my 3rd mile and taking it off now before I get all worked up and hot, and it feels good to have the air hit my T-shirt and dry out what little needs drying out, and knowing I'll avoid that getting overheated thing. Yeah, I know this ain't rocket science but it is what it is.

I bunch of people tied talking me into doing a podcast or video podcast, a Vpod, but I don’t know, I don’t much like getting on camera. So I’ve got my blog here and a friend, Kelly Hughes, who has his own video "Rising Star-Music That Matters" podcast, and doing rather well and he has had some incredible guests, I’ve got to say. But it just occurred to me, I wonder if there’s an AI to turn my text log into an audio podcast? I mean, I suppose I could just read the damn thing as an audio podcast, and maybe I could try that?

OK I just walked back past those landscapers with a big long hedge trimmer which is really noisy, even though it’s electric, and it’s much quieter now with the sound cancellation. Though I can still hear it too much with these AirPods, it is much nicer now.

OK The Liars Club podcast with Bill Burr and his first story starts, One time I was an altar boy…
OK then Bill. I was an altar boy myself. We had a tiny Slovak church in Tacoma, called "St. Joe’s" how we called it (Saint Joseph's Catholic Church). Says right on the building it’s a Slovak church. My mom was Czech, Grandpa came over on a boat at a young age, Grandma was born in America. Then my dad‘s family‘s Irish. In eighth grade, I went to Holy Rosary Catholic Church and school (closed as of 2019 due to a need for $17million in repairs), with the big cathedral you can see from many places in downtown Tacoma if you look south. There’s the church, the school, a rectory for the priests and a convent for the nuns, and and a big playground area. South of it is the I-5 freeway and up above that on the hill is our little St. Joe’s church. My little brother went to Holy Rosary all the way through school until he died. Decades later I heard that everyone knew our family because of what he and we were going through back in the mid 70s as the priest would say prayers during mass for him. Didn’t work, but it was a nice try. I thoughtful effort. I'd had some trouble in seventh grade at Stewart Junior High (only 3 blocks from my parent's house) and wanted out. So I got finagled into eighth grade at Holy Rosary. No, I didn’t realize, although I knew eighth grade was the last grade there, and then you go, probably to Bellarmine prep, an all boys school then, which eventually became co-Ed. In fact, my girlfriend after I got out of the Service graduated from there. Which weirded me out because I didn’t know it turned into a boys and girls school. I turned down going there after eighth grade because I didn’t wanna go to a school with no girls. Which kind of shows you my orientation back then. But in going to only eighth grade in a Catholic school, I'd not realized it I was stepping into the morass of being the new kid in the last year at a school where these kids had been together for eight fucking years! I got along really well with the outsiders in the class, who are either really poor Catholic kids, or not even Catholic but their parents wanted them to get a good education. Well, the nuns smacked you around, so yeah, you paid attention, for safety's sake. And we had the oldest Nun, the principle, Sister Rogers. Good God, was she a piece of work! We had several rich kids in there who were really annoying. But not so bad once I forced my way in and got to know them. The girls anyway. The guys were mostly just all assholes until several year later, those who got out of the Catholic school system and had entered public life. I had the most fights in my K-12 years of any grade level, in that school, over that single year, with... the altar boys. Apparently, stepping into the last year of a school is a bad idea. Unless you bond with the kids and make friends. So they were nice at first when they asked me, Do you want to be an altar boy? I was very proud of the fact I was an altar boy at the little church up the hill and I saw this giant cathedral as say the corporate version Church over our mom and pop version. St. Joe's was a great experience. Small church, small community. I mean, going into Holy Rosary a cathedral, was literally awe inspiring. There was one day I was asked to serve Mass because all the altar boys had gone on an outing and I wasn't invited because I wasn't an altar boy..at their church. You know, one might think I'd get a complimentary invite to show some affection for the church up the hill, as I WAS going to their school, but no. Nada and it was explained to me very clearly. I just always thought it an odd situation. The Church is based in Rome, so it's international. But they can't show some love for an altar boy ONE church, ONE block away? OOOkay.
Anyway, after being asked to join the gaggle of Holy Rosary (affectionately nicknamed, "Holly Roller" BY the altar boys, by the way..), altar boys, I’m afraid I may have expressed my indignity in saying no thanks. They kept pushing at that meeting, cajoling me into joining, which was a mistake. For all of us. Until finally, I said, Look, I’m head altar boy at St. Joe’s and I’ve gone there all my life. I don’t want to be altar boy at two different churches as it takes up a lot of time at two. And I don’t want to quit being head there to just be ordinary here. But they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want this esteemed privilege. I think at that point I might’ve gotten a little irascible. Anyway, that was the exact opposite of a bonding experience for them. Or me. And so they harassed me mentally and physically that entire year and I’ve written about this elsewhere…worst day/experience? They got in a big ring around me and kept hitting me in the head with a basketball until my head hurt so bad I just walked off "campus" and went home. They may have given me a slight concussion. Nice guys. I remember some girls in that ring around me that moved as I moved. It was bizarre.

My point in bringing all this up getting and back to Bill Barr and I don’t know what his story is about to be, but it continued with... they would take the altar boys on a field trip… It was when I became an adult and started hearing about pedophiles in the Catholic Church ad I was shocked. I went to Camp Don Bosco, a two week summer camp, run by priests, and those studying to be priests and I couldn’t of had a better experience. Amazing people. And no, I’m not suppressing memories. But other than the obvious problems in the Catholic Church, being the dogma, and how I was a very analytical child, and wasn’t buying into the Bible overall, I had a pretty good experience being raised Catholic. It was pretty strict. And there were downsides and yes it took me into my 30s in actively studying and researching, and looking into other religions and such, before I could wash my mind of all the Catholicism. Which granted, will still be there in my roots until I die, but hopefully not there afterward. My Buddhist orientation now, where I don’t buy into reincarnation, and by the way I didn’t see any of that in the original Buddha's teachings, and while my oldest and I continue to talk about physics, and how there may BE something after we die, though I doubt it, as existing in a discreet unit of existence, as we do now, that is, we may more realistically end up being dispersed into the energy of the universe and what the hell good is that as an individual? I know, I know, you’re getting to be in the presence of “God”. But that doesn’t do me any good if I don’t know I’m existing.

Funny, if this is the true story Bill Bar is telling, oh damn, I have to say Bill Burr, not Bill Barr. Burr had a similar experience with the altar boys. He got the shit beat out of him too. Well to be fair, I didn’t get the shit beat out of me. Public school, I did a few times. But the thing was, those altar boys didn’t know, because we were in eighth grade, that I started fighting tournaments around the Pacific Northwest in Karate in fifth grade. So I did pretty good anyone fight in particular and ended up beating the shit out of this one kid who took a swing at me first and then when the fight was over and I was walking away, tried to jump me from behind. I had fine tuned awareness from fighting tournaments so I threw a back kick and dropped him like a rock. A kid told me years later in high school, who didn’t go on to Bellarmine prep, that after I got in the car with my mom and little brother and we drove off home, which is what started this whole fight as somebody had thrown a snowball in my mom‘s car. Abuse me, fine. Abuse, my family? Fuck you pal! So this kid had noticed the kid Mark, from the fight was missing just after as the kids were milling about talking. I think this was Johnny White telling me this one day, as we were walking to Lincoln high school one morning years later. He went and looked for Mark and found him on the other side of the church, huddled up in a fetal position and told or threatened him that, You better not tell anybody you saw this. So I guess I won that day. Catholic school is supposed to smarten and toughen you up for life, but I don’t think that was the best way to do it, to throw you into a lion's den with a bunch a little spoiled fuckers. Anyway, back to Bill Burr story…

It’s funny how I keep hearing mostly well-known people talking on TV or Podcasts or wherever, even in movies and I guess on TV, hearing this commentary about how "back when I was a kid it wasn’t like it is now, it was more dangerous "back then". I've heard that succeeding, if you want to call them “classes“ or generations after me through each decade, in looking back how it has a more dangerous group when you were young, then you see today. So by extrapolation I would have to say that when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, OUT scary kids must have been carrying around handheld nuclear bombs or something.

Bill’s second story on the podcast is about his being involved when he was young, stealing alcohol from a package store. He didn’t do it. He was waiting in the car, if this is the true story. But it got me to thinking… I don’t remember ever stealing alcohol, and I certainly drank it in high school. It’s one of the reasons why, by the time I got in the Service at 20 (after kicking around America a bit) I really wasn’t into drinking any more and much preferred getting stoned on weed. For Christmas one year my sister gave me this long thing pocketbook telling you all about wine. It was designed to talk with you to buy wine. And so I got into wine. In the late 70s I would always have like six bottles of $40 wine at the ready One of my friends who worked in the shop, up front of the parachute shop, in the fabric and rubbergear shop, came over one day and I turned him on wine, taught him about it. He’s from California so decades later he sent me six bottles of California wine out of appreciation. Last time I heard from him he was very into Jesus, so...another lost to the ethereal. At some point in my late teens, early 20s when I got that wine book I read it and got into it and that led to my lifelong appreciation. Years later, when I got to Western Washington University, Prof Rees, told our class that he was gonna teach us how to think. Give me a subject, he said. People called things out until I said, almost jokingly, BEER. He stopped, pointed at me and said, Good, OK, good. Beer. And he started drawing on the chalkboard and spent the hour explaining to us why you can drink beer as you would wine, for taste. You don’t have to drink it just to get fucked up. I didn’t know that about beer back then. And it enhanced my respect for beer. It's interesting. When you drink for quality, you can lose the desire for inebriation.

I love "stand ups". So it’s ironic that I’ve only been to one comedy club in my life. It was some comedy club on Roosevelt Street in the U District in Seattle. Called Laughs Comedy Club now, might have been back then when I lived a few blocks away. Typically we went to the Monkey Bar (Monkey Pub now) until it was sold, and the clientele changed to bunch of assholes. Next to the comedy club or nearby so was a college bar called Dantes, which always had attractive girls in it but also had a bunch of drunk asshole frat boys. So I was in there a few times, but mostly steered away from it.

Good grief, I just saw how long this blog is today… Sigh…sorry?

So I started doing the elliptical and dead lifts on my off days when I’m not walking I’m feeling pretty good from it. The more exercise I get the more motivation I seem to have to do things.

Bill, now talking about the fights he had when he was younger weren’t as many as it sounds like, but in his family, there was like a fist fight every day. And that his dad would threaten to "put them through the wall", which sounds like my stepdad who was from Crisfield, Maryland. He had more education having graduated from high school then my mom, who made it through ninth grade, but my mom was a hell of a lot smarter and knew it. My stepdad liked to terrorize me once in a while and was a grouch overall on a daily basis. He treated my sister though like a princess. Who wasn’t his kid either. But if my screenplay "The Teenage Bodyguard" ever gets made into a movie, there’s a scene in there where you’ll get the idea what it was like growing up around him.

Bill Bill is talking about going to a college party where he didn’t go to that school and in hitting on girls from another school they could figure out pretty quick like that, You don’t go here, do you? That reminded me when I was in USAF tech school in Illinois, and a couple guys and me went to a bar in Champaign/Urbana up north, I think? I was dancing with some girl and she asked me what I did. She was in college. I said I was at the tech school at the airbase. And she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That  happened one other time, after my divorce (okay A divorce, one of them), when my son was like four years old, I was at a bar in Pioneer Square, Seattle dancing with some girl and I’m not really a dancer. But if I like you enough, well… anyway. I was always very (too) upfront about my situation. I always have been. I’ve blown many dates that way. After the Air Force, I was in debt for a while (we divorced, I took all the bills) and I would share that with a woman and needless to say, I didn’t get the date. So I told this girl I have a four-year-old although he lives with his mom and...she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That was the end of that. So when I met my next wife to be, who had asked to use my darts to play darts with me and with her girlfriend, at the Pioneer Square Saloon one night, she offered that she had an infant. And I lit up. I said, Well I have a little kid too, but he lives with his mom. And that bonded us. Because in talking about it a long time later after we were married, we both realized that having a young kid pretty much made no one want to date you. But I thought she was so cute that she could’ve had a baby elephant I wouldn’t have cared. But that infant was amazing and I ended up adopting and saw their first step and the first word was "Dad" and we’ve always had a great relationship. Not so much with the mom anymore, which is pretty much how her entire family feels about her now, so… there is that.

Now the podcast is talking about drinking when they were younger, and one of the women says, Yeah, they drank a lot in the military. Which reminded me when I was in college  at Western, Washington University, Playboy that year came out with a rating of all the universities around the country about drinking. They made the comment. I think they chose the UDub, University of Washington, as the drinking school in Washington, because they didn’t consider Wazoo, Washington State University, in Pullman Washington for consideration because they considered them a professional drinking school. Fair, partly because just over the Idaho border the drinking age was lower and in fact, that girlfriend of mine from Bellarmine Prep went there for a year, got in trouble on that stretch of well monitored road, twice and joined me for our next three years of college/university. I was at a party at Western and we were talking about that Playboy piece. Everybody was pretty offended and somebody asked me if I wasn’t offended as I didn't seem so. I said no, not really, remember. I am a STRATA student (STudent Returning After Time Away, or something like that, it means I had time between graduating high school and college, mostly military types), someone who’s been away from school for a while and returned. I had been through the military in between. And as they had said about Wazzu, I’ve already been at a professional partying organization, in the military.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Plane Crashes, Rescues and The Teenage Bodyguard

How do I keep getting into these weird research things? For "Gumdrop, a short horror", the film I'm shooting right now, I had to research serial murderers. And worse, actually

For "The Teenage Bodyguard", yesterday and today I've been researching crashed small airplanes within 100 miles of Tacoma in 1974. I found two that work. One as the crash site in the film, one as the plane itself.

I don't want to use just one anyway as it's better to blend more than one in characters of a true story to avoid various issues involved with that kind of an endeavor. Regarding the people I knew back then, I have already combined several real people I knew into a single character. And, changed their names.

In this new opening for this redraft. I chose the Cessna 210 Centurion, an above cockpit winged aircraft. Back in the 1960s when I was in Civil Air Patrol, I flew in a variety of airplanes. Cessnas, Beechcraft Musketeers, a T-34 trainer front /back seater, once even a USAF Lockheed C-141 Starlifter,  To date, the loudest aircraft I've even flown on. Louder than the KC-135 Stratotanker I flew in when I was in the USAF.

There were two crash causalities in the story. I took the story in the screenplay from my own story I wrote years ago, "Marking Time", which is in my 2012 published book, Anthology of Evil, a collection of my first short horror and science fiction.

That story itself has an interesting history. I originally wrote it when my son was about four in 1992. I was being reflective and ignorantly headed to a divorce. So I wrote a story where I was reflecting on my past and how happy I was to have a family and a child and ...yadda yadda yadda.

Now that story in that short story came from a story I was told one day up in the mountains when I was in eighth grade. Another CAP cadet told me the story on a break from backpacking that he heard from another cadet. It was about a crash site found by that cadet with two casualties, a young daughter and her father, the pilot. I was told while in Civil Air Patrol on a training search and rescue operation at Wing Team's camp in the mountains near Shelton, WA in 1968-9.

I wrote in the original about how it was. We were all competitive to be the first to find the crashed plane. It was an honor and a bagging point to be honest. It just takes one dose of reality to turn that fun endeavor into a serious life event, however.

I saw my first cadaver in serving mass at St. Joe's Catholic Church in Tacoma when the old pastor, Father Joe, passed on and I got the serve at his funeral mass. He was a great guy and we all loved him. I was afraid to see his dead body, in the open casket, during mass. But when the priest and I went up to him in the casket there before the congregation and I saw him, he looked great. Like he was sleeping. And all my fears faded. Then I was only left with missing him and knowing we'd never again talk to one another.

The original story goes that the two passengers had been up in the wintry mountains for a while before finding them and they were frozen solid in their seats. So they had to extract them, and lay them out, then jump on their joints to flatten them and get them into the stretchers to carry them to where they could be transported to the morgue.

I always found it stunning that it was among those on his team, a kid in jr high or high school who was doing that. Jamming his booted foot down on a knee to get it to crack into a straight leg position so he'd fit into the carry.

When I was going to publish that story some years ago, I rewrote it, updated it into a supernatural horror story about a spec ops soldier in Afghanistan.

When I started writing The Teenage Bodyguard, I needed a story about my time in CAP and that story came to mind. it wasn't my story to be sure, but it gave one an idea of what being in CAP could be like. Children acting professionally like adults.

So here we are today.

In rewriting the story, I wanted to make the find of the downed plane more accurate and decided to find an actual crash incident and build off of that. I spent time getting the jargon down to an acceptable degree to work in a movie where most of the audience isn't military savvy.

I found two crashes. One within weeks or months of the actual timeline in the screenplay and another eight years later in another location. Between the two it anonymizes the scene but gives me reality to base my writing on. Which is or can be important in writing a true story. And I value reality and accuracy in my writings.

How do I keep getting into these weird research things? As I said, for The Teenage Bodyguard yesterday and today, I've been researching crashed small airplanes within 100 miles of Tacoma in 1974. I found two that work as the crash site in the film, in the new opening. I chose the Cessna 210 Centurion above cockpit winged aircraft.

Two causalities as in the story so I can anonymize it as you do in combining characters in true stories sometimes.

This is plane crash based on a story I was told while in Civil Air Patrol on a training search and rescue operation at Wing Team's camp near Shelton, WA in 1968-9.

I wrote the story, "Marking Time" based on it in the early 90s. Then rewrote it and updated it for my book, Anthology of Evil about a spec ops soldier in Afghanistan and turned it into a supernatural horror story.

After shooting "Gumdop" I want a palate cleanser and decided to maybe shoot "The Mea Culpa Document of London", a short story I wrote up at Western Washington University in getting my psych degree and a minor in creative writing and team screen/script writing.

That story is about a medieval witch hunter and a bizarre horrific situation he finds himself in where he realized he's not only been torturing his daughter, brought to him by villagers he met years ago on another campaign (thus the daughter now), but realizes he is in the same exact situation his mentor and the previous judge was in. And it had killed him.

Maybe I should do a comedy next after the next?

I'd love to shoot "Quantum History" a story about an MIT experiment that went awry clear across the country in Portland, when a guy wakes up to find he is a young Hitler, literally, but with comic elements to it.

A Creative Mind and Life

I have noticed something of late and I wanted to share that. Full disclosure, I had ADHD as a kid. ADD as an adult. I'm getting older, I turn sixty-four near the end of August. I was lucky. As a kid, I had lots of activities that taught me control and discipline.

Myself as a kid

It was torture to master. Years of practice. Years of pain and frustration. Years of delayed gratification. We all need some of that, some of us far more than others. Structure to be unstructured. Discipline to be undisciplined when the right times come upon us.

I noticed as I got older that I had better control over things. Far better than many. Not as much as some, to be sure. I had built good habits growing up. Or they had been built into me. Probably out of necessity so as not to kill me as an offspring.

It was a struggle to figure out, to learn, but in the end, I did figure it out. I found I had a certain way of thinking and that it was more productive to work with what I had rather than to work against it. As we are typically taught in school through K-12.

Once I realized that my life got easier. I also realized I had to hide it. To be perceived as the other kids. To fit in while not fitting on. So I had to work around things, had to work harder and faster than others. Reminds me of that comment on Ginger Rogers doing what Fred Astaire did, only backward, and faster. I'm not claiming to know the female experience in life as I'm male, but intellectually, I do get it.

I learned to make notes for myself. I learned to take responsibility. To not be a victim to my circumstances but to find a way to succeed despite them. I learned that if I had to do something I had to see it got done to completion and if that required extraordinary means, so be it. If I had to walk the extra mile from others, no one cared, as long as I got my responsibilities cared for.

I realized that I was very good at creating in going forward, not so much remembering and regurgitating. I was exceptional in synthesis, in synthesizing things. In taking from one concept and adapting it to many others.

I was very good at taking something and modifying it, making it far better. Eventually creating from scratch myself and then modifying that over time. As they say in the writing field, writing is rewriting. So it is in other fields. To create, you make something and modify it, over and over to perfection. To YOUR perfection.

As you modify you learn. When humans do anything, in doing it over and over they find the flaws and find the enhancements needed. Those who sse that, who apply that, find success. The other end of that is the business side of creativity which is hard for most artists and why so many fail.

My grandmother told me repeatedly, if you start a book, always finish it. I can today count on one or two hands, all the books I've started in my life and not finished. Probably on one hand.

Another side of this is perseverance. Those who give up fail, by definition. Don't be defined by your failure. As Thomas A. Edison said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." I've heard so many who have "made it" who said it was luck. You do have to, as they used to say, "take a licking and keep on ticking." Persevere.

Being in the right place at the right time, making that happen, so that luck could happen to them. So it is luck, but it's also setting yourself up for luck to happen, rather than failure. They've also said that in their never giving up, while their friends had, who started when they did, some who were even better then they were at whatever their endeavors were, while they made it, the others didn't. Because they quit or couldn't take rejection after rejection.

A famous author once said about rejection in relation to writers, that you should collect your rejections as a positive thing. As a collection. Put them on your office wall where you see them every day. Collect more. Fill the wall. Fill another wall. Fill all your office walls. Then start to fill another wall in another room.

By the time you fill your wall, or your office, or another room, or your entire home, you will have a sale and then another. You have to acclimate yourself to so-called, failures. Because each failure is a success in learning, in moving past that failure to the next and so eventually to the success you want. Or another success you never saw coming. And be sure to see that when it arrives.

Opportunity knocks only once, they say. Be sure to answer when it knocks. Truth is, opportunity knocks in our lives many times. But we often never ever hear the knock because we're looking for a knock at another door. Or listening for a knock when it is a doorbell or a whistle from outside our windows.

My High School Graduation Photo

My sister suggested when I entered high school (and that was the year after she had graduated so we missed one another), that I should write notes and put them in my jeans pocket, the pocket with my keys in them. She said it had worked for her. And I knew she was smart. After some months I found that some days, I would have a pocket full of small pieces of paper with notes on them.

When I was leaving school at the end of the day I would reach for my keys, in 12th grade, it was my car keys to drive home (even better) and I would feel the notes, read them, refresh my memory on what was to come.

Or if it was for the next day, leave it in my pocket for tomorrow morning to refresh again my memory and then try to remember to, remember. Or to keep checking my pocket throughout the day. It got to be a habit as the day went on to just touch my pocket, to feel if there were notes in there. I would remember (maybe) what the note(s) said (which actually helped my memory) or when I couldn't remember, pull them out and review them. Which also helped my memory.

My confidence grew. I made it a point to show up for things on time or a few minutes early. I came to be known as punctual. Also, dependable. A teacher pointed out one day the difference between most kids who sit in the front or back of a class.

I started putting myself on the front line, in the front row. I found I could pay more attention, get more involved. I became more interested. I had always felt I didn't want to engage (a holdover I think from my lower grade school experiences. I found ways to trick myself to, or to force myself, putting myself into positions where I had to learn or to become involved. At first, I hated it. But I persevered and eventually got to relish the interactions.

All this led to a change in how I was perceived by others. For two reasons. My strong desire to be trusted and dependable, and those pocket notes. For a while later on, it became my watch with an alarm. But there were times, without a supporting pocket note, that the alarm would go off and I would have absolutely no idea why. Nowadays, of course, I have my smartphone and calendar app along with other apps for support.

My reason for bringing this all up though really has to do with creativity. Something I studied at university. My major being psychology, one of my classes actually was titled, Creativity. And it wasn't an easy class. I quickly realized that shot name classes were hard and classes with longer names were easier.

I've noticed something for some time now about my creative pursuits. I'm very good at them. I can produce a lot, much if not most being of very high quality. But not always. And, why not?

What I have noticed first, is a change in myself as I age. When I was younger, I had massive amounts of energy. In fact, I seldom got a full night's sleep in high school. I would lie awake most of the night until four or five in the morning. Then fall asleep and wake exhausted to my alarm clock.

I had a night job at a drive-in theater snack bar. I became the snack-bar manager for the last couple of years there. I went to school during the day, then to work in the evening, then home and bed. I learned to get my homework done at school during the day.

Sometimes working in one class on homework for another class. Teachers weren't stupid and they'd rail against kids doing that. So you had to be smart about it. And you still had to pay attention to the class you were in. But I seemed to be good at multitasking and it kept my mind from wandering (ADD again).

But at night, I was usually running at a high rate of speed by the time my head I hit the pillow.

Still, I had the energy to spare when I was young. In fact, being ADHD/ADD I had far too much energy most of the time. I just had to learn to use that to my advantage and not disadvantage.

What I've noticed as I've aged though is that decrease in energy. Obviously. I'm getting older. Regular workouts become ever more important as we age. It's not just that I could be in better shape though.

There is another and well-known component involved. I asked my doctor at a checkup some years ago about changes I'd noticed. I seemed to feel things more deeply. Emotionally. I'm more affected by things than I ever used to be. He said that was really quite normal (normal, there's a concept).

Obviously, as you age you gain experience and so you feel things more deeply, he said.

OK, that made sense. Then I noticed that my creativity seemed to become more problematic. That is, I've always been able to produce quality on demand. I still can, to be sure. Years as a technical writer do that, just as Isaac Asimov had claimed in his first autobiography, In Memory, Yet Green. A book that affected me deeply when it came on the market years ago. But for pure creativity and comfort, I've noticed a change.

Example. in 2016 I sold my house of sixteen years and moved to a rental in another town, Bremerton, WA. I went where the best deal possible was at the time. I had to. I wasn't rich and I was going to retire and live off of my retirement at too young of an age. Because I could.

I was retiring, young at sixty-one I was tired of on call and IT work and wanted to finally take the time and effort (and could) to explore my creative pursuits. Writing fiction, screenplay, become proficient in film production, perhaps shoot my own films from my own writings. And so I am now doing all this and making progress.

I expected to live there a year or two and look around, find where I really want to live after having sold the house, and then move to a more long term situation. I was also retiring from twenty years in IT. Which I did. One month after moving.

Now, if you talk to a realtor, they will tell you that buying (or selling) a house is like dealing with the death of a loved one over the course of that year. There is actually a numeric scale of how much stress you should have in a year that gives you a kind of guide by which to know if you are heading into taking on too much, if not headed into more serious issues.

Friends told me when I retired that it takes people anywhere from six months to two years to recover from retiring. It is a massive changed after all and I had not only sold a house I had moved into with my wife and children, but was now a house I was to move out from without that wife and kids now full grown. And I was retiring. All that in one year was a lot. Apparently.

Yet, I figured, "I'm tough, I can handle it." Maybe a month or two to reorient and I should be good. Several months of partying and doing whatever I wanted and having drinks nearly every day if not more, one day I realized that I wasn't slowing down. It was over six months later that I realized, I was finally getting over that previous summer's house sale and move.

Two years now after selling my house and moving, I moved again.

In the interim, I had to deal with family member situations, my dog of fifteen years dying and within a month, my mother dying. There was more family drama overall going on than I want to go into here but suffice it to say, it took a lot out of me. Now that I look back I think over this last move, even though it was only from one rental house to another and only a mile away at that, it really was more intense and compromising than the move two years previous.

Once again I am trying to get back onto my creative feet and needless to say, it's been difficult. Though to be fair now, there were issues with this move too. I had volunteered to help refurbish the new rental house so I could move in earlier without paying rent for the partial first month.

The guy moving out had three large dogs, hadn't paid rent in several months and seldom on time when he did and he took questionable care of the house and yard. It was a mess. We had to rip out all the wall to wall carpet and replace them and paint the entire inside as well as clean and remove things left by the previous renter. Unused to 10-12 hour days of physical labor and during some very hot summer days, I was pretty beat when finally I moved in.

Because the carpets were put in a week after I moved in all my things were downstairs except for a bed we had to move to have the carpets installed. So I'd been delayed in getting all fully "moved in". It took a while to get my writing desk in place or a working...workspace.

It was a little frustrating. My youngest child (mid-20s) was having problems finding a place and so had moved into the previous house and about a week into the new house before moving to a new location, and suffered the interim condition of the house along with me.

My real point in bringing this all up is... I find when I go through mental duress, and working for a month requiring oneself to ignore the pain and exhaustion of remodeling in sweltering heat at my age, is a mental thing too. I find that it compromises my creative endeavors.

I find I need a period of decompression, if you will. Of relaxation and perhaps, of healing. I can fight it, or I can give it its space, which I did as I happened to still to have that luxury. Lucky me, to be sure.

I have struggled to do what creative things I could. My hardest work is writing. Alone, blindly and boldly creating, if you will. I've done some events and other physical things where I could do something creative. I've worked on and been in a few local small indie horror film projects for instance. Attended some Cons. But my goal has been writing, creating, and film production as in filming and editing my own works.

Here's my mental image of what I'm dealing with.

It's like my mind is a vast and finite cacophony of (as in a murder of crows) eggshells, all arranged in a massive solid structure. Each next to and stacked upon another. When I go through these periods of, shall we say, challenge? Some of these get crushed. So I need time once the difficulties are over, for these things to heal back up. Or be replaced. Whatever works.

If the structure is somewhat crushed I cannot traverse the creative routes. Like trying to wind through a maze in a forest, where there is too much overgrowth and too many downed trees. IF however, I take the time to clean up that part of it, to allow things to heal and grow back, then I'm back to normal and not untypically, even better.

It's just that I find now that it is easier for this structure to get crushed than ever before. Though now that I think about it, there were times in mid-life when I had trouble being creative and I gave that up to laziness. When in hindsight I can now see it was daily stress and just many of life's compromises.

It is frustrating now though because I now have what I've worked toward for some years and I'm unable to be that creative or productive. Still again, my point in bringing this all up is that I know it will pass and I only have to work with myself in order to get back on track and... I will.

I have for one, made an appointment for the first time with a top rated consultant on a screenplay of mine that has been consistently getting high reviews (THE TEENAGE BODYGUARD). I have high hopes for it, as do others. But also I need to be writing every day for a full day at a time and I'm not. Still again, I know it will come... and eventually, I'll get to where I'm headed.

Because it's all a matter of time and allowing myself to take the time I need, to properly heal up and then step bravely into a new stage of my life.

But for now, I feel kind of broken.

Like my fragile list of daily habits has been broken. Floating, drifting, rudderless. I just need to rebuild my list with a new set of habits. Or the same exact list as I had before, which can be frustrating. When you get used to that happening in your life, that urge to rebuild that which shouldn't have been broken becomes more challenging. First world problems, I know.

Taking the time to live the new life, to get used to it, to assimilate it, the list will come, eventually. If I need it faster, then I need to do it intellectually, pedantically. to know that the rest of me will eventually catch up, organically.

It is in not understanding that, where some people go wrong. They become irate, unsociable, irrational. When all you need to do is relax, be patient, and work towards a positive outcome. As best and quickly as you can. No stress, just effort.

No. It's not all wonderful. But it doesn't have to be a big difficult life event either.

You just have to let yourself... Live.

I wrote the above during the third quarter of 2018.

At this point so much has happened. I have produced my first short horror film. I'm about to start shooting my second, more than twice the length of that first eight minutes short. I'm now working with a Hollywood producer on my screenplay, The Teenage Bodyguard. This week I'm shooting an interview of me to hopefully be included in a horror documentary from the UK on horror writers and filmmakers. And I now qualify ss both.

It took me a while but I'm finally in a good place to explore the creativity I had always wanted to explore over most of my life. Those skills and things I've gone through over a lifetime have paid off and I'm seeing hope for a new career. I've met many new and interesting people. I see a path up now.

It hasn't been easy, it hasn't been quick. Not by a long shot. But those who persevere, who set themselves up to be in those places where luck CAN happen for them and others they have surrounded themselves with, who hone their skills and creativity, who take the time to make themselves indispensable to others who can help them...they are the ones who have a chance.

They are the ones who made their opportunities. And when that knock comes, will hear it. Even if it is a whistle.

And I'm just getting started...