This has been a strange and really
challenging week creatively. I'm really weary mentally, and there is
still a lot to do. I think there will be a lot to do for quite some
time to come. This is in no way a complaint. The work is exciting and
fun for the most part. Even the not fun parts of the past week's work
will lead to something really exciting. It was just that every task
was daunting in some way. I was slowed down by the constraints that
came with every task. I was also dealing with a difficulty physically
that I have not seen in quite some time. It's not anything to worry
about. The legacy of chemo can be a new 'normal' life that comes with
occasional obstacles. This was such a week. I'm hoping to make up for
the sleep I lost coping with those difficulties. But that's no fun
to blog about. Let's begin with the challenges.
Distillation
I have found that authors and
screenwriters who ask me for advice generally have a hard time
distilling their work down to a short synopsis. The best high concept
pitch ever, according to Hollywood lore, was for the ill-fated Cop Rock. It was just two words – MTV Cops. Brevity is an asset in both
industries. Yes, I believe that this is true for any sort of
publishing. With all the diversions vying for the attention of
readers, it behooves a writer to distill their work down to a
tantalizing concept that can be tweeted easily (140 characters –
not words – or less). This skill is useful not just because
producers and publishers have short attention spans. I have found
that if a writer cannot distill their story down to it's simplest
explanation, they usually don't have a good handle on the plot. One
of the reasons Sybaritic Press remains largely dormant toward outside
submissions is that I don't have the patience to read rambling query
letters and equally rambling novels.
I learned to distill plots when I was a
film and TV critic in college. And I've had a lot of practice over
the years writing script pitches or blurbs for books. Still, the
constraints placed on me for writing pieces over the past two weeks
has made the tasks much more daunting than usual. For example, I had
to turn my complicated romantic comedy into a two sentence summary
that explains the film completely has some 'zing' in it. Zing, he
says. Next, I had to do short bios on all the partners involved. Let
see, how do I take decades of work experience in divergent fields and
explain how that experience applies to a film project in a convincing
and very brief paragraph. That was for our partners. For Jon and I,
it was a matter of morphing our bizarre work histories into short
paragraphs that showed we were an asset to the production. That was a
long afternoon. Speaking of constraints, I had to write a cover blurb
for the manga I've been editing. For that I had to describe the plots
in the book in an enticing manner without giving even the tiniest
whiff of a spoiler to avid fans. Avid fan geeks have hyper sensitive
thresholds when it comes to spoilers. I spent a whole lot of time
writing and re-writing that as well. All of that effort yielded less
than two pages of actual text.
Blog Monsters
Goodness knows I enjoy writing this
blog. It has kept me connected to friends and family during difficult
times, and it has spread my writing and general quirkiness all over
the internet. I started this blog to promote my writing. It soon
drifted to my crazy life in LA and to observations on pop culture.
And I was happy with that. However, to successfully market books and
build a brand, I needed something much more specific that could be
easily found on a search engine. Thus, Yaoi at Sybpress and
Romantica at Sybpress were created to talk about and promote yaoi and romantic erotica
respectively. So, this means writing separate blogs for these sites
with some regularity. Fine. The new books have been selling rather
well, and these sites are visited quite often by my readers and by
new readers. Then, I realize that Digital Manga, the company for
which I edit manga, wants its guild teams to promote their books
among their fellow fans via twitter and blogs. I had no problem with
that. I figured it would draw more readers to the yaoi blog. Then, I
find out that the company would prefer the teams have blogs and
twitter accounts under the name of the guild team and tagged in such
a way that a search for Digital Manga would bring it up.. That's
completely understandable and absolutely reasonable. Setting up these
social media accounts is relatively easy when there is a team working
at work. The difficulty came with actually writing the first blog for
the manga, Again Tomorrow. I had to entice and titillate without
revealing plot twists or or character spoilers. I had to be
conversational but mindful that I am representing a company. And I
had to not promote my own work. I have never been so nervous and
tentative about a blog before. For those interested, the result is
HERE.
Geez, I just realized I'm blogging
about blogging. Time to move on.
Fancy Dancing
On occasion, Jon and I have helped
other filmmakers shape a pitch and a business plan for investors.
I've even been paid to do budgets and schedules for film business
plans. These are really easy, because they don't involve re-writing
the script. The one time we were given a script to re-write, we were
told to strip to the idea and start over. That script came out
reading like a Deb and Jon script. Recently, we took on adapting a
story into a pitch from TV. The story was not written for the camera.
It was created for another form of media. Yes, I know this is
terribly vague, but it is as specific as I can be. The creator has
decades long experience and a large, avid following. The fans for
this particular title numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and they
are passionate about it. This adaptation is a daunting challenge.
We've gone through weeks of pouring over the original works and
asking questions of the author. The idea is to make the new material
fit into the original seamlessly. I've had the treatment for the
pilot a week, but have only written a a handful of lines. It's an
intimidating proposition, dancing in someone else's shoes. But with
the editing of the first manga out of the way, I can really focus on
writing the additional material. At least, that's my plan for the
upcoming week.
Updates
I've been giving them during this whole
blog. Haven't you noticed?
Stay tuned.
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