So.

A few updates are in order.

It's been an freakishly active year for me, and not only because of a little thing like getting all hitched up to an amazing woman whom the natives call Heather Kamins. (Yes, the rumors are true. Sorry ladies? Gents? Paramecium?)

I've been spending an inordinate time editing and reediting a wedding video I shot for a good friend way back in May. Working at my normal turtleish blitzkrieg, I'm finally at the end of that particular tunnel. There's some good stuff coming. You can see samples soon at http://www.infinite-moment.com.

And yes, still working the day job. I haven't clawed my eyes out yet, and things are better. Good thing. I'd suck at Braille.

But as always, my eye remains on the Big Ol' Ball. The career. Three matters of importance are in motion.

1) Cosmodrome. I finished it. And it's almost 180 pages. BUT. I think it has some of my best writing yet. As always, it could use approximately 10 to the 4600th power revisions, but I think it's a very solid piece of work. My only self-complaint is that the stuff that's inordinately ambitious, the ones I research for eons and pour my lymph nodes into...they're genuinely epic. Maybe it's the 2001/The Right Stuff influence, but it's what I connect to the most. I trim the fat out of the weasels, I promise you, but they're still packed.

Too bad I'd be a really inept novelist. Don't have the flair, kids.

The practical downside of this aside is that it's hard to get reads on Zoetrope, friends and family have to carve out a year to read even half of it, and most pressingly, I can't get anywhere near a screenwriting competition. See: conundrum.

2) dayjob. Is this the solution to the above problem? Right off the bat, I'm aiming dead at 120 pages. If I get within 10 pages of that, I'll be a mighty happy clam. I'm going for fun, fun, fun with my little tale of love between a Europol inspector and an art thief, and I have to say, my writing is kinda sprightly and snappy. And I do love writing a good action sequence.

(They say you should try brevity for action sequences, as the director is gonna impose his own vision. Fuck that. I see myself as the choreographer. The director, whoever, yeah, I respect the traffic-cop vision that they bring to each piece. I want to be that director as much as a writer. But in a musical, they are as subordinate to the choreographer's specificity as the dancers. And I believe the same thing is true for writing sequences of physical action. In other words, bite me.)

3) Diary of a Mad Deity. This is the newest project since the last time I updated this blog. It's based on a short story by James Morrow, who very kindly gave me permission to attempt my own low-rent adaptation. I'm extremely proud of the 26-page script I whipped out - which I hope is both faithful to the beautifully cleverish source material, and visual as hell.

If everything goes perfect, I may be shooting this with my Canon XL-H1s in late winter. I'm working on a surprising casting choice. We'll see what happens. If I can conquer the effects quandary, I'll be swimming in duck soup. Technically speaking.

And oh yeah, wrote the first page of Pax Galaxia and submitted it to the Page One Screenwriting Competition. Keep your pinkies crossed.

I have a few more bonnets in my basket, but that's enough for now, I reckon. Need to get back to my big computer and finish off some diagnostics. The Radeon X800 video card utterly failed, and I was up late, late, late plugging in a monster GeForce 8800 GTS, which leaves me set for Vista. (I had really wanted to forego any updates until new 8 core Mac Pros with HD/Blu-Ray burners hit the market. My plan was - WAS - to sell the existing G5 and the XPS, and put the money towards that handy behemoth. But I need the XPS too much right now, as a lot of my high-end software is tied to it.)

Bastingly,
Dimitri