Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

Tales of meta-change

Tomorrow I start my new job.

I've been working at Circle Thrift for six or seven weeks part-time as a way to stave off unemployed anxiety. I sorted clothes and ran the register and behaved cheerfully toward customers.

I loved it. The situation was unsustainable, but if it hadn't been, I would consider making a career of it. There were colorful characters and bizarre goings-on every day I worked. I could have told a story every day.*

So at first it seems strange to me that I didn't. Didn't write or draw or sew during this time. I composed blog entries some days, but they never left my neurons. I didn't even track the movies I watched last month. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some other stuff.)

Instead, I volunteered. Since July, I've further embedded myself in responsibilities among my church. It's been surprisingly non-creative. Attending meetings, returning phone calls, head down, concrete, task-oriented, unreflective. Combined with a hang-clothes-handle-money retail job, there was lots of do, little doo-dah. Not my style or strength, but there kept being one more thing that needed doing. So I kept doing it.

Now I'm starting a new job, a shift from anything I've ever done professionally. Not writing. Not editing. It involves mental health clients, so I don't know how much I'll even talk about it here. Probably lots of stories, but discretion will be at a premium.

I'm also starting to read tips and lists and crap that I won't link to about blog posting. I'm spontaneously looking at new ideas for monsters. The YA novel I lost track of a couple months ago has wandered back in. Creative ventures seem to be re-emerging.

Things are changing around here. That's probably the takeaway. I'm excited by recent prospects, yet for all the change, it seems like no relief from the pinball life. The categories of change seem to be the things changing now. My change is changing.

I think I'll have more to say about that soon.

*Slumming it is underrated. A job you exceed grants a marvelous attention surplus.

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Who you know

Realized that there's a large-ish pool of good-enough writers in the world, of which I am a member.

After that, it's a matter of who you know and who likes you that determines who gives you what work.

There's a whole other stratum of high quality writers who get work according to merit and notoriety and making their own damn luck. But guys like me, it's about who you know.

I've been using this principle for a while to get the work I do get, but my network is small. Feels a little deflating it took me this long to come to that conclusion consciously. Maybe I need to start caring more about Media Bistro.

Update: Media Bistro kind of sucks for Philadelphia residents.

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

Interesting article: How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want.

This is a larger problem than most productivity gurus seem to understand. In my experience, when I know what I'm after, I don't have a problem taking the steps to get it (implicit in those steps is the grail of "goal setting"). Even if it's a multi-step process, even if it's a years-in-the-making multi-step process, I'm cool.

For instance, one of the current things I'm after is a return to full-time work in games, and ideally I'd like to work as a writer at BioWare in Austin. Pretty specific! I know what I want. Goal setting is, therefore, commensurately simple.

The thing that makes me surf the Web all day is a failure to discern what it is that I'm after. I'd like to write comics, but where am I headed with that? I dunno. I've got some ideas, some places I've cast around into, but no real goal yet. I don't know exactly what I'm after yet.

I'd like to be internet famous, but there's a whole lot of unknowns there, so I spend more time dreaming about that than goal setting.

This article is (necessarily) vague, but it's the kind of place wandery people like me need to start. We don't need a roadmap. We need a destination.

Finding that is something that "8 Tips to Organize Your Workspace!" will not help to discover. If you're lucky, that kind of "productivity" junk is just noise. If you're unlucky, you start organizing your workspace and think you're making progress.

The Rules

For all the time QT has been around, I've operated with a set of rules I've never spelled out here. I've never done it mainly because it's almost a full-on swipe from someone else, who made such great rules, I wanted to follow them too.

His name is Robin Laws, a writer and game designer who seems to have the personal resources to do nearly anything he desires, and has chosen to write for roleplaying games. Fascinating.

Here are my rules, based lavishly (though not slavishly) on those of Mr. Laws:

1. I must strive to be interesting. I owe it to you and to me to make something worth reading when I write.
2. I will not write an entire post apologizing for a long absence. If you see a long absence in writing, it is because I have not taken the time to work at being interesting. When I make the time again, I will skip straight to the interesting part.
3. At no point will I tell you what I had for breakfast.
4. I will avoid links and one-liners to the latest Internet point of interest. The dramatic chipmunk was truly hilarious. It was hilarious all those other places you saw it too.
5. My writing will not serve as a bulletin board for petty complaints. I shall seek to avoid detailing:

• Minor illness. Unless it is integral to the more interesting anecdote I am relating.
• Computer problems. This one actually isn't about you. I find this boring.
• Bureaucratic annoyances. Although I have many.
• Anything else that might characterize a tween's cat blog.
  

Sometimes I break my own rules. I recommend not analyzing the rules too deeply. Trust, gentle reader, that I am looking out for you, and that there are guidelines to help the process.

Blogaday 2009 -- Now!

Blogaday has become a yearly phenomenon here at QT. On some level, I'd prefer Blogaday to be perennial rather than annual. But I collapse under pressure.

Instead, I slide challenges to myself casually, leisurely. If I were to direct myself to begin writing on my blog every day, I would fold like an accordion. However, if I conduct a series of increasingly demanding "experiments" on myself, I come closer to achieving whatever goal I'm actually after. My mind balks at conquering the mountain, but clambers happily if it thinks we're just scaling to take in the view. I do not understand it, but it is so.

This is all my roundabout introduction to Blogaday 2009 -- the 60-day trial! In previous years, Blogaday was a November occurrence, my nonfiction response to NaNoWriMo. In just 3 years though, it's become its own animal, a modest self-experiment with discipline, consistency, and composition.

This year I'm experimenting with doubling the length. Please, stop back every day for the next two months. I will strive to be interesting! And hope in your good nature when I am not.

So they say

The New York Times reports that "they/them" is pretty much dead cert to become the gender-neutral 3rd person singular. Again.

It's no surprise that we'll get there soon, and it's not really a surprise that official grammarians are caving.

Rather, the interesting bit is the hidden truth that "they" was pulling double duty before the he/she regime came down in 1745:

This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

...many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians.

I've tried to maintain the singularity of gendered pronouns, but this bulldozer puts me off high-falutin' ground. I'm'a start making the switch. Anybody doesn't like it, they can take it up with Byron.

Good company

A game project I worked on has just had the full author list revealed. Check it out at Paizo.com: Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Here's the author list:

Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

A plurality of writers is usually a bad sign, but it makes sense for the fractious River Kingdoms, land of the politically improbable. Once again, I'm fairly happy with my work on this book.

Also, please note that I've now worked on a project with China Mieville. That's one for the weaselly self-promotional bio!

The French Capital

I was reading up on how Napoleon rebuilt Paris today, and I found a fantastic original source: The New York Times.

They've scanned and made available their entire archive, and this story, dated "December 13, 1867, Wednesday" was a treat. In addition to the useful information, I read the top journalistic stylings of 150 years ago. It's quite a bit chattier than I'd expected.

You'll need to log in, and then download a pdf, but it's worth the hassle. Here's bugmenot if you're a privacy goon like me.

Check that out.

3 stories on being a writer

I have difficulty thinking of myself as a writer, because I do not write for "fun", and writing is a painful, tooth-pulling experience. Earlier this year, I had decided to give it up. Here is what I wrote to myself on March 4:

I have decided to stop benig a writer, and to stop thinkin gof myself as a writer. I do not write. I do not like writing. Writing is difficult and obstreperous, and chiefly, I do not do it. I have many friends who are writers, and what they do is write. I do not.

So this leaves me with a hole in my perception. I don’t know what I am, or what I do or how to categorize myself now. I have an uncommon facility with English. That and a familiarity with layout sofware seem to be my marketable skill.

I don’t know who I will become now. Hopefully, somoene better, someone with fewer illusions.

I was basically ready to think of myself as a professional editor who dabbled in writing on the side. That still might be a sane idea for me.

Instead, about two weeks later, I signed myself on with a company called World Leaderz as Head Writer and Web Content Specialist. The backsliding didn’t even seem strange at the time, I just blundered in and started.

==

Since then, I have heard, unbidden, from four different people involved with the company, that I am an “excellent” writer. People use the word so uniformly, I wonder if they’re humoring me. I have no method to discern whether I am actually an excellent writer, or an accidental bullshitter.*

The difference is in confidence. Not the blustery unself-aware confidence that marketing employees use like motor oil to lube their ill-defined engines of commerce. I’ve tried that confidence, and a fairer-weathered friend I’ve never known. I’m talking about the confidence borne of experience and clear thinking.

As an editor, I have this latter confidence. I’m totally worth my money as an editor, and I can tell you why. Writing, however, is so much harder to do, requires more attention and grit, has fewer objective, measurable standards, and I’m such a weak-willed, lazy man. If I’m ever any good, I can’t tell you why. I’m an epistemic slot machine.

==

In junior high school, they occasionally took a bunch of the gifted kids into a room and talked to us about more interesting things than we had in class. (One wonders why we couldn’t maybe come up with an entire curriculum of the interesting stuff.)

One of these sessions involved an aptitude test. There were 14 or 15 areas of aptitude, things you might actually be sort of good at naturally. Above a certain score in each area indicated that you might be suited for this sort of thing as a career. The instructor told us that we should probably have three areas above the line.

I had one: verbal skills. I wasn't just good at it, I brushed the ceiling with it. Then about eight other areas were just below the line.

For all the crap aptitude tests get, this one was practically oracular about my future career. I’m not demonstrably good at anything, but somehow I’m great at telling you about everything I’m above-average at.

==

I’m back on the job hunting trail again. If you are or know of anyone looking for an above-average generalist who can show his work, my email is in the right column.

*Yes, they might be the same thing on some level, but anyone attempting to smear some of that smarmy wisdom on me is really saying they’re not trying to understand my point.

Information: free and expensive

Taken from Wikipedia
Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.


From me
Information is so valuable that there has to be a way to profit from it. It's just that information's value, when decoupled from a physical medium, is extremely difficult to gauge.

Information is unquantifiable. "Cows go moo." seems like a single mote of information, but fractally smaller bits of information are implicit in that three-word sentence. Like what a cow is. How a moo sounds. Why "go" is an appropriate verb in this instance.

At this level, information is so voluminous, that you can only charge for it in bulk. In that way, all books are like newspapers -- you bundle in important parts with the unimportant parts, without knowing exactly what any given buyer deems "important." You hope people will pay to get the parts that are important to them.

Information is also extremely context-sensitive. Noise to one person is life-saving info to another one. Depends on whether you stand next to a train track, or on it. Which one would pay to hear that whistle?

Don't have a point today. Just thinking.

Caring about what I'm doing here

Yesterday I was reading Wil Wheaton’s blog, and he had a post about how to run a good D&D game. It was solid information, but nothing groundbreaking. Anyone who’s been running D&D for a while could come up with the basics of that list.

But his comments section was full of people telling him what great ideas he had, and how awesome he was for having such great ideas.

Wil Wheaton has had enough going on in his life for lots of people, me included, to care. But this is an area where Wil is not an expert. I am more expert than he is in this area. Yet people seemed to care enough to post on the internet to tell him that they cared about what he thought.

My default assumption is that people do not care about what I have to say. Whatever I think has to be justifiable by some vague personal standard to ever say out loud, or post on a blog. It has to be funny enough or meaningful enough, or I have to establish myself as expert enough for me to think anyone will want to hear it.

Getting dressed this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that people might care what I have to say, whether or not I can justify myself to them. Readers/listeners might just intriniscally care. I might not have to prove myself.

Insight on doing what you "like"

I don't know nothing about Paul Graham. He appears to be some sort of venture capitalist or start-up expert, or something. I haven't bothered to research him. But as I continue on my drunken path toward becoming a person who works for himself and accomplishes things, his essays give good info I don't find anywhere else. For instance, this excerpt from an essay titled, How to Do What You Love:

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Self-motivation, reflection on

Self-motivation is hard. I forget that sometimes. The fact that I fail much more often than I succeed at it -- that’s actually how it works in life.

Roger's Wish

Roger found a magic lamp. The genie inside told him he could have three wishes -- whatever he wanted.

There were lots of things Roger wanted. A better position in work, better relationships, better quality stuff in his life. But wishes are very valuable, and it would be foolish to waste one asking for a luxury car or a promotion.

Besides, Roger reasoned, better cars and promotions are fully achievable without magical assistance. So while Roger considered how to best use his wishes, he began working on getting things he wouldn't waste a wish on.

Years passed. Roger got many things he might have wished for, though not all. Nevertheless, he found a loving wife and had many fulfilling relationships; through patience and work, he achieved recognition for his efforts; and his family never lacked for food or clothing or shelter. All in all, an excellent life, well lived.

On his deathbed he rubbed the lamp. He croaked out, "Genie, I wish for more time."

And so the genie made him Lord of All Time and Space. Roger soon discovered that this was what he should have wished for all along.

THE END

Dread borne from editing

How does one "loosen up"? I hear you humans use this phrase, but I do not understand it. I am tight. Not like a virgin, like a spinster.

I think one time a long time ago I made things up and wrote them down and people told me I was a "good" writer, but circumstance and happenstance have led me to this place where I am a better critic than creator, and that must have its charms, but I'm missing them right this second.

The search for discipline, for control, has led me to this place where I know grammar, but don't have anything to put in it. This is not writer's block, this is "Oh my fuck, I've spent my life becoming an editor, not a writer, I didn't mean to do that, FUCK."

But the viscera of that horror doesn't shock long enough to drive me to change. And by now, halfway through life, should I even bother trying to shore up weakness any more? Do I just accept what I've got and play to strength?

Oh BlogaDay. You lead me to despair. I hope it's redemptive.

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, dead at 89

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday.

My first exposure to this great writer was in college, when my speech professor, Mr. Collins (a man for whom teaching "speech" took second place to teaching "clear thinking"), sent us to the library to read a Solzhenitsyn essay.

We had to answer several questions about the reading. The questions required harder, fuller thought than I had ever given to anything, and I'm fairly confident that in my second year of college, I did a genuinely sophomoric job of answering.

A question that stuck with me -- more than the essay itself, even -- was, "How can you tell from reading this that Solzhenitsyn is a Christian?"

I had to infer from the question that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian. There was nothing overt in what he wrote. In my limited experience, there was not the usual whiff of "Christian" about the writing -- by which I mean, "vetted by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board."

After that class, out of curiosity, I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and a few other essays he wrote, more of which bounced than stuck with me. What did stick from his writing was a dignity, clarity, and foremost truth -- the kind of truth that you do not (cannot) hear from people who have not had close, hard brushes with Truth itself.

I'm sorry you're no longer with us, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, but I'm glad you're home.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting

A MOMENT OF SELF-PROMOTION

Paizo is a game company operated by several people I like and respect. One of those people asked me to contribute to the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting a while ago, and I metaphorically leapt at the opportunity.

I have come to find most fantasy pastiche settings tedious these-a-days, but Pathfinder sparks. In addition, I'm part of an all-star cast of writers on this thing, and for once, I'm pleased with my work on an RPG product, instead of slightly sickened.

It goes on sale in a couple of weeks, so if you're of a gamer persuasion, look into it. It's going to be pretty great.