Currently reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a second time while plowing ahead on my untitled sci fi screenplay. Nearly finished with first draft, I'm enjoying the process a great deal, and, I already have another idea for a film script. This is an odd trajectory because it's even harder to find an agent for a film script than a novel.
A couple of days ago, I sent off a query for my novel, Angie's Choice, to a New York agency. But the interesting thing was how I felt about the query process since it was an old fashioned agency and wanted a hard copy query in the U.S. mail service. As I took out the two pages of auto bio and 20 pages of manuscript and tapped them on the desk to align their edges, I experienced a bodily sensation that returned me to the years when all queries and manuscripts were sent through the U.S. mail. I recalled putting together and sending out whole manuscripts, boxed up and carried to the local post office. I felt connected to all the past writers of the world, through all the most recent centuries of the world when manuscripts were ink on paper.
My children, now all grown up beings in the world, suggested I ought to begin to make these "Silent Boomer" blog entries as videos. They say that many people have found multitudinous followers by doing blogs as video presentations. My oldest boy says that it seems the more awkward and unprofessional the video is, the better followers seem to like them. I'm intrigued and think about it from time to time. I ask myself if that would really help me to achieve the one item on my bucket list: to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels before I kick it.
Addendum: Or film script.
It's been a damn long time since I made an entry here. Hate that, but first I had a lot of things to attend to, insurance and what not, about Mertie's wrecked Echo. So I was strung out as long gaps in time interrupt the flow of writing, and my memory also fails to recall all that went before in the plot. Lots of work to get back up to running speed. I haven't yet gotten back to sending out query letters, and for a spell I considered suspending any more writing and going back to doing algebra in the mornings. I worked algebra problems and monitored algebra classes for free in Washington university system during the first years after retirement, but, at last, I'm back to scribbling on my sci fi screen play which still is working out nicely. Still nameless too. No working title even. Hope to get more regular now that the insurance is all worked out...about 400 dollar increase in our premium, but I went down this morning and cut back on some of the Cadillac auto insurance I'd been conned into by a fast talking auto insurance man. I'm a sucker at heart, I fear.
My wife on New Year's Day bought a car that looks just like the one to your left. Recently, another short story was rejected of the four I sent off with very high hopes. Two remain out in the world unaccounted for.
My spirits aren't very high today, but it has nothing to do with rejections. I didn't sleep well last night. When I'm tired, my experience is that negativity can get a foot in the door and kick my ass, but the work on my science fiction film script continues apace. Today was productive. Will wait patiently for tomorrow.
Speaking of low spirits, off in the corner of the coffee shop I'm writing in, two men are talking loudly about their ideas about their god. One's voice is labored and stumbling. His voice is precisely the voice, intonation and rhythms of a young child repeating to a parent what he has learned in Sunday school, but the man's in his 70s or 80s. Of course, his way of speaking might be the result of a stroke. It's that halting and labored. Makes me very sad about fundamentalist religious folk. And fearful too.
My current reading is Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves.
