Your emotions do not compute...

Lonely? Isolated? Stuck at home while all your friends go out to play?

Is this you? Or a late night 900 number commercial?

I've written before about how important it is to have friends. To have people who somewhat know what they are doing help you out. To tell you when you are being stupid. To keep you from embarrassing yourself. To stop you from repeating...

Whoops!

I am in a tiny town in Northern Indiana. How I got here is as pitiful as story as can be told - suffice to say, we were going to make a movie here - and now - here we are. In actuality - it is a brilliant place to be a writer. There is simply nothing to do - and you can live here for peanuts. Believe me - I've watched my savings disappear slowly over three years...

I find that I write best when there is absolutely nothing else possible to do. If I can visit every web site on my favorites list, clean the house, eat everything that's in it, shower twice, workout, make phone calls, write in my blog...

Then I can write. Wow. Imagine if I lived in a big city?

Now the flip side of that is that in this tiny little town of 3000 people - what are the odds that I would find another writer? Let alone a writer of screenplays?

Well as luck would have it - there is one. Ryan. So our writers group consists of two - Ryan and I. Now the amazing thing about that is Ryan is actually very smart. While he hasn't written that much yet - he gives very good notes. And he is good at destroying your script without a lot of thought for your personal well being. Something that I am horrible at.

Ryan just gave Blair notes. Blair should be out of the hospital in a few days...

Ryan gave me notes on my latest opus back before I sent it to my agents. They were really good notes - and, out of all my friends in the "extended" writers group - his were the most like my agents.

(Recap- My agents didn't like the way the script broke down into two movies - shifting tone radically in the middle. I liked this - as did most of the other guys - and that is not to say that Ryan didn't, but he said it was something to be acknowledged.)

In the past week - between fielding lots of phone calls and emails about my current script trying to limp into production - I have decided to try to rewrite my last script and make it a bit more rom/com and less thriller. I think it will be a fun exercise - and we will see if it is better or not.

I pitched my take to Ryan on Monday. He was helpful - and since the new take is right up his alley - he liked it. But as I went into some details of scenes with him yesterday - he reminded me of an important thing. While I get all caught up on plot and cool scenes - the easiest thing to forget is the emotional through line.

While I had a great way to tie the plot together - I was forgetting why my cool twists and turns mattered to the characters. He gave me a good wake up call - and showed me how much more powerful it can be when you actually care about your characters...

This was pretty cool - to know that you at least have a really cool direction to head in - and a new way to do it. While I thought that I would really just rewrite the second half of the script - I am effectively starting from scratch... So there is a long train in front of me...

So I guess I better get on my writing outfit and hit the bricks.