Ten years ago I was a fairly tongue-tied young man, with a tendency to frown or smirk at people to cover my inability to finish a spoken sentence. This evening expect I came off as a less arrogant, better-behaved version of that idiot kid. Context encourages behaviour, so running into an old friend partly turned me back into my old self. The idiot.

It was an uncomfortable minute for me that we spoke on the street corner. I was confronted by my past, the many things I’d hoped would be different, the dreams that would have in many cases been impossible for anyone. I fought old habits, realizing how much of an arrogant jerk of a kid I really had been all those years ago, wanting to somehow convey the better person I hope I’ve become since then.

My old friend seemed just as uncomfortable as I did – I suspect in her own way she was experiencing much of what I felt. I stepped away as quickly as I knew how to, out from the past, safely back into my present life.

I believe there may be such a thing as time shock, like culture shock when confronted by our past. Could there be culture shock for our future? What might that look like?

Regardless, it was an experience. The clock is ticking, now matter how easy it may be to lose track from our vantage point inside the clock.

I decided I should come back to blogging because of a post from my friend, Amy Sundberg, who said about blogging, “Do what you love (or at least like).” What a concept! And yet I realized I’d let myself be limited by what I’ve heard we’re supposed to do as a blogger. I realized I liked blogging – I just didn’t like the structure of blogging I’d set up for myself, a structure that required me to talk about a couple of specific subjects. In person I like to talk about everything and anything. The world all comes together anyway – everything’s connected – so why not talk about whatever bit of the jigsaw puzzle of life interests me today, and maybe figure out (or let others figure out) how it all fits together later on?

For awhile I tried to come up with a new name my blog should have, to reflect this new-found perspective. “Uncommon Sense”, I thought, sounded neat – but do I always make sense? I probably rarely make sense, in fact; few creatives do, since thinking outside the box by definition means thinking disconnected from conventional contexts. “Common Nonsense”? No, I don’t think in a common way at all. “Uncommon Nonsense”, though it probably describes many of my thoughts, suggests I won’t sometimes speak in practical terms.

That’s when it hit me. I realized naming the blog would just be restricting its content – no matter how open the name might be.

So here I am, doing what I like. My old Stories about Stories blog, along with Into the Stuffing, will have their archives mixed in with this one, and soon you’ll find only a single blog here. A single blog, unnamed, unrestrained in its content, sure to plumb the fecund corners of my imagination. Is that a good thing? Only one way to find out: hang around and watch.

My goal is simple: 300,000 words of new writing.

Sounds like a lot? It’s 1,000 words per day, all but 65 days of the year. I write every day, and I can write 2,000 words each day without trouble. In the last three months I wrote about 100,000 words, so I’m easily on track.

By the way, if you’re a writer I suggest trying something similar. It’s fun to get so much done, and creates its own sort of momentum. It now takes about two hours per day to get a first draft of 2,000 words done, and the more I write the better I get. What was holding me back from writing so much? I used to think I could only write about 250 to 500 words per day worth reading. I was wrong.

About a third of my word count will be TV pilots (okay, maybe a couple TV specs too, but I think pilots are the better way to go). A third will be novels, and a third short fiction.

Here’s to a productive year!

And if you too are nominating for awards this year, I would like to point you towards one story of mine published this year: “Tiny” (200 words), which appeared in AE Micro, May 2010.

There’s other things I could talk about with the HP series. I could talk about how the series uses wondrous magic that is made easily accessible in neat juxtapositions with daily life. I could focus on how this sort of mash-up came at just the right time. But you probably got that already from reading the series, or whatever else you’ve read. So I’m going to talk about the series less as YA, and more as a Blockbuster series. The biggest thing (I think) that can be learned from the Harry Potter series is how a series can evolve from rather lackluster beginnings into a real phenomena.

The first couple of books seem so-so, but for a lot of people they had enough interesting stuff going on and were well enough written that this was enough to get them to go read the next book–or at least to listen to their friends and relatives who told them that things were getting better and they should check out the next book. Each book got better until Prisoner of Azkaban–after which the real breakout book of the series, Goblet of Fire, turned the series on its head and made it into a phenomenon with a true potential to be remembered.

PoA was really well-written, tight, but short and to the point and very much in the same vein as the earlier adventure series, which were very much still kids books (yeah, with heavy content, sure, but the Narnia series dealt with fairly heavy issues too). Still, it was a really great read, and it made people highly excited for the next book–which Rowling took her time on, since with enough excitement she could do that. And taking the time paid off: GoF was a giant of a book compared to the earlier novels, with a billion sub-plots, a highly complex set of red herrings for a set of who-dun-its rather than the simple one central who-dun-it of the earlier books. And then of course the series turns entirely on the last few chapters, when Harry is faced with the real danger of Voldemort, Stuff Gets Real, and the promise of not just how the next book will go is set up, but the promise of how the series itself must change and grow is provided to the audience.

This is the best written book of the series, and infinitely more complex than the earlier books. If it weren’t for the author getting better and better at her job like these books demonstrate (if you haven’t then you’ll have to read them to see exactly what makes each book better than the last), then the series would have maybe kept an audience but never really gone anywhere, or just as likely flopped. But as important is that the book already had an audience that developed from the earlier books in the series.

After Goblet of Fire, the books don’t really get better. They get worse, in fact, in many ways. The last book is, in my view, a failure because Rowling hadn’t developed the chops to write the satisfying ending she’d promised for so long. Taking Harry out of Hogwarts–which could have opened the series up in a billion different ways–instead closed everything down because Rowling was trapped inside of the formula that had made her books work before. The formula become a crutch–one she was an expert with, but one that had to go in the last book, and she wasn’t up for the challenge of writing without it. Which isn’t to fault her; it would have been nearly impossible to satisfy most everyone with the last book, once their expectations were so high. Still, that doesn’t change what worked so well about so much of the series. Many of us kept reading because we’d been brought in, spent the time on the early books, read the great breakout books that snagged us for the rest of the series–and then no book was so bad that it tossed us out the door thereafter, until possibly the last book (and that was too late if, like me, the last book didn’t work for you).

So what I think we can learn from the HP series is: If you manage to get to write a series, you’ve got get it out there and get get better at it (duh), and–here’s the important point: After two or three books you cannot feel scared to break through the mold you’ve cast and turn the whole thing on its head. Preferably to turn it on its head in an interesting way that will keep an audience with you from then on. Don’t be scared to take this chance, because it is this chance that makes breakout novels, and break out novels make breakout series. Also, if you can, then learn to do what Rowling did not manage to do; learn to write outside of your formulas before you need to go without them, so that when you do need to go without your formulas then you’ll still have a chance to be writing at or above the top of your game–which is where your audience will expect you to be. In other words, be willing and ready to get the series to break out more than once, if you can find a way.

Not a short order. This isn’t about writing and selling a book or even your average series–this is about making and selling an industry-changing (perhaps culture-changing?) series, which is what I think series writers should be shooting for as often as they can be. Put against that goal, the willingness to risk the series in order to make it truly great doesn’t seem like an unreasonable set of expectations to me.

Dahl’s work always has a particularly ironic but unrepentant zing to it (example: the woman who kills her husband with a frozen chicken leg, then serves it to the policeman who comes investigating). Though that zing is potent in his early work for adults, nowhere is it more noticeable (if only by contrast) than in his later work for children. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, is greatly enriched by the obvious glee that Dahl takes in torturing the adults and bad children alike. All in all Dahl usually comes off as the slightly odd old uncle who tells dirty (but true) stories to the kids while the other ‘adults’ are out of earshot.

Anderson, in contrast, is forthright and plain-spoken in a very wide-eyed Midwestern way. It may be an affectation, but he does not use it ironically – he uses it to tell a story more profound and satisfying for the very plainness of its telling.

So while Dahl (in this context) is a faux adult telling children’s stories, Anderson is a faux child telling adult stories. Yet somehow this film adaptation still works – probably because Anderson makes the project his own as much as he can.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes Anderson film that covers over Dahl’s rough and ready craziness – except for where it peers out through the cracks in the corners. And maybe those corners is where Dahl most safely belongs . . . assuming, of course, that we don’t get to close to them.

I have a DoP: Michelle Ayoub. She’s a third-year Concordia Comms student, and really gets my project. I’m looking forward to working with her very much. Another film-maker, Pierre Samuel Rioux, will be joining me for the test shots. It will be great to get his opinions on the show.

The puppets are almost totally complete. Stephanos is waiting for his suit, which will be ready in time for the final shoot. Chloe is being strung this week, and should be ready just in time for the tests.

And now – in the very middle of writing this post, no less – I find out I can’t use the camera I wanted. Which is okay, because I had a back-up option – Except the back-up has been totally booked out for when we need to do tests. So test shots are going to be only about half-useful now, but I’m doing them anyway; half-useful tests, after all, are better than no tests at all.

December 12th I hope to meet a lot of the puppeteers for a read-through and rehearsal. After that I’ve set up shooting for every weekend from January 15th until February 7th. It looks like that first weekend will be mostly another sort of test shooting – which is fine, given that my sound people can’t make that shooting date anyway. I just hope I don’t have to tack on additional shooting time; I will be grading an absolutely gigantic pile of assignments starting in mid-February, so I’m hoping to be in post-production by then.

Tasks to complete: Between December 12th and January 15th I need to talk with my sound people, set up a shooting script with my DoP, maybe storyboard with my DoP and a concept artist, and play with background ideas using the Dec 5th test materials. I also need to finish a formal proposal for the MA research project component of this work.

When I started this post I meant to say everything was on track. Looks like everything isn’t quite – but at least we’re not really off the rails just yet.

The lesson to take away: enjoy what you’re writing, trust it, and relax! If it entertains you, it will be entertaining. If it’s going to be important, it will be because writing from who we are is always important. Yeah, when you start writing it’s often frustrating – but it should be a fun challenge anyway. If it’s not then you could make lots more money as an accountant, for a lot less stress . . ..