Writing + life
Tonight was my second week of screenwriting class. I went to the Thursday section last week and decided to register--though, ironically, the instructor was in some sort of an accident (maybe she rode her bike into a car, not that we know anything about that at my house), and the first two weeks of class are being taught by the other guy, which was sort of alarming when I thought the less-crazy option might have been a figment of my imagination. But I talked to a couple of very enthusiastic repeating students, and the syllabus indicated that a) the actual instructor is real, b) she has actually seen a movie made after 1983, and c) she covers TV writing in class. Sold.
Tonight, the stand-in lectured a bit from Joseph Campbell, with a brief foray into The Wizard of Oz, then showed us the entirety of The 400 Blows, which is apparently a classic of French New Wave (how very Morgan Grimes!) and turned out to be utterly depressing: essentially, a typical 1950s Parisian kid turns from a garden-variety troublemaker into a genuine juvenile delinquent without exactly meaning to. Cue loss of innocence and eventual realization that he's irrevocably involved in a life of crime, so really, all fun stuff for a Thursday night. However, class itself proved awesome for another reason altogether: since before Christmas, I've been vacillating between upgrading to Mac OSX Snow Leopard (I'm currently running Tiger, placing me two versions behind) and finally getting Final Draft, the industry-standard screenwriting software. They cost about the same--somewhere in the neighborhood of $150-200--and I can't afford both. So tonight I'm sitting in class, and the girl behind me announces that she's selling a slightly outdated version of Final Draft for $10. I say, here's to my poor decision-making skills and to carrying small amounts of cash?
Also, this just in: I got my first freelance assignment! I responded to a Craigslist ad for a celebrity bio writer (a writer of bios about celebrities, I assume, and not a bio writer who is also a celebrity) and just got a reply with an offer. It doesn't pay well, but it does pay, and it's experience to cite for future fact-finding and celebrity-writing jobs. Woot! I are a freelancer.
My exciting life, ladies and gents.
Tonight, the stand-in lectured a bit from Joseph Campbell, with a brief foray into The Wizard of Oz, then showed us the entirety of The 400 Blows, which is apparently a classic of French New Wave (how very Morgan Grimes!) and turned out to be utterly depressing: essentially, a typical 1950s Parisian kid turns from a garden-variety troublemaker into a genuine juvenile delinquent without exactly meaning to. Cue loss of innocence and eventual realization that he's irrevocably involved in a life of crime, so really, all fun stuff for a Thursday night. However, class itself proved awesome for another reason altogether: since before Christmas, I've been vacillating between upgrading to Mac OSX Snow Leopard (I'm currently running Tiger, placing me two versions behind) and finally getting Final Draft, the industry-standard screenwriting software. They cost about the same--somewhere in the neighborhood of $150-200--and I can't afford both. So tonight I'm sitting in class, and the girl behind me announces that she's selling a slightly outdated version of Final Draft for $10. I say, here's to my poor decision-making skills and to carrying small amounts of cash?
Also, this just in: I got my first freelance assignment! I responded to a Craigslist ad for a celebrity bio writer (a writer of bios about celebrities, I assume, and not a bio writer who is also a celebrity) and just got a reply with an offer. It doesn't pay well, but it does pay, and it's experience to cite for future fact-finding and celebrity-writing jobs. Woot! I are a freelancer.
My exciting life, ladies and gents.