Artwork tonight from Manchu.
Sooooo…The Next Generation, TNG for those in know, is on Amazon Prime Instant Video…in HD. Say, uh-wahhhhh? How did I not know this? It’s a game changer. I’ve been doing it all wrong for months now. MONTHS. I’ll bet you a shiny penny that the entire original series is freaking on there in HD as well, dagnabbit!
Well, at least I know now. I have five more seasons to crash through, and I can do it in STYLE. HD style, baby. It seriously is like watching a different show when it’s in HD. It’s freaking beautiful. And the action all looks so…real? Less dated, more in the present. It’s much more engaging for me. Seriously. It makes a huge difference.
That makes me think of watching “Battlestar Galactica,” the new Syfy Channel series. We started that in HD. And, then the first season ran out on the HD DVD discs I had it on (yes, HD DVD, the short-lived rival to Blu Ray), we watched a couple episodes off iTunes, back before iTunes was offering anything in HD…and it was like watching a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOW. It looked so cheap! And outdated. The HD really, honestly, made watching the show feel like a movie. A fully-budgeted and executed 44-minute feature film every freaking episode. The show looked that good. the low-res version of it was far cheaper, and far more relegated to “aw, it’s just a flimsy wacky TV show.”
I also saw today that someone I just made an acquaintance of, whom I actually already knew had a book deal in place for his first novel, made almost $1 million on the advance. That fucking floored me. And, not at all in a jealous way, much more in a “holy shit, there actually still is SOME money in writing books…” I’ve talked about this before, in fact I think I might have talked about it last night; writing prose comes very, very naturally to me. It’s the way I think (I think). It’s something I genuinely *enjoy* doing. I put writing prose in a 3-pages-a-day context, and I feel like I could write forever, and finish 500 books. It’s really something I love doing…but I’ve never, ever felt like I would make a living from it. Not for *real*, anyway, which is to say, enough to like, buy a house down here in LA “enough.” Well…maybe I was wrong about that. Not that I’m ever expecting anything I’d write would receive an *advance* in the neighborhood of what this person did…that literally has to be like winning the lottery…but even a much smaller fraction of that, multiplied a few times by a few different books…well…maybe there is a future in the whole “novelist” thing…
I don’t know exactly what that means, guys. I *genuinely* love television and film. Like, fanatically. They are resoundingly and without a doubt a part of my present and future. I want more than even to be in a writers room, seeing how this shit actually goes down, from pitch to screen…that would be a dream come true, which is weird to say, but it’s the truth. I find peeling back the curtain incredibly fascinating, and I think an experience like that, and to write on a TV show would raise my level of…awareness, and knowledge, and grow the size of my toolkit and my ability to craft stories immeasurably.
At the same time, I think I might always need to be writing a novel. An hour a day. 3 pages at a time. I think that might be wired into my DNA now, after having finished my first.
So…I think in the meantime what this amounts to is that I need to find a way to write for TWO hours every day…one hour for my prose, and one hour for me screenplaying. Maybe that will be too much to ask for. I don’t know. I can try to adjust as I go, but I’ve been thinking about something along those lines now for a while. I think there’s some substance to it…and reading about my new friend’s incredible achievement made it even more apparent that this novel-writing compulsion is something not to be ignored.
That’s all for tonight, y’all. It was an EXHAUSTING work day, but I got everything done. I’m currently ahead of my “goals” by an entire day. It continues tomorrow. MORE WORK. Gotta strike while the iron is hot, to steal a phrase from all dem blacksmiths out there.
Good night!