Improv Philosophy
a poem, by Deron

Team play.
Do. Learn.
Be honest.
No fear.
Fail hard.
Don’t try.
Funny follows.

Meanwhile, today finally sees Obama go off the charts at RealClearPolitics.com, according to their aggregate tally of national polls:

Either way, I’m a thousand percent happy to help.

1. I am named after a baseball player who swung for the fences, with mixed results.  He was traded 9 times, including playing for three different teams in the year I was born, and had 923 RBIs over his career.
2. Currently I live in a house with five women.
3. I do a pretty spot-on Kermit the Frog.
4. The first CDs I ever bought were the sound track to Robin Hood and R.E.M.’s Out of Time. I got them at Costco.
5. I have flat feet.
6. My childhood celebrity crushes included Brooke Shields, Amanda Pays, and all the girls on Charles in Charge.  Especially the tall, nerdy one.

Life was slow and relaxing for a little while, but then August slammed me in the forehead, a little like a cartoon frying pan.  A producer had departed BrevityTV.com with no warning, leaving me scrambling to keep us producing material.  My scrambling ultimately failed.  We didn’t publish a lot of sketches over the summer.  In the end, I spent a lot of effort this summer restructuring, regrouping, and recruiting.  It should turn out to be a great thing, bringing us much closer to the goal of a new sketch every week, but August was not so gentle as I’d hoped.  Meanwhile, the teeny little screenplay consulting shingle I’d hung up on the side started offering a little work, and eventually some full-on script doctoring pay.  Then tutoring snuck up and wanted attention again as the new school year started…  Put it all together, and it’s now been about a month and a half since I’ve posted.  Bad blogger.  Bad.

They say you shouldn’t post about the fact that you’ve not posted, since 1.) it’s not interesting, and 2.) it only calls attention to your delinquency.  But it’s worth examining at the moment whether blogging is worth keeping on my plate.  A couple of years in, I know it’s something I enjoy doing, and after all, if I’m a writer, I should be writing.  Then again, I now have BrevityTV to pull writing out of me, plus screenplay consulting, plus aren’t I supposed to be writing for me?  So I thought twice when the time came to renew this domain last week.

But I still get search traffic.  Old top-ten lists or women seeking monologues… Plus, just sleep a little less, right?  Keep writing, writing, writing?

Well, we’ll see.  It’s experiment time.  If, between here and the new year, I stay disciplined and average at least 20 posts a month, I keep blogging.  If not, then I face the music and focus my energy on the projects that are making themselves my priority.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve updated WordPress finally (they really did a good job with version 2.)  Somehow all the category tags for my posts have been erased, so I’ll have to play with that… Do a little reworking of the site design over the weekend.  Clean up the dead links.  Oh, and hey, post some stuff.

Now’s a good time for feedback if there are certain kinds of posts or subjects you like to see covered here.  Do you give me permission to talk politics?  Is my life interesting?  (OK, we know it’s not, but do you want me to post about it anyway?)  Do you care about industry insider news?  Shall we just stick to TV shows?  Movies?  Buffy?  Comments and contacts welcome.

At this moment, there is an eyeliner pencil in my breast pocket, next to a red pen I’m using to do a script consultation. My fingers are sticky with spirit gum from just having applied a fake beard. Life is good.

Here’s a weird tip: We were attempting to create a costume for a character who looks approximately Hasidic. The hat I picked up for him is labeled “gangster;” it’s like a flat fedora. The beard, which we only trimmed a little, was called “Lumberjack.” So there you have it. Lumberjack plus Gangster = Jewish. Now we know.

I have a friend whose pet peeve is people saying, “ATM machine.”  After all, he points out, the ‘M’ already stands for ‘machine.’  You’re effectively calling it an Automatic Teller Machine Machine.  (It doesn’t help that people use PIN numbers to access their ATM machines.)

Another friend appreciates the fact that my voice message says, “Hi, you’ve reached screenwriterguy’s voice mail.  Leave a message.”  I do NOT say you’ve reached screenwiterguy, because you haven’t.  I say you’ve reached his voice mail.  (Meanwhile, as a society, when are we all finally going to stop leaving instructions for how to leave a message? “Please leave your name, the time you called, the best time to get back to you…”  Aagh!)

I didn’t think I was as anal as either of these guys, but lately I’ve had some real sand under the eyelid over use of the word, “blog.”

As most people know, “blog” comes from “web log.”  A log, of course, is a record of things that happen on a journey.  So your web log is a recording of stuff that happens to you in the journey that is your life.  A journal on the internet.  The English language being a flexible thing, “blog” soon became a verb.

However, some have started using the word “blog” to describe an individual piece of a blog, as in: “ScreenwriterGuy put together this blog today on proper sea serpent training technique…”

People, this is not OK!  It makes no sense to say that today I wrote a log, because the log is the complete collection of recordings.  It’s akin to using the word ‘teeth’ to describe an individual tooth.  Yet that is the recent, misguided trend on the web.  (I’m looking at you, MySpace.)

Sure, I know that the word “blog” has existed less than ten years, and like I said, English is flexible.  But that’s precisely the point.  We can turn the tide.  The message one writes each day is called an “entry.”  Refuse to misuse, ladies and gentlemen, and others will follow, before “I wrote this blog today,” is a way people talk.   Act now, before “blog” becomes the next “ATM machine.”

We do. It’s not you.