Favorable Critiques Don't Hurt

My songwriting partner and I are members of NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International) and one of the membership benefits are a number of song evaluations. Over the past year that we've been members, we've sent a few of our songs in and received really helpful critiques. In the past three weeks or so, we sent in several songs all at once and based on the results, I think we're better songwriters than when we began.

The trend is less about fixing what's wrong with the songs and more about what might make them more marketable for country. We've also found that as we've tweaked our songs to improve them based on the feedback, that people who listen to our songs seems to be responding more to them and connecting with them in a way that wasn't happening before.

So this weekend, we are auditioning once again for Sunday Writer's Night at the Bluebird Cafe. Having done this once before makes me feel as though I'm better prepared this time around. And honestly, I think the songs are better, so I'm hopeful. I'm sure that I'll blog about how it goes.

The Decline of Art in the US

This past Saturday, there was a special panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival called Power of Story: Making Art Matter (You can view it online). One of the panelists mentioned that the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking has been administered since 1966 to capture individual creativity levels. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but what I found interesting, is that the panelist said around 1990, American test scores leveled off after having increased dramatically every year prior to that and have actually been decreasing.


So I went looking. I discovered that Kyung Hee Kim, an associate professor of educational psychology at the College of William & Mary, performed analyses of Torrance test scores for almost 300,000 American adults and children and found that all of the scores of the Lateral/Innovative thinking factor, Vertical/Adaptive thinking factor, and Creative personality factor have significantly decreased or have significantly started decreasing. The decrease has been more in recent years than earlier years.


The Torrance test measures creativing in not only artistic areas, but science, interpersonal relationships and others. Dr. Kim says that in western cultures we think of creativity as artistic but that in eastern cultures they think of creativity as scientific.


Dr. Kim believes the decline in U.S. creativity may be in part because kids spend more time with television than in activities that utilize creativity - playing outside for one thing. She also thinks the lack of creativity development and the stifling of children’s creative opportunities in classrooms is having an impact. She is quick to point out that it's speculation since there haven't really been significant studies to look at this.


Creativity is so important to me that I devised a game for my son when he was almost a toddler. We've been doing it so long, I can't remember when we really started. He would ask to be told stories and we started out telling stories to him. After awhile, I wanted him to be able to come up with stories too. So I came up with a game that we played for years.


One of us would come up with three things and then the other would have to build a story around it and tell that story. As time went on, we would come up with the craziest mismatches we could possibly imagine and still the stories came. Good ones, terrible ones (mine mostly fell into that category), mediocre ones. Funny and poignant ones. It was a great game, and I hope it helped my son's creativity even though we didn't start with that intention.


I've also shared with my son the love I have for caving. We have spent many hours crawling through muddy passages and sloshing through borehole passages with water up to our thighs. On those trips we speculate about what might be down a side passage or how to get the best photograph of a pink planaria.

I like to think I'm a relatively well-rounded, creative type and I hope my son shares that capacity. He's been writing a science-fiction novel since he was about 12 and he's thinking about studying physics, astronomy and marine biology when he goes to college in a couple of years, so I'm hopeful.

Winding Down The Metal Tiger

Depending upon which calendar you choose, the year of the yang metal tiger is either gone or passing in the next few weeks. The eastern astrologers predicted that it would be a turbulent year, and I think they were right (aren't they all, one might ask?). By contrast, this upcoming yin metal rabbit is supposed to bring peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments. They say it's going to be a good year to focus on family, creative endeavors and diplomacy. Astrology may all be, as my grandmother might have said, "a lot of hooey" but it seems pretty timely for me right now.

This past year has felt chaotic to me. I've chalked it up to lots of changes and trying to cram a lot of things into an already busy schedule, but it's been more than that. I've felt more like I have Attention Deficit Disorder than I have ever felt in my life. It's been harder than ever to concentrate on the things that are routine, much less the things that are not. It will be fun to look back in a year and see what's transpired and whether those eastern astrological predictions were worth their salt.

I didn't make any new year's resolutions this year but I have made a change that many people would attribute to one: I joined the Y so I could start swimming again regularly. The timing was completely unrelated to the holidays.

I fell in love with swimming when I was ten years old. I spent from 7am until about 9pm in the local pool for an entire summer, seven days a week, swimming on the regular and varsity swim teams. I ended the summer with two things: a trophy for being the league's high point swimmer and the inability to even get near a pool without my eyes starting to burn (didn't wear goggles back then). I tried swimming at a local gym a couple of times over the years after that because I missed swimming and even with goggles, couldn't get over the burning sensation. I gave up swimming.

My younger brother, who swam on the high school team, started swimming again about a year ago. I don't know whether it was because he fell in love with a swimming coach or just missed it too. Maybe both. And in the past few weeks, my partner had mentioned a couple of times that she thought she needed to start swimming and it had reminded me of how much I loved to swim as a kid, but I didn't do anything about it except muse.

My mother was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia on Christmas Eve so my brother decided to come into town from the west coast to spend a few days with her before the new year. The morning after he arrived, they called me to ask if I wanted to go swimming with them. I worried over whether I had a suit that would fit (no swimming, but plenty of hot-tubbing in the backyard has occurred) then I said yes, picked up some swimming goggles and met him and my mother at the Y near her house.

It was fantastic. I swam a pool length without stopping (then had to rest a long time before starting back down the lane because my body memory hopped into race mode but my lungs definitely weren't with the program). I came home and suggested that my partner and I join the local Y so we could both start swimming. We did it, and both had a really great time swimming together in the slow lane. I think she loved it as much as I did.

My eyes were happy. I suspect the chlorine formula has changed over the years or maybe my eyes have restored themselves, I don't know. Maybe a little of both. What I can say, is that I've renewed my love with swimming and it's already brought me peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments.

What A Year 2010 Has Been

This has been the year of the iPad introduction, the passing of JD Salinger and the results of another census that will inevitably redistribute seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. We said goodbye to Eddie Fischer and "hel-LO (again) Betty (White)!"

I have more irons in the fire than I've ever had before and time seems to be just flying. I've continued to write music with my co-writer and I've spent less time on the three women script (but have actually found some time to work on it). It seems as though it has been especially challenging to complete projects this year. We took a trip to Juneau AK last month and had a lovely time. Definitely plan to go back - much more hiking to do than we had time available. So I guess the challenges applied to my travel as well this year!

As the year of the golden tiger winds down, I'm feeling as though I want the year of the metal rabbit to be the year of wrapping up open projects in writing and music. Since the year of the rabbit is traditionally associated with family and home, artistic pursuits and diplomacy, I'm hopeful that will be the case.

The year so far is a lot like a whirling dervish, with speed, nonlinear travel, and chaos. Is that what's supposed to happen in the golden year of the tiger?

I have been writing songs with my songwriting partner. Some are pretty good and some are pretty awful. I believe the more I write, the better they will be. I ended up upgrading my ancient notation software to Sibelius First. It's an impressive program so far, but I will probably end up needing full Sibelius before it's said and done. Mostly because Walt Aldridge turned me on to DADGAD tuning and my compositions haven't been the same since because I love writing in that open tuning and I want to be able at some point to use a hex pickup to directly write into Sibelius. Sibelius First can't handle anything other than standard guitar tuning. :(

That said, I haven't forgotten about the three woman script (who am I kidding? As if those characters would let me!) and I've been sneaking little bits of it in here and there. It's just that the things with deadlines turn into the squeakier wheels. As long as I'm moving it forward, I consider all of it progress.

So I've let six months go by since my last post. There's a reason why I wasn't a section editor with editorial deadlines for very long. No, I never missed one of those deadlines, but I don't think I'm cut out for editorializing on a regular, frequent basis. At least, not in print.

The three women script is temporarily on hiatus while I work out some things in my head with the storyline. Meanwhile, I've been playing music, doing a little traveling (which was a tremendous help to one of the other scripts I'm writing - nothing like actually visiting a place you've written a scene about), and now writing some music.

My partner decided to write song lyrics and asked me to write the music. I have almost no experience with this: years of piano lessons in elementary school, self-taught guitar in high school plus two unfinished songs written during that same time, one semester of music theory in college and a piece of jazz music I wrote on a lark about ten years ago.

I gave myself a refresher on music theory courtesy of several websites on the Internet, have done basic chording for the four sets of lyrics I've been given, and fired up the Notation software I purchased about ten years ago when writing that piece of jazz music. I was grateful it ran on Windows Vista but had to order a cable that to covert MIDI to USB since the midi to serial/parallel (can't remember which) cable that came with my keyboard years ago won't connect to my laptop.

Next, to put the chords I've written into the Notation software, flesh out the melody and add whatever embellishments it needs. I promised to have at least one song done by this Wednesday. Well, done in the sense of a first draft. I promise to post on my progress.

Please Learn From My Mistakes (with Gratitude Where it is Due)

After a very busy couple of weeks filled with family and work demands, I finally sat down last night and turned on my laptop to do some writing only to discover that the operating system wouldn't boot. When I tried to do a repair, it couldn't see an operating system on the machine to repair. I know what all of my Mac-owner friends are already thinking, but keep reading as there's a lesson in here for all of you as well.

It didn't take me long to think that I wasn't going to be able to boot the machine which was immediately followed by admitting to myself that I hadn't done a single backup of any of the materials on my laptop. I went to bed practically in tears but trying to make the best of it, telling myself that it was an opportunity to re-write everything I'd ever written and to make it better. I wasn't really buying it and worst of all I kept berating myself because I'd spent 10 years in Information Technologies and should know better!

I woke up, started thinking about the cost of data recovery from a disk drive, didn't believe it could possibly be the hard drive but had a deep concern about the motherboard or the controller. The BartPE disk I had for XP didn't work, probably because it was Windows. I started thinking about all of the changes that I wanted to make to the three women script since I would be re-writing it from scratch anyway.

I drove to work this morning tossing this all over in my head and praying. My significant other emailed some words of encouragement and technical advice early in the morning. I had a cup of tea and began the day's tasks but couldn't get my mind off the laptop. I booted the machine and went into repair options again. I thought I didn't have too much to lose, thinking that I'd probably already lost everything worth keeping, so I told it to repair the operating system that it couldn't see. I did that a couple of times and finally, that Windows login screen popped up. I think I woke up half the floor with my cries of joy.

I immediately plugged in a portable hard drive to the USB port and backed up every file worth saving and then some. And I recommend that all of you, including my Mac-loving friends, do the same.

As I write this, I'm thinking that a one day delay was good for the project since it inspired some great new ideas. I'm also thinking that my stubborn personality was a good thing for once. My partner might say that I'm rationalizing. You decide.

So much for New Year's resolutions. This year didn't begin even remotely the way I would expect. Since I last blogged, the three women script has continued to force its way into my conscious thought on a regular basis. I'm reading, thinking, writing. There is so much to cram into 120 pages and at the same time, there's so much more I don't know about these women. Meanwhile, my life outside my writing has become more chaotic than it has ever been in my life. Family needs have come before writing and I've slowed the pace down.

In in the past couple of months I've arrived at the realization that this is not about an audience. I have to understand these characters before I'll write a script that I will be satisfied with, and if that makes me self-indulgent, then so be it. The script will build on these women and I want to understand all about them - their wants, desires, thoughts. How they are similar and dissimilar. What their secrets are. I have begun to accept that this is taking longer than I wanted it to. I wanted to crank the script out, but the universe has something to teach me, apparently.

I am getting to know these woman as I would someone I spent time with on a daily basis. At first I tried to set a deadline for myself, and I won't be happy if I do that with this work. I tend to love the journey more than the destination, so it's always easy for me to abandon deadlines, but this time it feels different. As I blogged a couple of months ago, this script feels different than anything I've ever written before. For one thing, even if I can't write, I am turning things over in my head about this script on a daily basis. It's a learning experience on so many levels, which is fine, because right now I don't depend on my writing for my income. If I did depend on my writing for my livelihood, I'd certainly be writing a hell of a lot faster and employing the "done is better than good" theory.

Linear, Circular and Obsessive Writing

I heard an interesting conversation over the weekend. An academic was talking about literature and "orgasmic structure". If I understood correctly, she was advancing the theory that traditional literature has a male orgasmic structure - the whole idea of "rising action" then "climax" then "denouement". And that women's literature used a more female, circular orgasmic structure.

I haven't decided what I think about the orgasmic structure of literature, but I do know that the script I'm currently working on is unfolding itself with a shift from how I've written in the past. I have a story in mind, then I write linearly, from beginning to end. That hasn't been happening with the three women script, as I've taken to calling it.

With this one, different scenes push forward and insist that I write them "right now" without regard to what's happened before that scene in the script. I find myself dreaming about the script and various scenes. This is a script that I started thinking about years ago. It came from a single image I had one day. At the time I couldn't decide whether it should be a stageplay or a film script. Eventually I shelved it because it was having story problems. More recently I started thinking about it. Then I began to obsess about it. I had to actually put aside another piece of writing I was working on to answer the demands of this script. And I can't even think about loglines.

It's disconcerting on one level and yet, it somehow feels right. Is it a more circular structure since I'm a woman and it's "the three women script"? Perhaps in the writing of it, but I have to say that at the end of the day, my script does have exposition, an inciting incident, conflict, rising action, climax and denouement - certainly the classic structure, male orgasmic or not.

Catching Up

I've written some really bad loglines in the past three weeks for projects I have yet to start. I've also worked on loglines for projects that I have already in progress. Interestingly I found that the loglines for the projects in progress are workable first drafts. I wouldn't want to use them to pitch anyone at this point, but I know that they are a start in the right direction and that feels good. Perhaps I'll implement a "logline of the day" program for myself to keep in practice.

I have had some distractions from writing in the past three weeks, apart from the usual job & family responsibilities. In the past three weeks I've learned that I love the community of people that descends upon Park City annually for the Sundance Film Festival. My partner and I went to the opening weekend of Sundance - it was our first visit - and fell in love. The films, the discussions after the films, chatting with people on the shuttles (is everyone at Sundance a screenwriter?), conversations at bars and events. It is hard to describe except that it felt like a homecoming for me.

Today I won't get any more writing done than this blog. A nodule on my left thryoid requires surgery (it's today) so I will be out of pocket for a week or two in recovery. I'm sure the writing will be here when I'm feeling up to it.

Loglines

So, a guy walks into an elevator and standing in front of him is Steven Spielberg. That happens everyday right? Well, it probably does. But how often is the guy a screenwriter who would love to pitch his movie to Spielberg ? Maybe once in a lifetime, if that, especially if Spielberg is willing to hear the pitch. The guy has only seconds. Will he blow it? I dunno, but I have read enough to know that the guy better have his logline in order or he doesn't have a chance in "h-e-double-hockey-sticks".

The experts generally agree that the logline needs to explain who the main character is, what her problem is & how she's going to solve it. Which means the folks writing the descriptions for TV Guide are getting all kinds of practice. If a logline is a one sentance pitch, then I want my loglines to have well-defined protagonists who are up against larger-than-life antagonists. I want my loglines to give a sense of the atmosphere and setting of my script. I want my loglines to identify the conflict between my protagonists and antagonists , to lay out what's at stake. I want my loglines to identify the genre of the script. I need my loglines to do this all in one sentance and I am so wordy that this leaves me feeling anxious.

Adjectives help identify the protagonist and antagonists with greater clarity. If the descriptive is juxtaposed to the goal, it can be used for greater effect. For example, the neglected farmgirl in the Wizard of Oz just wants to get back home.

It has to grab the reader, make the reader want to read the entire script. No pressure. It has to tell who the main character is, who the antagonist is, and what makes the script unique. It should emphasize the internal and external conflict. It should identify the sizzle: sex, greed, humor, danger, thrills, satisfaction. I have a lot of work to do....

What the experts are really saying is that the logline is the superobjective (or spine) of the story.

I finally decided I should just write a bunch of loglines: good, bad or indifferent. Practice is the way to go. I'll let you know what kind of luck I have.

My New Year's Resolution and the Year of the Earth Ox

They say that writers can't be afraid to "kill your darlings" so I've done some blog housecleaning, deleting the very few but rather inane posts I've written over the past couple of years. I kept the very first one I wrote and another that has personal meaning for me. And while I really haven't been a fan of new year's resolutions over the years, this year I thought I'd give it a try. I have been writing more and I resolve to blog more. I also want to learn to write really good loglines. It feels right since the year of the Earth Ox is upon us once again on 26 January 2009.

In general, eastern astrologers believe that oxen come into their own during ox years. Taking stock, examining where you are and where you are heading are supposed to be good activities for oxen in an ox year. (Aren't they good activities for anyone in any year?) Being a metal ox, I am supposed to be strong, hard-working and will do whatever is necessary to achieve my goals. Time will tell but one thing is for certain, it also continues to march on.

My Friend is Dying

A friend from several years past is dying. He is much younger than I am. I hadn't even known he was HIV+ and with the "cocktail" folks are now given, it's a shock to hear of anyone succumbing to the disease so young in their lives. But my friend apparently has had several complications along the way, and now they have taken him off meds in a downtown hospital several states away, issued a "do not resuscitate" order and he will soon die. I am glad that he has a partner by his side during this time because when we worked together a few years ago and were both officers of the same LGBT employee organization, he was single.

He quit the company to move to another state and after a short while we lost touch. Occasionally I'd wonder what happened to him, but did not know that he had kept in contact with anyone I knew. Last week I started thinking about him again and on Friday received a call from a business associate, another former officer of the LGBT organization at our company, who gave me the news. Part of me wonders if we lost touch because he started dealing with the disease or whether it was just because he'd met someone and was focused on that relationship.

My old friend is in what I call the "young enough to know better" category. I was reading about a new, rare, (still unnamed) gay disease in the Village Voice when he was still a baby. My partner and I have two teenaged boys. We hope we have given them the tools (both the information and the emotional stability) to avoid falling victim to this terrible disease.

When I mentioned to a co-worker that this had happened, we had a discussion about AIDS and young people. She said that at the predominately African-American high school that her daughter attends, 35% of the students are HIV positive. At another high school in the same district, 20% of the students are HIV positive. What is happening in America? I knew that the rates of HIV infection in the black community were rising in America. I had no idea it was already reaching epidemic proportions. Why isn't this being discussed publicly?

It has been a long time since I watched a friend waste away, develop dementia and die from AIDS. I still have friends who are HIV+ and they have their occasional scares but it is not the same as it used to be. I can't exactly explain how but I'm sure it's because of the new drugs. The "cocktail" really has changed things over time. There is part of me that is glad I have not watched this particular friend go through this.

I still donate money to the various AIDS walks and rides when friends ask. The people who always seem to ask me are my friends who are gay men. So many people think we've somehow "conquered" the disease in the gay male community. But even the rates of gay men have started to climb again. Young people think they are invincible. They think this will never happen to them. They think that with the new drugs available they can continue to live normal lives and never have to worry about it. Unfortunately young people always seem to have this kind of thinking. They are so heart-breakingly wrong.

I haven't looked at the statistics lately, but within my own age group, most gay men became HIV+ when they were teenagers who lacked the self-esteem to have the kind of dialogue necessary to insist on safe-sex practices. And I am certain that this must also be true of the straight African-American community within which my co-worker's daughter and my own children navigate their young lives. Something must be done. Years ago, when the numbers were primarily in the gay population of the US, we tried to tell people, this disease affects all of us. When will people finally wake up and believe that we weren't just looking for sympathy?

Here I Am

Following the lead of someone I love and admire very much, I decided to join the blogging world. Better late than never, I suppose. At least by using a blog, I shouldn't have to wonder where in the house I've put down my journal. I'm sure I'll find a whole new set of worries.

I have been many things in my life. I tend to fill up every waking moment with something to do, often without regard to whether that something moves me closer to my goals in life. I have a tendancy to approach life with a kind of ADHD. Something grabs my interest, I devour it and then almost as quickly something else piques my interest. As I am now in or approaching middle age, that old nagging voice tells me I should probably pay closer attention and perhaps even make a decision about what I want to be when I grow up.

I have found myself saying over the years that what I've always known what I wanted to be but just never tried that profession. When I was in first grade our teacher gave us an assignment to create the cover of a book on construction paper. Not a real book, but "our" book. Mine was called "Murder on Blood Island". I remember so clearly looking up above the blackboard where she'd placed our creations around the room and thinking "that's what I want to be when I grow up: a writer."

I have been a writer all of my life actually. Friends in college told me they looked forward to receiving letters from me. I seem to recall that I never wrote cutesy shallow ones, but ones full of angst and soul-searching. I wish I had some of those letters now. They would probably be a good substitute for the diary I wasn't keeping in those years.

I have written a lot in my lifetime - had poetry published in a university publication, kept a detailed journal off and on (mostly on since my 20s), served as editor myself of a monthly arts periodical (complete with editor's column). I have never sought to be paid for my work but I plan to in the future. Why didn't I pursue this as a career? Too much fear of failure, too much need for security, too much...what? That's something I do expect to explore here in my blog among other things.

Time's a-wasting, in one way or another. Nothing earth-shattering, but the things in life that are agents of change don't always seem to be. This will be interesting to explore.