Small Mental Block

Dear readers,

This is the grammar thing I am/was working on. At this point I've reached a bit of a block on it so any recommendation or feed back would be helpful.

zeblogofgrammar.blogspot.com

Mike Hand

Edit: Fixed title and url.

Project Progress 4

Dear readers,

I apologize for not throwing this up earlier, but Thursday was used for decision making and on Friday I was in Hewlett. For those wondering why its because it was the last congress of the year (managed to get third place in a committee that debated almost exclusively about music, acting and books).

For the decision I made, I'm dropping the music as my side salad and am going to do poetry. All I have left to do is find a theme to hold it together (although I am on the third draft of a poem that I came up with after learning about a hill in Wales that rhymed with orange).

On the grammar, I don't think there is much more I can do on it in terms of material to post. I'll review everything tomorrow and then post a link here. If there is anything I missed, screwed up or you want me to cover on it then tell me and I will.

On the film, I'll start writing scenes again tomorrow and see how many scenes I can get through.

Mike Hand

Project Progress 3

Hello readers,

To begin the day I attempted to be a sounding board for Scott. Note to self: Being a sounding board is not my specialty. When this was all said and done I continued grammar research and made another post and realized that even though I have very few posts its gotten to the point where I did the "i before e" rule. I'm really going to have declare that done soon.

I wish to have a more extensive update for you guys tomorrow.

Mike Hand

Project Update 2

Dear readers,

Today I created yet another grammar post, this time on when it is proper to italicize/underline. The difficulty in the project is trying to find out what to write on next. Perhaps tomorrow will be on when to properly use a slash in a sentence.

In my research I learned that "Basket Case" by Green Day and "Pachelbel's Canon" use the same exact chord structure. While I have nothing saying that they knew they were simply taking the chord structure and placing it in a different key, Wikipedia tells me that it is one of the most commonly used structures in pop music and so I assume that they knew that they were ripping the chord progression off from somewhere. This of course presented an idea; what if one ripped off an interesting chord progression and focused instead on making it interesting rather than original? It would be an interesting project and would avoid all the pitfalls of current music where most of it feels boring.

Of course I'm not entirely sure on why I want to do this. I know part of it is self motivated as I have been playing guitar for a while but never actually wrote a song. A slightly more dubious side is that over my entire high school career I have been continually pressured by my family to set my poems to music. Now I believe there are three camps in the music world right now: Those that shouldn't be in any industry, those that should publish a poetry book and call it a day and those who are genuinely good. I see myself more in the second category. Of course, I haven't even attempted song writing in years which is what is pulling me towards it.

Those are my reasons for considering song writing as my next "B" project as well as my progress on the current "A" project.

Mike Hand

Q4 Project day 1

Dear readers,

Been a long time hasn't it? Well that ends now as I have to give daily updates to the progress of my work. Today I created a post explaining how one properly uses parenthesis, dashes and quotation marks. I hope to be done with it by the end of either this week or next. I did not make any progress on the movie I have plans of writing as I've pushed that aside until my "A" project is complete. On top of all that I've looked into songwriting. I didn't really learn anything new from my research however once the current "A" project is done and I need a new "B" project, I think I'll make song writing my new "B" project. Still not sure who to include in my community and for what project however I have people in mind and will have reached a consensus by Friday evening at the latest.

Mike Hand

Intensive assignment

The workload of an intensive is, as the name implies, intense. For me the change in pace was a little less great because I had just got up to Day 370 in a 365 for poetry however I had never seriously attempted play or screen writing before. In fact my prior attempts involved improper formats aggravated by “actors” who refused to do the necessary work and the few actors who were insistent upon doing there acting also decided that they should be the director and the writer and changed the work into an unfathomable abomination.

That said these intensives come off from me writing in a poetic matter and we very little experience writing for other people to perform. Perhaps this is why I found our first task of writing our most memorable argument so it fills up 6 pages and then cut anything that can be seen as unnecessary and lower it to a single page. I can no longer say that I find this difficult and I can say that I find it necessary as I do find myself going off into unnecessary details in my head from time to time.

From there the next memorable upgrade to my brain obtained from the intensives would have to be Pinter. For the curious and/or uninitiated, Pinter is a writer who is famous for his use of such things as silence, pauses and the infamous “...”. Somehow I found his indirect style easy to work with and was able to write in it very well. To this time a good portion of my work has continued to use the style that was introduced to us when we worked with his style and I feel like it is very complimentary of my own style.

I also find now that I am a much faster and better writer. Where as last summer while I could create a five page poem in roughly six minutes I could create six pages of script in twenty minutes. As you can see this is a very large discrepancy. The current time for my script writing for six pages is more akin to four to six minutes when I have an idea of what I'm doing and who my characters are. The scripts are also of a much better quality and no longer has what feels like dialogue that has been forced through the characters mouth and they have begun to take on their own qualities of characters much separate from myself.

Starting out in these intensives I had some reserve of putting down myself on page with absolutely no change. Then came time for the monologues and the first subject was one where the character breaks down crying in the middle of it. For it I wrote what I knew and I would have to say that the end result was amazing, especially after I handed it off to Andrew and he performed it. He put a level of understanding on it that really drove it home, especially for me. I had heard what I needed to hear for months and only because the intensives made me write it down on paper. Now I feel a new courage in my writing, that I should not fear what I write.

As one can see the intensives allowed me to stop being a coward in my writing, develop the voices of my characters and how long it takes to write a script as well as what is and isn't important to have in the script. Because of this work I know have a movie in my head which I have developed into three acts with plot points and while it is still on the drawing board I do not feel that I would have had the ability to do this with out the intensives.

As always thank you,

Mike Hand