W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

When we get rain in Austin -- and we've been having drought conditions -- love what it does for my yard and plants. Hate what it does for the inside of my head and general health.

The mold blooms something terrible, and I get horrible sleep, pounding headaches, red eyes, sometimes tearing like I'm crying. Man. And I creep around. Barely get home from work, and I have to sleep for 2 hours! Which is bad anytime, but now it's critical I finish my CAN'T SAY NO script for the Austin Film Festival. Final deadline? Monday, June 8th!

So this morning I emailed in sick. My headache was so bad it had made me pukey. In fact, I didn't eat anything today until 6pm. And I amazingly crashed to catch up on sleep and was knocked out until 2pm today. I think it helped I turned on the ozone machine in my room, together with the HEPA filter, I was finally breathing some mold-free air.

Then from 6pm until now, I've been coordinating the Michael Hauge workshop and closing in on my final screenplay draft. Procrastination -- it's an addiction.

Never been to Hawaii, but I will this August. AND it will be a tax write-off. w00ty w0oT!

The Maui Writers Conference is now in Honolulu (cheaper hotels and food that way) so is now called the Hawaii writers conference. I plan to do the writers retreat too, the masters class in screenwriting.

Here's more at http://www.hawaiiwritersconference.com/.

Then I will of course do all the cultural and historical things of a tourist. (Not so much with the partying and Mai Tai's on the beach and stuff.) And get to know folks from all over -- which is always fun and, as an organically* shy person, something I take pride in. I just chat folks up, crack jokes, and it seems to work!

And the dayjob is so frantic and challenging right now, it's fun to think of a beautiful beach and creative activities. aaaaahhhhh


* Shyness is in-born. An infant's response to unusual stimuli shows whether it's extroverted or shy. As an internal gauge, you know you're extroverted if being around people energizes you. If, like me, you have to be alone to recharge so you can go out and meet more folks, then you're shy. So I'm a shy person who's taught herself to be gregarious....

Yesterday I got early to work -- people even commented. But it was for a yucky reason: something awful happened to my next-door neighbor. I don't know what it is yet; from the three police cars, ambulance and fire engine that were parked in front of their house when I got up early yesterday, it should've been mentioned in the news. But I can't find it on any of the TV channel or radio sites.

It's a black family, very hard-working and polite. They have teenage kids who are popular, with lots of friends driving in and out during the evenings and weekends. I watched for a while and saw their two daughters, but not their son, so I kept getting ready for work. Then from my bedroom in the other side of the house I heard screaming. Loud and frantic screaming. I went out and saw the two girls trying to calm their mother who was rolling-on-the-ground hysterical, crying "my baby! my baby!" The police and EMS people kept trying to calm her, but her hysterics went on forever. The dad was talking with police and acting like he didn't even see it.

Then they put up crime scene tape. Awful. The house was quiet when I got home last night and there was a strong smell of bleach, which is ominous. This morning there are three strange cars there, so I'm guessing family members are showing up.

Supposedly you can call the Austin Police Dept, explain you're a neighbor, and they'll call you back with details... I'm going to try. I was looking at the APD crime Web page and it's a freaking nightmare of an interface that I can't get anything from.

I got an odd email a month or so ago from a student at ACC (Austin Community College). They were collecting interviews of people in the writing, audio-visual and design fields. It was five questions or so -- much like those LiveJournal memes I mostly avoid! But it's for a student getting a grade, so heck yeah, why not.

Just now was doing an egoboo Google search, and found a heavily (even, ornately) designed online mag with an interview of Wendy Wheeler. Hah!

Somewhat pedestrian writing on my part, but it was for someone's class, y'all.

www.aetherparanormal.com

This Austin group of young arty types is just as cute as they can be. They've created their own company: Aether Paranormal Team. They do ghost-busting investigations for fun! What's impressive is how cool and upscale their Website and the filming of their adventures for Webisodes looks.

That Website and the art direction of the documentaries is mostly done by Shad, a co-worker buddy. He's the bearded guy. His wife Jentri has an RTF degree from UT, and has made small movies, and is getting funding for a feature length that I did some script doctoring consultation on! Right now I'm sending out their URL and info about them to some reality TV producers I know. Just 'cause (I'm not packaging them or anything).

They've got a major adventure planned for tomorrow evening, Friday the 13th. They'll film it and make another Webisode, so should be fun.

My employer is one of those (typically huge) companies that decided to have mandatory holiday time off. You use your vacation (and, in my case, create a negative balance you have to work off) and are gone, by fiat, for two weeks. I have nothing against two weeks off -- that's a great concept! But I wanted to use my vacation time for the Mythic Journeys Conference in June and the Maui Writers Conference in August. Having a lot of time off during the chilly and grey winter is not-so-great.

So Friday we celebrated our last day of work until January 5th with a holiday lunch at the Headliners Club. Again, a place I hadn't thought of in years, but delicious food for the 2nd time in a week. Especially the Headliners Crab Salad and the array of special holiday desserts! We took a festive photo with their luxurious holiday decorations, and NC caught a picture of me turning away from the window view. (Both behind the cut.) And most of us went home with sweets or tea or geodes as we gifted across the department too, so that was sweet! My offering was a hand-beaded Texas ornament from Bookpeople.

At my (Blake Snyder workshop originated) Austin Cats group yesterday at Melody's, she had a gift of a ream of paper for each of us. How appropriate is that for a writer? And she'd had her girls color thematically appropriate pictures for each of us (see behind the cut). Very cute! And we did some good analysis of people's scripts too...

On the way to Melody's, I stopped at the Sunset Valley Farmers Market to get locally made truffles for some friends' gifts. I found a guy and his girlfriend there from East Austin who make fascinating arrangements of succulents -- the plants are SciFi looking, the pots are interesting and the prices were great -- $20 to $75. I bought two for gifts (see behind the cut). I'd already given J4 her gift -- the pop-up book of phobias -- but she loves succulents and this was too interesting not to get her one.

Which brings up a long, leisurely (if noisy!) dinner Thursday night at Mandolos where several of us gathered to chat with Dr. Tom Konrad, in town for a week. Patrice told us she'd turned in Book#2 to Ace in September. Clayton just listened quietly, and Jennifer was there to catch up too. We told them about our trip to Cape Cod for the rustic writers conference in August. We got there at 7pm, got desserts after our meals, and they chased us out at 10pm. Fun chat, but awkward too as Patrice is a huge Stina supporter and we had to talk around that subject at one point.

Still to come: visits to Keep Austin Bazaar and Greune, Texas; a Christmas Eve party; shopping for the roast beast dinner I'll make Christmas Day; and visits with family and friends to exchange gifts and cheer. Also: a new draft of my script CAN'T SAY NO and a short trip to Port Aransas with my brother and his fishing tackle. ( Photos Behind the Cut... )

CAN'T SAY NO went over pretty good yesterday in its first full reading. The Austin Screenwriters Group had a large turn-out, surprising me because by 9:30 that morning there were only 13 people so I handed out roles based on who was there then. After that, 20 more people showed up! I would've done somethings differently... but the folks i set up ahead of time were great. MarkG was properly nerdy and dry with his lines as my main character, Miller Davis PhD. PeterR blew people away with one of my sweetest characters, a guy named Arpit who is an inventor and an MC Hammer and anime fan. He got huge laughs out of all his stuff. Plus he did great with another character, an older man who sang a little Rigoletto. I gave him the melody and he ran with it! For a shy guy, he's such a ham, it's great...

I do have things to fix. People argued with me about my catalyst and I kept saying what they felt was the catalyst was the break into Act II. So I need to fix that. Some people wanted the inventions to be fewer and more pertinent to the plot. My main character didn't seem to have his own goals (he did, but obviously that needs to be worked better).

You worry about comedy -- "will everybody find this funny or am I being goofy?" Most of the time, I got laughs at jokes. A few jokes I liked, nobody reacted. And a few people wrote on their scripts that this {whatever} is the funniest scene in the movie. And I thought it was just humorous.

My plan: do a good new draft during the mandatory two weeks off at the holidays (my employer is requiring us to use up our vacation time). After the meeting, Maruisz was there and he came with us to lunch at Zee Tejas. I think he's going to get Ceasar to work on some stuff with him! And he's already got PeterR doing some stuff. So my networking promoting is working, yay!

Then I took it easy the rest of the weekend as I'd been killing myself getting that first draft done and ready to read. W00t!

How often does one get to make that equivalency? But that was my week last week. My dayjob sent me to Orlando for the BAI Retail Banking Conference and Expo. About 15 of us from my company stayed at the Rosen Centre Hotel, right across the street from the Orange County Convention Center -- a huge, huge, HUGE complex. We only used half of the west wing addition; it was that huge.

Colin Powell was the first keynote speaker on Tuesday. What a smart, funny, charming man! What a truckload of current history he's been part of! And, to his credit, he really doesn't bash anybody (boy, could he, though!), he keeps his stories on-target for his audience (in this case, the banking and credit crisis and what it means to be a leader during upheaval), and he does clever imitations of the presidents under which he served. A Colin Powell thing appears to be that, whoever he's serving, his name for them is Leader. As in: "Leader, I don't think that's what we need to be doing right now." More on on his quotes and stories behind the cut. I was surprised he's 72 already; he seems so sharp and vigorous, like mid-60s. He said according to a TIME magazine poll a few years back, he was No.2 in men that have aged well, "right behind Paul Newman."

Then the Terminator reference came from my Monday morning wanderings at Universal Studios Florida. I saw a fake Arnold Schwartenegger there and a fake Sarah and John Connor, from movie II (not movie III or the current TV series).

A weird sort of day; much colder and more blustery than you expect for Florida. I was "forced" to buy a souvenior Universal hoodie to keep warm! The place opened at 9am, but some of the rides or performances didn't start until a few hours later! And most folks didn't appear to like the cold weather either -- I never really stood in any queues for anything. If there was a wait, it was just 5 min while they cleared out an area, then we walked right in. Cost me $75 and I was done by 3pm. Really -- had ridden all the rides I wanted to, and one that I didn't.

Ironically, that Curse of the Mummy ride I posted about before I left? Turns out it's one of those things I no longer like: a roller coaster. Something's happened to me in the past 10-15 years and I find those scary annoying rather than scary exciting. And then it had another quality that I NEVER liked: a roller coaster in the dark! What is the purpose of that, I ask you? You can't see the track so you're just whipped side-to-side and up-and-down. The line was short, but the walking distance was really long to get there, too. When I got in the ride and it started doing the rapid acceleration in the dark, I thought, "oh hell." It had a moderately dramatic flaming ceiling effect as the cursed pharoah bellowed about taking your soul... but naw. Not worth the annoyingness.


Mummy stilt walkers outside the Curse of the Mummy ride creeped up on people and freaked them out. Poor guys: shirtless in that cold! And a second after I took this shot, that woman in pink screamed like a banshee when the stilt guy grabbed her!

( Details and More Photos Behind the Cut... )

It's for a business trip but I have some time on Monday when nobody needs me. Since I'm giving up most of my Sunday to travel there, it's a fair trade. I'll be doing this:


But most of the four days I'll be doing this:

With the financial markets meltdown, I kept hearing that John McCain was involved in the "Keating 5." I wasn't sure what that was, just assumed Charles Keating had bought people off so he could do something fraudulent with an S&L.

Now Obama's Website has a good, informative video on the Keating 5 and McCain at http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/keatingvideo

Glad to get better info and glad to see the Democrats are mobilizing (finally) against the Republicans with stuff like this. While the Republicans "swift-boat" allusions to how Obama at age 8 walked down the same street as a U.S. dissident (who's now a tenured professor, btw, so how much of a terrorist can he be?), McCain has awful stuff like this in his documented history.

My own work history includes doing marketing for a Texas S&L during that financial crisis. It's where my particular combination of high tech and communication work experience got melded and set on the path that's given me dayjobs for the past 15 years. I knew of charlatans who got in the S&L business because repealed supervisory oversight let them loot as much as they wanted. And they knew it would bust; flipping real estate until it was so inflated it couldn't sustain the balance books. Our (First Federal S&L) was one of the "good ones" but even it went bust b/c of the real estate environment. It was a**holes like Keating that screwed it up for everybody.