I spoke to that guy Tanner again (he of It's Too Late To Apologize) today, and you know what? He apologized to me again. I think I may leave him something in my will. But what?
At the library, I typed up all yesterday's words (although the wise man was right: it took two hours just to transfer them from handwritten to typewritten, although I did stop a couple of times to write today's words. I ran out of time before I was done, so I paid for another session. Yes, big spender me.
But I often feel more productive when I go to the--oh, I was going to say that on the set yesterday, I heard someone talking to somebody else about picking up something at the library, and the other person (a man of middle age) said, "Library? Do those still exist?" It made me a little bit sad--not quite as sad as the fact that NO TIME TO DIE was postponed until November, but sadder than when I heard that The Notorious B.I.G. is getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.
But anyway, I love the library, and I waste far less time there than I do at home. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, "God bless it!"
There's a woman I used to work with that I recently started "following" on Instagram* and she apparently has some music app on her phone that tells her how many times she's listened to a particular song. Then she posts it.
While this is utterly banal and exactly what is wrong with the social media generation . . . it's still really interesting to me. For example, in a post last month, I mentioned the forty-something times I had listened to Everything I Wanted, and when I recorded a podcast version of that post for my Patreon address, I upped it to seventy-something. And now, well, it's gotta be over a hundred (I heard it twice on the radio today, within a ten minute stretch).
How many times have I heard Every Breath You Take by the Police? Somebody somewhere said that was the most played song of the 1980s, and I still hear it at least once a week today (we're in, what, the Nineties now?). Would that song be over two hundred for me? Three hundred? Five hundred? Or, if I've heard it once a week for thirty years, wouldn't that be something like fifteen hundred and sixty times through?
I'll never know. Not without Spotify**.
Also, while I was at the library, I opened up the time travel script I wrote for my friend's show, looking it over one last time, and changing the wording on one line of dialogue. It was time to send it off.
So, I was a little bit worried the last few days that I wouldn't be able to use the story I wrote last month, since the contract they wanted me to sign said the idea was no longer mine. I had an experience like that a decade back where I came up with this--rather captivating--take on King Arthur and Guinevere that I was paid to write for a local production company. I thought it was good stuff, and had hoped they would pay me to turn it into a script, but they only took the premise, then gave it to somebody else, who dumbed it way down so it would be more of what they had asked of me in the first place, which was HIGHLANDER meets UNDERWORLD. But the sad thing was, they owned the pitch/treatment I had given them, so I couldn't do anything with it, even though they weren't going to use it.
Or maybe they did, maybe they turned it into a hit movie and it came out with almost none of my contributions in it and all of y'all love it and I just somehow never heard about it. Except they didn't. I would've heard about it, even if they'd shot it in Bulgaria or Romania or Des Moines, you know, one of those really cool foreign locales.
So, I called up the guy that got me the gig and told him of my worries, and to my surprise, he said he would amend the contract so that I could put out a short story version of it, and if they don't actively make it over the next twelve months, the rights revert back to me. That kind of blew my mind, but it's pretty much what I wanted to hear.***
So, I sent that first draft off today, and won't even think about it for a few days. And now I'm going to go outside.
Words Today: 1966
Words In March: 8,943
*Does it need the quotation marks? How do I differentiate following someone on social media from my usual hiding-in-the-bushes-looking-through-their-blinds sort of following?
**Or whatever the app is. I don't know for sure.
***He also asked if I was worrying or losing sleep about it, and added, "There's no reason to stress out over something we're paying you so little for."
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