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for writing classes?
Want to write for publication or for personal growth?
Want to sharpen those professional skills?
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the place!
Don't
have one, other than at myself for not keeping this newsletter
up on a weekly basis. I actually have a semi-excuse
for April. I spent most of the month sailing, in one place or
another, including ten days in the British Virgin Islands. (The
latter a 50-foot charter, one of two boats our singles sailing
club chartered. Two guys, five women on our boat; it's a tough
job but someone has to do it.) While I kept up on some work
at home, as best I could, I seemed to
always
be
out
of
town
when
it
came
time
for the
Friday
newsletter.
This
weekend (Memorial Day weekend) I get to stay home and work
on several projects. I'm assisted in this by the
fact that my 21-foot trailered sailboat is sick and unusable,
several vital parts having been removed to be repaired.
I took on, starting May 1, the web editor job for
ASJA, a national writers organization. There had been no web
editor since last December and I have been frantically trying
to catch up for the past 25 days. Fortunately for me, there is
a webmeister who actually runs the web site, which is more than
2000 web pages big, most of that in the form of archives in the
members-access section. But it is still a huge job. I think I
have a handle on it now but the handle seems to be on the side
that is rolling over me...
I'm
also working with a friend and fellow ASJA member on a travel
book about Florida. We got sidetracked right
off. We sent the book proposal to Globe-Pequot Press and they
rejected it. Then they e-mailed us to ask if we would update
a very similar book. The other book was written by other authors
who, evidentally, don't want to bother updating it. This is not
uncommon. So at the moment we are updating someone else's book
that bears a striking resemblance to the one we would like to
sell ourselves.
And
speaking of déja
vu all over again, I'm working
on an article for an architectural magazine. My collaborator
on this one is my ex-wife, an architect. She wrote about this
very house twenty years ago for another magazine, now dead. This
new magazine pays about five times what the other did. We zoomed
over to the house and met with the architect, now rather aged,
and
with
the
photographer
--
who
had done the
photography
twenty years ago. I do not recall any private home being featured
in two architecture magazines twenty years apart. Since my ex
owns the copyright to the original article (which I have) the
writing was easier than usual. I can even re-use the quotes if
I wish. Some days you make calls and nobody returns them and
you write and it's all garbage. Then, on some days, you fall
into
the tub of chocolate.
FEATURED
COURSES:
Screenplay
Writing, by Beth Danasco. This class is designed to help beginning
screenwriters navigate the important pre-writing work of organizing
the story of their potential screenplay into the time-tested structure
almost all screenplays follow.
We will examine the specifics of this structure and see it at work in some great
films, act by act. At the same time, students will begin to lay out their own
script ideas using various pre-writing techniques including paradigms, informal
outlines, sequences, and finally, detailed step-outlines.
By the end of the class, students will have a blueprint for their first drafts.
Better yet, they will have a method for planning any script projects they may
work on in the future.
Needed: access to various films on DVD or VHS. Optional reference: Syd Field’s
Screenplay; Robert McKee’s Story.
I'm
not sure how much longer we can hold onto Beth. She is a
talented writer with other irons in the fire.
She has already
hinted that she may have to pull this course from our catalog.
So, if you were thinking about screenplay writing, jump on it
now.
SCHOOL
NEWS: As the poop-shoveler at the wildebeest exhibit
at the zoo once said, "No gnus is good gnus."
WHO's
DOING WHAT:Mary McIntosh had
an article printed in her local newspaper dealing with her
memory of the Hindenberg disaster. Mary kept a journal
as a young girl and had seen the giant airship pass over
her
house just hours before it burst into flames and crashed.
