I would have posted lovely pictures of the Farmer's Market on Saturday, when I took them, except that I have been largely unable to access my blog the past few days. Users of my forums have noted that things are moving painfully slowly there and, similarly, it's proving infuriating to try to log into my Movable Type account to blog, let alone actually post something.
My hosting service, GoDaddy, swears it's not something they can replicate in Technical Support Land and is, therefore, a figment of my imagination and/or something I'll just have to figure out how to fix. Problem is, I have no idea what the problem is. Thus, no idea to fix it. Not that I'm frustrated or anything. It's hard being your own IT department. I'm having an amazing and challenging and frustrating time working on rewriting my screenplay. It's tough to have written a full-length feature script and then to have to dissect it and piece it back together or change it according to the rules of drama and structure and voice and timing... I'm devouring scripts right now (You Can Count on Me, Good Will Hunting, Thelma & Louise, Silence of the Lambs) and watching movies (American Beauty, Witness, Chinatown) to try to absorb some knowledge, some idea of how to piece a story together for maximum dramatic impact. And as with so many things in life, the more I see, the less I think I know.
Of course, lately I've been feeling a lot like someone who just doesn't Get It. For example, I recently skimmed through James Frey's controversial psuedo-memoir A Million Little Pieces. I found a dollar copy somewhere and thought I'd check out what the fuss was all about. Given the blurbs on the jacket, my expectations were pretty high going in and by the time I had waded through as much of it as I could, I closed the book in frustration and thought, "I don't get it."
All debates about reality and memoir aside, I found the writing style to be virtually impenetrable, a repetitive sea of monotonous observations that pained me to work through. If you're writing a novel and your main character is a brash, unlikable egotist who changes little throughout the course of the book, you've got a problem on your hands. If you're writ