It Can Only End Once...

Hey Flip-philes. Back from a two week break to bring you another magnificent helping of blog.

I have finished the first section of Gulfview Heights (pretentiously titled "Some Invisible Threads), and it has been a bizarrely-smooth process so far. All of the doubts and worries that slowed down the writing of Down and Yonder are absent here. If all goes well, I may be looking at a completed script in time for April. Since my personal goal was May, I will try to use the remaining time to inject the kind of detail that separates the great stories.

Right now, I'm reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and I'm constantly stunned by the amount of history, wordplay, and care that has gone into every sentence. It's a slow read, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, here it's an outright amazing thing. The sentences are so loaded with careful detail and the language is so precise that you almost have to take your time. Chabon's attention to the small minutia of daily-life is admirable and hopefully I can instill something similar into Gulfview Heights. Again, I will probably be the last one to know.

I've started working again on the book, We Are The Echo. I'll admit I suffered from a minor case of writer's block. However, after taking a month or so off and thinking about the logical scope of the piece, I think I may have overcome it. My goal is to have it ready before the end of the year. We're halfway there, folks!

Coming up on my L.A. radar, I have The Room this Saturday. It's one of my favorite monthly rituals, and I encourage anybody on the west coast to seek it out. Over the past couple of years, I've become a rather avid fan of the midnight movie. There is just something about watching an overlooked classic (or, in the case of The Room, not-so-classic) with a theater full of movie geeks. This is the sort of bunch who, when I say that "Han shot first," they understand what I'm talking about.

Alright, last week's Locke-centric episode of Lost, entitled "The Substitute," was amazing. Absolutely breath-taking, one-for-the-record-books kind of awesome. It had great revelations and plenty of food-for-though mythology-wise, but it remained intensely focused and character-driven (I promise- no more hyphens for the rest of the post). I loved the flash-sideways storyline this week. It showed a John Locke without an island destiny, and it's hard to argue that he isn't better off without it. He's loved and content. I've long theorized (for about three weeks) that one of the timelines is eventually going to flicker out and take precedent over the other. John Locke is so happy here that it's easy to begin rooting for our island timeline to be the one that fades into temporal non-existence, to hell with our six years of investment.

To close out the blog, I have decided to include some pictures I took last Saturday while walking through Griffith Park. Too many times I have heard people talk about Los Angeles as not being a beautiful place to live. There's beauty everywhere. You just have to be willing to look for it and acknowledge it.

Anyway, I believe that wraps it up for this week. Please make some comments! The blog is only a powerful tool of we use it to engage in a larger conversation.

Flippo