The contest works like this: In the first round, a premise is published Friday evening. Everyone writes a scene based on the premise, due first thing Monday morning. No pressure! The 100 best screenplays move on. In the second round a new premise is given and participants have but one night to write their scenes. The top ten of those will be given a new premise and two whole hours to turn it into art.

Last time I did ok with the first round, but not well enough to distinguish myself from the pack. I did the second round just for fun, and though it was not judged, some bystanders thought it came out better than my first round’s effort. That may well be; I think my first round script lost some sparkle as I worked on it. I lost the original quirkiness as I polished the language. While writing a scene in a weekend may seem daunting, last year I think it was too much time for me. This time around I will concentrate on increasing the unique character of the scene as I polish the script.

As I did last time, I’ll be posting my work here, along with any observations about the contest in general. One fun side effect of last autumn’s effort was that this blog became, for a short while, a meeting-place for a few participants in the contest. It was an unexpected bonus that made participation all the more fun.

So pencil the weekend of April 17th, grab your word processors and gather ’round the ol’ Muddled Ramblins. It’ll be a hoot!

Or, just drop by to cheer me on.

Let’s start with the good. Since the dawn of time Apple mice have had only one button. It’s a religious thing with the boys in Cupertino, I guess; even while their operating system supports (and even embraces) functionality that requires right-clicking and scroll-wheeling, the mouse has remained mired in one-button land. The Magic mouse technically keeps the one-button faith, while providing support for a huge range of input. There’s one button, but where your finger pushes the button can change the action. The entire top surface of the mouse is a trackpad. You can configure the mouse to have as many virtual buttons as you want.

There’s no scroll wheel, but if you slide your finger down the surface of the mouse it acts like one. Slide your finger side to side, and you’re scrolling horizontally. I really like that feature, but it took some getting used to.

With a little extra software, things get even better. You see, the mouse can track all five of your fingers at once, and can respond to a huge variety of gestures. Pinch to zoom in. Reverse the gesture to zoom out. Twist with three fingers to rotate something. It’s all configurable and it’s sweet.

The only problem with this hot little number: It’s wireless. I don’t need wireless; in fact, the vast majority of people who use computers don’t need wireless. It’s a convenience for those who use a mouse with their laptops, but I’ve always been just fine plugging the mouse in (and in fact some people have had problems when their wireless mice have awakened their laptops and drained their batteries).

Yet somehow wireless is better (rhymes with ‘power windows on cars’). The Magic Mouse just seems “magicer” when it doesn’t need a wire to talk to the computer. There is no doubt that the marketplace has decided “wireless is better” and Apple (and the rest of the mouse-producing industry) is not going to fight that.

So what’s my beef with wireless? Simple. It’s the batteries. Batteries cost money, and using this mouse produces a steady stream of toxic waste. If the purchase cost of a battery included the cost of disposing of the hazardous chemicals inside it, maybe people wouldn’t be so fast to use battery-powered devices where wired power is available. How many AA batteries go into landfills each year, creating a toxic mess someone will have to clean up someday, because people buy battery-powered devices that don’t need to be? Let’s reserve the battery power for things that need to be battery-powered.

I know that technically people aren’t supposed to throw away batteries anymore, but people still do. The chemicals in batteries are just as harmful in the soil as plutonium for the same amount of energy (he says with no backing evidence), but people treat them with cavalier indifference. And sure, rechargeable batteries reduce the rate that toxic waste is created, but they don’t eliminate it. Rechargeables will be my compromise so I can continue to use my wonderful mouse with a cleaner conscience. Wired power has environmental consequences as well, but I’d be right stunned if they approached the harm that battery power causes.

So here I am, using the coolest damn mouse ever, happy with it, and feeling slightly guilty. My old Logitech USB mouse is right here, with lots of buttons and a scrollwheel and whatnot, but it’s just not as good. It’s ok to pollute if you feel guilty about it, right?

It was after I read this passage:

During the winter months, wind ripped up Hamilton Avenue, whining past plate-glass windows, banking trash against curbs and storefronts. During summer months, the air sat still and gauzy, leaden with humidity, saturated with hydrocarbons. It shimmered over hot cement and melted road tar. Cicadas buzzed, Dumpsters reeked, and a dusty haze hung in perpetuity over softball fields statewide. I figured it was all part of the great adventure of living in New Jersey.

that I turned to my sweetie and said, “this looks promising.”

She was glad to hear me say that, since she had recommended the book to me, and said something like, “The first ten books in the series are all really good. The next ones go downhill, but the fifteenth was the first one I really was disappointed with.” You can probably dispense with the rest of this write-up — that tells you all you need to know.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich is the first of fifteen (and counting) stories of Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, and an interesting assortment of characters that surround her life. Stephanie does not wake up one morning saying “I think I’ll go be a bounty hunter and kick some ass.” Far from it. In fact, in this first installment Stephanie proves herself to be really bad at being a recovery agent. Ill-trained, ill-equipped, and unimposing of physique, she ends up with the job because she can’t find any other. Her cousin the bail bondsman doesn’t think she will succeed, but hasn’t got much to lose letting her try for a week.

Stephanie does have one advantage: She’s a local girl, and some of the kids she grew up with are still around, working as cops and storekeepers. It is this network that will allow her to survive.

Not all her friends are on the right side of the law. At the top of her list of people to apprehend: Joe Morelli. She hasn’t seen him since she hit him with her car years ago, in retaliation for his taking her virginity behind a deli counter and then never calling. You might say they have a history.

Stephanie is in way over her head, and if she were the stereotypical lone wolf hero type she would have been dead in two days. One man she tries to apprehend laughs at her, steals her stuff (including her brand-new gun), and slams his door in her face. There’s nothing she can do except call for help, and help comes. I imagine this is much more like what a real newbie bounty hunter would go through, no matter how badass they were.

What does she bring to the job that makes us care whether she succeeds or not? Well, she’s persistent, no doubt about that. And she’s courageous. She’s got grit. Moxy. A desperate need for cash. She’s willing to learn from her mistakes and it’s easy to imagine that one day she’ll be a kick-ass bounty hunter, if she lives long enough. (The release of the fourteenth novel in the series would indicate that she will live long enough.) I wonder if I’ll like her as much when she knows what she’s doing.

Meanwhile, Stephanie and Joe are driving each other crazy. She’s not good enough to capture him, but she’s persistent enough to cause him serious trouble. When she needs a car, and Joe’s is just sitting there going unused… well, what’s he going to do, call the police?

Joe is not Stephanie’s most serious problem, however; there’s a psychopathic boxer who likes to rape and torture women who has set his sights on her. He is very creepy and very scary and a real, believable threat to her life.

There are a lot of interesting characters (some of which are automobiles) in this book, and while they all have quirks, they are all believable. The reason for this is consistency – I never once thought, ‘Ramirez would never do that’. Well, actually there was one point where I thought exactly that, and in fact he hadn’t done it. Characters are consistent enough that behavioral changes are significant clues. It’s sad that we can’t take such basic craftsmanship for granted when we pick up a book to read, but let’s appreciate when it’s done well.

There’s an interesting quirk to the writing and I wonder if it’s intentional. Many times Stephanie comes home to her empty apartment (new extra deadbolt installed on the door) and we follow her through a series of mundane tasks — setting down her bag, putting away her keys, splashing water on her face or whatever. It’s the kind of thing that other books and screenplays use to slide us into the “She’s not alone!!!” moment. So trained have I been with this device that it’s more of a surprise now when she is alone. I was surprised several times in this story. Probably the author was just using these lulls for pacing, not realizing that she would be pushing my suspense button. It was pleasant all the same.

Naturally I have a couple of criticisms. The most serious is that the bad guy does the classic full-confession-before-I-kill-you-in-a-complicated-manner mistake, which really wasn’t necessary.

Overall I really enjoyed the language and the descriptions. The passage I quoted at the start uses some pretty high-falutin’ language but it reads gritty, which means the writer has mastered the language, rather than the other way around. There are lots of descriptions like this, where Evanovich finds just the right word to really put us in the scene. (OK, in the above I could quibble with shifting the scope of the description from a street to the entire state, but that’s the kind of thing you notice later, when you go back to take a closer look at a passage you particularly enjoyed.)

Will I read Two for the Dough? I don’t know. Probably, eventually. There are a lot of books on my shelf to be read first, though. While I liked this story plenty, it did not fill me with the burning desire to sit down and plow through the entire series.

public function sendCommunication($oCommunication)
{
    if (self::emailMode != EMAIL_TEST_MODE_NONE) {
        if (self::emailMode == EMAIL_TEST_MODE_LOGGED_IN_ONLY) {
            // DO NOT COMMENT OUT THE FOLLOWING LINES
            // EVER
            // FOR ANY REASON
            // INSTEAD CHECK THE TEST MODE AND SET THE ADDRESS FIELDS ACCORDINGLY
            $oCommunication->to = $oCommunication->from;
            $oCommunication->cc = '';
        }

Now, I ask you, even if you’re not a programmer, you know there’s one thing you would never, ever, do to the above code. Right? Now let’s say you are a programmer, a professional, being paid because of your ability to find solutions to problems and express them in an abstract language.

Now further imagine that changing the above code can lead to the customers of the people paying for this work getting spammed with confusing emails with our client’s name on them.

Yeah, you guessed it.

I’m not sure what The Casserole is, but when the light of my life mentions it I can hear the capital letters.

The crudely-crafted Web site at jerssoftwarehut.com no longer accepts payment for Jer’s Novel Writer software licenses, and bears the following statement:

Well, it’s happened; I have a regular job. As I slave away working for the man I often wonder if things might have been different had I only worked harder at making Jer’s Software Hut a business rather than a hobby. Probably now we will never know. It was a good run but it’s time to ackowledge that development is stalled and customer service around here has been really awful.

That pretty much says it all; despite thousands of happy users, some of whom even paid for the software, when it came time to have a steady income again I took the safer path of working for someone else. (The ironic twist to this narrative I will leave for another time.)

It was a good run, and as I get my work life under control I hope soon to at least return to using Jer’s Novel Writer for its intended purpose – as a writing tool that helps me create fiction. Until I do that I can’t even consider opening the shutters on the Hut and throwing the big switch that raises the lightning rod into the violent midnight thunderstorm, while sparks fly and the turbines spin faster and faster, the needles on their gauges creeping ominously into the red. Maybe someday, though. Maybe someday.

It is a common practice these days for publishers to put a series of questions at the end of their more ‘literate’ offerings. The purpose of the questions is to help drive book club discussions, and therefore book club sales. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith is no exception. The last of these study questions reads thus:

Some scholars believe that the zombies were a last-minute addition to the novel, requested by the publisher in a shameless attempt to boost sales. Others argue that the hordes of living dead are integral to Jane Austen’s plot and social commentary. What do you think? Can you imagine what this novel would be like without the violent zombie mayhem?

This was a question I had asked myself many times while reading the book. If our protagonist, Elizabeth, were not a superlative zombie slayer, trained in the ways of Shaolin and other deadly Eastern arts, what would she do instead? Skimming Project Gutenberg’s archive of an earlier draft of the story, it seems Elizabeth was originally an accomplished musician. That’s not bad, but the motivation of this pursuit seems mainly to attract the best mate possible.

And what of Mr. Darcy, her foil in this early example of the I-hate-you-so-much-I-must-love-you story? Even as a highly refined killing machine he doesn’t bring that much to the table except a generous nature (it turns out – sorry for the spoiler) and a lot of money. Take away his skill with blade and musket and there’s not much left.

So bring on the zombies, I say. Let Elizabeth kill several of Lady Catherine’s ninja bodyguards. Let the final confrontation between Catherine and Elizabeth take place in a dojo, with swords and grievous wounds. Let Mr. Bennett spend an amiable morning with Mr. Bingley trapping, decapitating, and incinerating the undead. Let Mr. Wickham — oh, but there I go spoiling things again. Anyway, let’s give these people some teeth!

As an afterthought, I would be curious to know how well a student would do on a typical exam for the abridged Austen-only version, having read and Zombies instead. Would some teachers decide that reading the expanded version was better than not reading it at all? Would some teachers say quietly to unmotivated students, “If you read the zombie version you can still pull a B”?

As always, if you use the above link to buy this book, I get a kickback.

In the meantime, happy birthday, sweetie! Let’s do that again lots of times!

It is possible that my brother took my eyebrow mojo – he certainly has more going on on his forehead than most.

Recently my sweetie and I were cuddling and she started to laugh. “Oh, my God,” she said (or something like that), “you have a crazy eyebrow hair! Go look in the mirror!” I did and she was right; I have one big kinky gray eyebrow hair.

My only notable eyebrow hair.

Man, I sure hope so. That would be cool.

What you do: Write one of the best 12-page screenplays ever. Send it in.

What they do: Choose the best of the screenplays submitted, bring you out to Albuquerque, and provide you with a mostly-skilled crew and (usually) a film industry mentor to help you get the job done. Cameras, grip, and whatnot are provided.

What happens next: After casting local talent and getting everything ready, teams have three days to shoot and four to edit, before the films are judged by an industry panel and then shown in a big theater packed with enthusiastic people. It’s a good time. You can read of my experience in the Shootout Under the Pirates! category. I advise starting with the oldest episodes and working forward in time.

If you have a flair for writing cool short movies, you really can’t go wrong with this festival. It’s a lot of work getting a film to the screen, but here’s a chance to make it happen. Check out The official Duke City Shootout Web page for the lowdown.

What are you waiting for? Get to work on that script!