3.04.2012

AUDIT: March of 2011 @ hnywork

Elvis and the Apostles    A


First photo ever posted to hnywork:
Cops @ a DD in Woosta
Last March this site started.  Despite the first post coming on the 15th day, this first month counted 21 posts, a number never again reached.  The math is obvious: struggling writer has much backlogged material to upload/unload.  This blog is a workbook, a rough draft, hopefully with a few diamonds in the rough of dead ends.  I've looked through last year at this time, to AUDIT the site, and grade out the content; this is meant as something of a second draft, (or a second life).  All the links, stories, pictures, are getting the rough justice of a year's clarifying distance.  Like some DC Comics "Earth 2" restructuring, this audit judges what was good enough to survive if I had last March back to do over again. Back we go.. March of 2011, and this page is born with all the sound and fury of a nobody.  The posts below are linked if you want to read them.  


STORY: The Three Weyard Sisters
I think I thought this blog could be a work desk on the internet, where others might check in once in awhile and shit down the throat of my work, give advice.  To post an unfinished piece as my opener is an attempt to set the theme.  It's months from evolving to Chazz-like shenanigans, and here a story about a boy revenging the death of his brother at the hands of witches.  Anyone who knows the places could spot the setting of this story as the Saco River I grew up on as a boy.  Because I did complete this story, a month later in a cleaner completed draft, I'm cutting this.
 "It were night around, and their eyes like flakes of quartz, twinkled out of muddy stone.  The tall one held Ned like an infant, and rocked him to make her sister in the water laugh."
GRADE:C- VERDICT:CUT



SCRIP FRAG: Dead Dog: Segment One

The problem, (still is), is how to make screenplay format look less dull when pasted to a blog post.  This opening about a boy losing his dog, his only friend, is, effective enough.  These Mar11 posts feel very much the work of the autumn/winter previous.         

GRADE:C VERDICT:KEEP



Reads like a half-developed set-up for a direct to DVD zombie movie: a cooking staff at a hip lower Manhattan restaurant attempt to fight there way off the zombie island with nothing but their kitchen knives, and their dope.
"Manhattan was bad geography.  Watching the streets those first nights we saw the zig-zag lines of the plagued sniffing out clean meat.  I suppose everywhere else it was the same,  but with the prospect of escaping the island, an insurmountable labyrinth with a minotaur of three million by the third day, it was the end; one had to look at oneself and evaluate, (re-evaluate), one’s purpose: a terrifying prospect when one was a restaurant critic -- not the skill set to latch on with other survivors.
What saved me was spending the first three innings of Armageddon at the Spotted Dick, with fifty of the most useless humans to survive that bad seventy-two; a herd of trust fund Richies now three days at the bar with what private pharmaceuticals they had with them; the infected clawing at the blockaded entrance as musical accompaniment.  When Chef Martin Benoit, that sawed off, addled maestro came down the stairs from his private quarters, his staff wielding cutlery behind him like Shun storm troopers, his restaurant had degraded to an apocalyptic orgy, as frightening a rabble as the monsters outside."
GRADE:D VERDICT:CUT




VID! Here Comes The Night

A video tribute to Bela Lugosi and Van Morrison posted on YouTube in 2007.  Doesn't fit the Blog.

GRADE:C VERDICT:CUT


RTHR - Comfort Inn Augusta

Clean.  Lots of pillows.  Two ashtrays.  32inch Philips non-hd tv.  Wendys across the street.  Black sink.  Working Man's rate: 85.00.  That rates pretty cool out of coolest.  

(SO short, this is the entire post.  The first hotel review.  I must have thought the blog was going to be a series of dispatches, no photos, scrapwork.  This would be crap for a Facebook post.  Icky.)  

GRADE:F VERDICT:CUT

                                                                   
MLH was something I had been writing for eight years, in one form or another.  The script was not posted in March, just this pitch.  I like this fine.
"a bad scene goes down in Rockland, Maine involving an infamous love triangle, and a more infamous drug bust; an interloper gets the story, and writes a novel based on the mess; as sometimes happens people want to make a movie out of it; and so one cast of characters, a ragtag group of entertainment people come to the wild rural world to tell the story; unfortunately for them and their production, a second cast, the locals who lived the story, are waiting for them"
GRADE:B- VERDICT:KEEP


WS: 87
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate,
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thy self thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me to whom thou gav'st it else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
(William Shakespeare's Sonnet 87.  The one time I've posted content not my own.  At this early time I still think I was thinking of this blog/workbook idea as including excerpts of what I was reading/watching/listening to, as I worked my own things.)
GRADE: X VERDICT:CUT

STORY: Owls Head Menagerie
Less story then bit I wrote to try to get ten stories in for this horror story contest.  This is about a giant lobster who reads Soldier of Fortune.. 
GRADE:D VERDICT:CUT
Another old vid: Taxi Driver (1976) cut to music that I thought was sweet dichotomy.  
GRADE:C VERDICT:CUT

MLH HYPE PROSE 1: The Pizza Boy

Prose work, written from the other side of the storyline from where the MLH teleplay tells it a few months later.

"Even as Lee knows the trail out of heartbreak can be burned on a disc, this twenty-seven minutes of music is an oval race track he's built; he's hurlied, he's burlied, he's all shook up; and there are laps left.  So: to this crevice between the ocean and the town for the alchemy to smooth it out.  For the seventh time since the new year he's getting high on the clock; reminiscing; his is a constipated heart."

GRADE:B- VERDICT:KEEP


A joke poem I wrote about Maine Red Sox fans being Uncle Toms to Massachusetts.  What do you want, I wrote it in twenty minutes.
GRADE:F VERDICT:CUT

STATS! analysis of the MLH Pilot Script

More hype.  

GRADE:D VERDICT:CUT

MLH HYPE PROSE 2 : How a Pizza Boy Falls in Love

Sections 2 and 3 of early MLH prose.  My favorites from last year this time.
"He thought: I am unformed.  You've un'd what form I have; scoop me up, lay me under your chin, I'll have your name the password to  my e-mail; I'll have your eighth grade portrait hidden in my trapper-keeper; I'll steal toy jewelry from that Walmart and leave it on your windowsill, all of this while waiting for you to rebuild me!" 
GRADE:C+ VERDICT:KEEP

MOVIE PITCH: Dead Dog

A pitch for a script.  Nothing flashy.  Serial Killer as working guy on the rural roads of Maine. Something grown out of the environment I was living in, tinkered with as low budget movie.  The first MOVIE PITCH.  
GRADE:C VERDICT:KEEP

LIST! a scripthack's music playlist

Something that survived a few months, posting music I was listening to on the road while writing.  The kind of bit that has been replaced by stupid comedy lists and photos.  A decision was made: how ever bad I miss, I should miss on created content, not lists of songs on my iPhone. 

GRADE:F VERDICT:CUT


MLH HYPE PROSE 4: Anne then Joe Shippey

The last section I've posted from the MLH prose work.  There is more, but not long after this writing the prose intersects with the MLH-It's All True teleplay.  

"Shippey had come down from so far north that, like a wrestling heel, he hailed from points unknown. "    

GRADE:C+ VERDICT:KEEP


HACKWORK: Blacky on the Mountain pt1

Half a werewolf story.  Never posted the second part because no one read this one.  Ironically of all the horror stories I tried at this time, this was the truest to the genre.  Just biker werewolves coming down from Canada into Maine.  It's a werewolf snowplowing story.  Kind of shit.  

GRADE:D VERDICT:CUT


MOVIE PITCH: The Golemic Polemic

I like this pitch.  A whacked out Frankenstein remake where Frankenstein is named Sam Gamgee; the pitch includes an homage to "Walk Like A Man" starring Howie Mandel.  

GRADE:C+ VERDICT:KEEP


HOTEL REVIEW: WORCESTER Comfort Inn

A second dispatch/review excited about falafel delivery in Wooosta! 

GRADE:D VERDICT:CUT 


SONNET:You Weren't Sad Enough 1.1

The reason is you were not sad enough
To see my notes plucked out from under bed
And satchel'd up with all my other stuff
To cross the bridge and go out like you said
You thought the time was left to do goodbye
You thought hello might time and oft resume
When you returned to see our pretty sty
Was there space for you in that little room?
    Was time rid rough by your reflection?
     Do Tigers feed on nat selection?
I don't think this is a bad poem.  Not a good poem.  I'm scared to improve it, because sometimes you hit something, it isn't that good, but you can only make it worse.  As a work of its moment, late March of 2011, worth logging.
GRADE:C+ VERDICT:KEEP


*Last March looks like this:
▼  Mar (21)
by hny @ 3/04/2012

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