The Chronicles of Rick

I was walking to the parking garage in Chinatown after a long morning. I had to wake up around 8 o'clock (which in my world means it's still bedtime for me) to go to my bi-annual dentist appointment which doubled as a hair-cut day for the family.

Anyways, we just finished buying our groceries for the week and were about to go home. I just received a call from my buddies to go hang out and have lunch at the chinese buffet (9.99 for all you can eat lunch, fuck yeah I'm going). Given that I was already in Chinatown, it was an offer I couldn't refuse for the sake of convenience. Holding bags of groceries in my hand, I ventured down to the parking garage with my mom and sis to drop things off and head back out. It was there that I heard a familiar tune, which if anybody has ever been rick rolled, would have recognized almost instantaneously.

Now, having been on the internet for a while, I've been rickroll'd quite a few times. I hate it when it happens, not because I hate the song, but more for the utter disappointment you feel when you click on a link to see whatever it is you want to see (no, I'm not talking about porn... ahem) and be greeted with the elvis haired ginger Rick Astley dancing as hard as a white kid could in the 80's.

It's just the thought that someone would actually be singing along to a C.D. of Rick Astley that disturbs me the most. Not that I have anything against it. I just wished I could see the face of the driver when he realized he wasn't the only person in the garage (the music died rather quickly after he saw us).

I guess this could be a continuing series of posts. If I'm unlucky enough to get rickroll'd in real life (meaning I encounter the song never gonna give you up in real life and not on the internet), I will record the circumstances of the rick roll and add it on my blog.

this was when I was rickroll'd in Chinatown's parking garage.

The Agony of Defeat

Stanley Cup finals are over and as you'd expect, and much to my disappointment over my pessimistic prediction, the Vancouver Canucks lost against the Boston Bruins in seven games. I'm sad but strangely not too much so.

The Canucks accomplished quite a lot this season. We led the league in goals differential, had the best power play, penalty kill, won the President's Trophy and finally defeated the Blackhawks and advanced past the second round to play to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. We were just one win away from winning it all. All in all, it's not too bad of an improvement over last year where we fell in the second round to the Chicago Blackhawks.

But you know, you're not really a true sports fan until after you shared in their many disappointments. It's great sharing in a team's victory, you're overjoyed, you scream and you bask in the glow of the team winning the championship. But when you lose, man it sucks, especially when you're so close to winning the Cup.

That's really the spirit of being a sports fan. You celebrate the victories as one and you share the disappointment of defeat.

So ends my extended vacation from writing. I'm getting back on the bike and trying to write consistently again. Maybe I'll have more blog posts, but most likely, I'm gonna finish my outline for my script. I haven't been showing up for work the past few weeks on this thing (mainly because it's summer) so hopefully, I find my writing legs soon.

Getting back on the Bike

It's been a while since I fired up the word processor to write, outline or do any kind of prep work for my script. Actually it's been a while since I wrote anything that wasn't school related. But that's the thing about life, you go to school (or if you're older, work), come home study and relax a little and once magic hour comes for you to start getting work done on the page, you think to yourself that you had a big day, you're kinda exhausted, and quite frankly, you're not feeling like writing.

Welcome to the last few months of my life.

I've been off of school for about two weeks and it certainly doesn't feel like it. It feels that I just finished my last final the night before and I still need to catch up on my rest to be at 100 percent before I start writing again.

Every night I tell myself, "tonight is the night I'm gonna sit my ass down and write" and every night for the last two weeks, I've found another excuse not to. Either I want to catch up on the movies I haven't seen or I want to finish giving notes on a script to a friend, or whatever. I blame the fact that school has been a burdensome orangutan for the past few months. It sapped me of what little will power I had to write by making me write essays. By the end of the school year, I just wanted to sit back and let myself go a little. Just relax. It's gotten so bad that I stared playing video games again, that's how much I wanted to escape putting words to the page.

But... I have only about two months left before I leave for school in the fall. That means I have about two months left to finish writing my script... or at least an outline.

Hockey News: Vancouver vs San Jose

Well, it's a dream match up for me. The San Jose Sharks are playing against my team, the Vancouver Canucks.

This is truly a hockey series where the fan wins no matter who does. Vancouver has finally advanced to their first western conference finals in 17 years and will battle for the position to compete in the Stanley Cup Finals.

The San Jose Sharks are repeat visitors from last year hoping to break through the conference finals after they lost in a sweep against Chicago, the eventual Stanley Cup champions of last year.

Both sides are battling against criticism as playoff underachievers. Both are hoping to prove these very critics wrong, but only one team will be able to do so.

I am very excited to watch this series.

Hockey: Or Why There's Going to be Few Updates this Month

I know that I haven't been updating this blog as much as I want to, but that's mainly because of my having to worry about schoolwork as well as doing my own writing. But it's April, and that means one thing:

It's the Stanley Cup Playoffs. If there's one thing that's going to keep me from writing, it's going to be hockey. But this year, much like last, won't be too much of a problem.

My team, the Vancouver Canucks, can't seem to win against the Chicago Blackhawks in any series ever and even though the series stands at 3-2 in favour of the Canucks, I'm not holding my breath for a victory. We were blown out of the water two games in a row: 7-2 in game four and shut out 5-0 in game 5. And this is after securing a 3-0 lead in the series. Let's face it, gotta give it to the Blackhawks for having the skills to beat us despite the great purge last year where they traded 10 players in order to remain under their salary cap. Canucks added depth to the roster but it never seems like enough to beat the Blackhawks.

It's hard to watch the game when the team, in it's regular season, was the president's trophy winner and have them lose two games back to back in blowout fashion. It's hard to watch the game knowing that the team leads the league in power play, penalty kills, goals for and goals against and have them play that horribly against the Blackhawks to games in a row. It's hard to believe after watching this, that this teams still has a legitimate run at the cup, knowing full well that the teams we may be facing against will either be the San Jose Sharks or the Detroit Red Wings.

This may not be our year but hopefully, it will be soon. Hopefully in a few years from now, I will have a full stoppage in writing and watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs with my team in the finals and their shot of finally winning the Cup.

My Writing Style

If you ask 10 writers how they write, you're going to get 10 different answers. I had taken the advice to write a specific page quota. Stephen King writes 10 pages a day. Because I try to write scripts, I wrote 3 pages a day (so that I could have finish a draft in a month's time). The problem I found, was that I wasn't so concerned with the quality of the pages that I was writing, I was more concerned with how fast I could finish it.

Now, some will say that, for first drafts, that should be your only concern. But for me, it becomes a big roadblock because I lose interest in the draft. I don't want to continue writing something that I know is bad. That's not to say I expect gold from the first minute I write either. It's just a self defeating process when you plow away at 3 pages a day and not look back at the story thinking to yourself, "Don't worry about it, you'll fix in the next draft" only to go back and read that draft and think to yourself "There's nothing here I can use". It sucks the passion out of the project for me. Pretty soon, you look at the page count and kick yourself for not writing three pages a day and you pull up the Final Draft program.

You start writing only to lose passion in it because you start to think about what you wrote the night before and how shitty it is. You plow through another 3 pages of shitty writing and want nothing more than to start over again but you're too far into the draft to give up. Then you start finding excuses not to write, because 3 pages a night is too much damn work with school to worry about.

Suffice it to say, writing 3 pages a day may get the pages done, but it don't write a script.

Frustrated with my current process, I decided to write a short script a few weeks ago in order to take my mind off of this current behemoth of a script. The short concerned a coulrophobic businessman being stuck in an elevator with a clown. It's not any good, but it got me excited to write a new story. Because I knew it wouldn't be longer than 20 pages, I wasn't concerned with making a page quota so I was free to write as much as I could for as long as I could. I was free to experiment.

And strangely enough it worked.

Here were a few things I discovered about my own writing process as I was writing this short script. I found that I liked to edit things and reread what I wrote as I was writing. It certainly goes against the conventional wisdom people tell you about writing, "Just get the first draft done, don't edit and don't concern yourself with making it good". I guess it's just not me. I like the hybrid of editing while I write, I like being able to throw a scene out that I just wrote and completely restructure it. I like this way, my way.

So here I am with another process. Instead of a page quota, I'm setting aside a certain amount of time each night to write. It seems to be working fine for the moment, but it is an incredibly slow process. There are nights where I did nothing but editing what I wrote the night before and look at the page count only to see that I'm two pages shorter than I was last night. But the work is something that I can be proud enough to say that it's a work in progress.

But I guess my main concern right now should be consistency. I'll do whatever thing is necessary to keep me writing.

Strange Sight

It was a Saturday and I was out on one of the rare occasions where I was in Chinatown with my Mother and little sister. I just got my hair cut and my mom wanted to go and get some groceries for the night's dinner.

Because I didn't want to wait inside the grocery store, and neither did my sister, we elected to go out and wait by the street, directly in front of the store, right in front of the vegetables and newspapers and the seemingly always wet concrete. It was better than staying inside the perpetually dirty and fishy smelling grocery store (comes with the territory if you actually sell fish)

So this guy comes out of the grocery store with his dad. Now, the dude couldn't have been older than me, but he certainly was bigger (I'm 5 "5 in comparison -- short, but that shouldn't stop you, ladies). He had this real "Don't fuck with me" kinda attitude, the sorta person that doesn't take bullshit and bad news too well. His little brother was less like him and more "in the moment" and completely happy for being in it. The kid looked downright jovial in comparison to his ultra serious big bro. So the little kid goes in one direction play pretending like he was either an airplane or Superman (can't really tell what goes on in a little kid's mind). His big bro and their father were going in the other direction.

Now, at this point I was thinking that the little kid should be more mindful of his surroundings. Will the kid snap out of his daydream and follow his family? Will the kid's family even notice that this little kid was too busy playing in his pretend world that he's ? How pissed off will this bigger brother look if he found out his little brother went missing? Is there an even more pissed off face than the one he wears?

But I guess I didn't really have much to wonder about. It was like he had this sixth sense of where his brother is. Without turning his head, the big brother snapped his fingers, yelled "Phillip!" and like a little dog, his brother came scampering up to his sides.

My sister and I witnessed this and I remarked that I've never seen such a well trained sibling. We both laughed and felt sorry for this dude's little brother.

Then, my sister turned to me looked me in the eyes and said, "If you ever treated me like that, I would've cut your balls off".

Somehow I get the feeling I missed out on an opportunity when my parents looked to me to babysit my sister when we were younger.