We must all take a moment and thank Lt. Sparky – our webmaster, Dave Baxter – for making all the pages look beautiful again. I originaly batch-converted the original 600 dpi bmps into 150 dpi jpegs using Irfanview* on my stupid Vista Lenovo laptop. This obviously did not work (for whatever reason). Dave did something and made it all work. So you can all continue to read the Peach in a pristine format.
Now… as to my present work, I’ve run into a very odd sort of writer’s block. NOTHING I start to write about is interesting to me. I’ve done a couple dozen pages of roughs, and rejected all of them. They are none of them good enough, at least in my opinion. Now I know that the roughs have always looked crappy, and that I’ve added to them as I did finals, but my interest is petering out after five or six pages. I’m being the most snotty editor you’ve ever met.
If we look at the careers of any successful writers we have the obsessive and the journalists. A obsessive has one central idea that obsesses him, and he just continues to send his characters in tight circles around it all his career; Charles Dickens is a famous example. A journalist takes a central idea and embelishes it with whatever hits him in Real Life as it whirls at him; Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe enjoy this category.
I’ve been an obsessive all my writing career (like I need to tall anyone that) and I think I’ve becoming a journalist. This may be because Nearest has forced me to listen to the news on All Things Considered and Canadian radio every day for thirty-five years. It may be because I’ve been working as a freelancer for a navel-fixated rural-county daily and an isolated country weekly.
The script-writer of the movie The Devil Bat was outed to me when the reporter character said to his sidekick photographer, “If I did a thing like that I coudn’t get a job on a country weekly.” After Nearest and I had to stop the video because we were laughing so hard, I giggled, “I will bet you money Ben Hecht was hacking on THIS flick!”
Hecht was the type of glorious hack any writer envies – he could writer about anything because he’d gotten training as seat-of-your-pants news-hound. Nobody else in Hollywood at the time could have supplied those characters or, most particularly, that line.
*I love Irfanview. It’s like a Mac Program. On my Mac, so wonderful for everything else, I have to use that stupid Automator – which uses like a PC programmer snuck in to the development sessions someplace. Including forcing a user to hunt down script, PFT. And doesn’t allow dpi conversion unless you go buy something. We writers don’t pay for anything we don’t have to. So there.
