TRAMBLINGS...



My I.D. expired on my birthday and I forgot about it until the last minute. Went with my sister to the local DMV to get a new one. Now, first off, my old picture is so breathtakingly bad that my mother took one look and said, "Oh, my god, Chelle. Oh, my god." The Crown Prince saw it once and said, "You look like a thumb print." Oddly enough I agreed. A bizarre cross between a thumb print and MOROCCO MOLE (remember that little guy from Secret Squirrel?) Anyway, when it came time to fill out the paperwork my pencil hesitated over weight. My sister saw that and said, "If they wanted the truth they'd have a scale up in this motherf*cker." Classic. We laughed so hard and, frankly, laughing, each other and music, are the only things getting us through these dark days.

The illness continues and it's a rollercoaster ride for everyone involved. Some days I leave the hospital feeling hopeful and other days I'm so despondent I can't even breath. Today was a good day. Tomorrow? Who knows. Sitting on the side of the bed, reading the same paragraph over and over and over again in whatever book I've chosen for the day, means I've seen an amazing amount of bad TV. The bad stuff is easier to digest because I don't have to think and my sister and I can snark at the screen and amuse each other. In the reality TV world there is so much to make fun of. Is it a requirement on every show that at least one person utters the line, "I'm here to bring it?" Bring what? Unoriginality? The same old ridiculous worn out comments and phrases get recycled again and again. We should start a drinking game.

Watched the boy's night on AMERICAN IDOL and was thoroughly unimpressed. A couple of the girls made me smile but my overall thought was that all of the contestants failed reading comprehension in high school. Did anyone else get the feeling that the majority of these kids didn't understand the lyrics, had no idea what they were singing about or that words strung together actually form sentences, sentences form thoughts, and a song can actually convey an idea or an emotion? Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm old. I can live with that. It just seems to me that their performances might benefit from taking the time to figure out what the songs means. Even if they're wrong it will at least give their singing a point of view. But I did like THIS GIRL, THIS GIRL, and THIS ONE but moreso in the audition phase.

And, in non-TV talk, I have two speaking engagements on the horizon. The offers came to me through this website which is very, very cool. THE LAST KING was published in 2004 so the press for that book is nonexistent these days. Same for THE DYING GROUND because that pub date was 2001. THE FINISH PARTY had a group reading at BOOK PASSAGE last December and it was the first time I'd read in awhile. I read the first chapter of a work-in-progress instead of something from the Maceo series. I spoke at CAL last spring but I read an essay that I'd written for ON HARPER LEE. It's a very personal essay and that was the first and only time I've read it in public. I also read a snippet from THE LAST KING but not much. Reading the same thing becomes tiresome after awhile so I wanted to mix it up a little.

Not sure what I'll read for the upcoming engagements but I'm considering my short story, "A BEST FRIEND NAMED RICK". I think I excerpted it here once. It's up for critique next month with The Finish Party and it's also the short piece my reps include when submitting me for TV shows. In addition to my RESCUE ME spec, the LAW & ORDER: SVU and the original one hour drama, they'll also throw in a short story, a chapter from one of the books or the reviews. "A BEST FRIEND NAMED RICK" was the piece that went out last year during staffing season but it only went to WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB. I didn't submit it to my reps until the end because I thought the other three samples were enough. This time, because staffing season is upon us once again, it'll go with the rest of the samples. The death of Tommy's father on RESCUE ME, and the addition of Larenz Tate to the cast of the show, blew holes in big parts of my script so I don't know how viable that will be. My original spec is "soft" so I need another piece to balance that out. I'm on it.

Three years ago I was visiting my mom and she told me about this story she heard on the news. It blew me away. A great local news story with POTENTIAL all over it. I called the Crown Prince and told him about it. He agreed it was amazing and then I said, "You should do something with it." It didn't seem like a movie or a book but it did have the feel of a great one hour drama. At the time, I was focused on the book and not really planning the transition to TV. I did a little research and found the two small articles written about the story. Then I put it away. A year later the story started to creep up on me again. I asked C.P. about it but he was swamped. Then once I finished my first original spec and gained some confidence in the arena I decided to "take my story back". I asked C.P. if he ever planned to do anything with the idea and he said no.

At the start of staffing season last year I had a meeting with both my TV agents and my manager to figure out the game plan for the season. It was an interesting meeting because each of them had a different favorite out of my samples. But they all loved the new idea when I pitched it. One of my TV agents said, "Please, Nichelle, whatever you do don't tell that idea to anyone. I mean it." Well, this ain't my first time at the rodeo. When my ideas are at the nascent stage I only share them with C.P., my mom or my sister. No one else. The story has to get to the toddler stage (when it can walk on it's own) before I share it with others. My agent, of course, thought it was easy to steal so he was protecting my ass on that end. Well, since WMC - or at least my involvement with WMC - seems to be over it's time to get out there and shake my ass again. Or, to be blunt, I'm back on the ho stroll.

I started outlining the new spec last week, and once that's done I'll write the first draft and then the second and third. My manager said, "It would be great if you finish it in a month." I didn't freak out. I have a lot of down time at the hospital so I try and use it to flesh out my ideas. I do that in my head and write it down later or I stack the novel I'm reading with blank post-it notes and scribble on those. Since I came up with the idea I've had an opening sequence (the teaser) stuck in my head. While in L.A. with the Crown Prince last week I told him the idea and then he told me his. IT. KICKED. ASS. Much better than mine and I am woman enough to admit it. When I expressed my surprise at how thoroughly he'd thought about it he said, "I think about this story every day. Do you want to give it back to me?"

Uh, no.

But that give and take is a perfect example of what happens when two writers, who work in the same genre, share the same space. I read Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING when it was published (loved that book) and one passage stuck with me. Excuse the paraphrasing, I don't have the book here with me in Northern Cal, but it really hit me when Didion said that after the death of her husband she missed the sound of his writing in another room. During the course of an afternoon they'd each be in their separate writing spaces shouting out to one another about the spelling of a word, the structure of a sentence, etc. Didion also talked about reading pages to one another and bouncing ideas around. The silence that engulfed the apartment after his death was different from the silence that existed while the wrote together but apart. C.P. and I often do the same thing. He writes in the morning and morning is not my friend. I write at night which means I have the house to myself. When Kobe was a pup he would stay up with me. Now that he's an old man he bids me adieu at about 10p.m. In the afternoons when C.P. and I are both around we'll often give each other pages to read, help one another to flesh out a character, or talk through a problem with narrative or action.

While I was on script for WMC I wrote until about four or five in the morning, printed out the pages and left them on C.P.'s laptop. Whenever I dragged my carcass out of bed, those same pages would be on my laptop or desk with his edit marks and comments written in the margins. If he was gone I'd call his cell phone to get clarification, argue my point of view or tell him how I planned to go forward. He does the same when he's writing with strict instructions to grammar edit, read for continuity, or general notes. I didn't do this with THE DYING GROUND but I couldn't have written that book if I hadn't met C.P. He introduced me to the real-life Jonathan "Holly" Ford and another friend of his is the physical prototype for Maceo. Besides that, he prodded me to really look at the social ramifications, and not just the personal ones, of the drug wars of the late 80s and early 90s.

Because I was living and writing in northern California at the time, and he was in L.A., I read chapters to him at night over the phone. And I was the first reader of the script that went on to make a splash. By that time I'd sold THE DYING GROUND and was living in New York. He sent me the completed script via FEDEX and I sat in CARL SCHURZ PARK and read it in one sitting. That script got him his first agent, his first script sale, his first rewrite assignment and his first manager. It's all mixed up together but we don't write as a team. We tried it once and, let's just say, it did not go well. In his words, he'd write pages leave them for me to read and I'd just rewrite them. (I was young. What can I say?) Or I'd read a section and say, "I really like that." Not realizing (because of my out-of-control ego) that they were my own words. We still laugh about that. But the deal breaker I think was the "fuck no!" scribbled in the margins when I didn't agree with one of his changes. (Again, I was young but it's a good thing he can laugh about it now). We finished that script and NEVER again tried to write together. Since we're getting married in a couple months that was probably a good decision.

Over dinner once I told my lawyer about the way C.P. and I work together and he almost choked to death. I am not kidding. He lost all the color in his face and had to gulp down two glasses of water before he could talk. He asked me if I thought I might marry C.P. and I responded that I certainly hoped so. His answer, "Great. Good to know. We need to have a serious discussion about intellectual property and a pre-nup." I can dig it. He was looking out for me and my interests. And when C.P. wrote the adaptation of THE DYING GROUND, my attorney treated him, and the producer attached to the project, like strangers on the street. He was a tough negotiator. I think it was his way of working through the stress of the loosey-goosey way his client approached living with another writer. I know other writing couples and they all have similar approaches. Do you guys know any writers that live together and manage to keep things totally separate? Drop me a line if you do.

Anyway, back to the hospital tomorrow, and trying to decide what to read at the next speaking engagement. Maybe I'll make it easy on myself and read from one of the books, maybe I'll read from a short story or a work-in-progress. Maybe I'll read from a story I wrote while taking a creative writing class at SFSU. The first engagement is at a university for the creative writing students. It could be interesting to show them just how green the writing was all those years ago. I'll let you know.

Until next time...

Labels: Reality TV, Research, Speaking Engagements, Writing