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06/15/2004 Archived Entry: "Sunny days"

LAST WEEK WAS BAD NEWS. The juxtaposition of the morally depraved torture memos with the endless state-worship of the Reagan funeral coverage was hard to take. Besides, it was mid-June and spring still hadn't sprung. Cold and gloom -- ugh. A December mood.

Today the sun is shining. And there's not one thing in the news that's absolutely awful. In fact, as Silver points out over at TCF, there's wonderful news of Burt Rutan and Paul Allen headed toward the X Prize -- venturing into space with entirely private funds. I love Rutan's line about government "help" always making everything so expensive.

Even the bad news seems no more than silly -- like this article Jebur27 found about G8 protestors being arrested and charged with giving false names -- when in fact, they didn't give any names. DUH.

Some chivalrous Linux gurus at The Claire Files helped me get my laptop computer back online yesterday -- a great reminder of the good sides of both the Internet and the human race. Today looks so much brighter, literally and figuratively. And it's a pleasure to be computing while lying in bed again, with dogs at my feet and a cat at my side, looking up over the monitor to see mottled sun shining through the branches of the trees.

I'm also enjoying the challenges of working on my first screenplay (although Life, in typical Life fashion, likes to make it hard for me to actually get down and do that work). I like starting with somebody eles's original story, then changing and changing and changing until the old bones have all new flesh on them. Concocting a plot from scratch is terrifying -- something along the lines of exploring the Arctic, I think -- or maybe like venturing into space. So I admire fiction writers who can do that well, and heaven forbid I understand the ones who do it badly. But once somebody else has started at Point A and gone to Point Z, then there's a path and a known destination. Much easier and very gratifying to come in then and say, "Oh look, you could get to Point C so much more interestingly by turning here." Or, "Hey, you can bypass Points M-R altogether and make the journey much more quickly."

Guess I'd better get to it now, though, if we're going to make that journey at all.

Posted by Claire @ 09:34 AM CST
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