the groundhog day project

Today's film is a little bit of a cheat like Highlander was. While I saw Stand By Me in the theater, it was not really a fixture in my movie life until I was a teenager and I bought my own copy on VHS. But, then this was a movie I would watch time and time again, only in my 20s. And, I even ripped it off a little bit--or paid homage to it, I suppose--in my second novel. Actually, I think that was more ripping off--or paying homage to-- It actually. There was even a battle between kids throwing kids at each other. The thing is, speaking of my writing, I often snagged bits of setup or stylistic things from Stephen King. For example, in my... I want to say fourth novel-- (None of these have been properly published, by the way. I had a few of my novels available self-published for a bit about a decade-and-a-half ago, but no longer. I recently did a re-edit of what's probably my best writing--a novel called Clubhouse Blues , which I'm sure I've mentioned in this b...

Sunday morning, October 16, 1994, the underground theater in Old Town Pasadena. Officially, it's called the AMC One Colorado. Throughout the 1990s I would go there a lot. This time, I'm there for Pulp Fiction . I had only recently started my subscription to Entertainment Weekly so I'm fairly sure I knew about this film this weekend because I read the review in the Los Angeles Times that Friday morning, sitting in a classroom in Waite Phillips Hall. Discussion section of an anthropology class. I had the Times delivered daily back then, even made an effort to read it, especially the Calendar section. And, I made my way to Old Town for movies as often as I could. I wouldn't work at the United Artists Marketplace a block from the underground theater until '95. Thursday night, February 11, 2016, my living room floor. Groundhog didn't see his shadow last week so winter's over and it's been hot this week. Got a fan to my right, my son Kieran sitting in the ...

In class tonight, we were talking about finding a story. Like, you're producing a news story and you're in a situation and you need to know the main elements of the scene, but the story... the story has to be found. And, I got sidetracked in my head. I thought about one of my unpublished novels, possibly the best one of the bunch. It's called Clubhouse Blues . It began as my third attempt at a new storytelling format--a serialized story put online one chapter at a time. It was set in the same small California town as two of my previous novels-- Seeing Her Naked  and Twice Into the Same River . Each of these was built around children and/or teens trying to, you know, figure out life. Seeing Her Naked had run for ten chapters, building an audience as I emailed out chapters as I wrote them. Each chapter was written in one sitting, about one a week. The night I wrote the last chapter was, up until that point, about the most painful night of my life. I was writing on a comput...