Monday, November 18, 2013

Blogging Bad in the Old ABQ

Is blogging bad? Instead of writing for National Novel Writing Month, I've been up blogging. The same goes for writing my Breaking Bad spec script (How Saul meets Gus) to get on the Better Call Saul staff. I also have scripts for all those short films about Albuquerque...well you get the idea. Is this silly little blog worth it?

I only have an hour of writing time in the morning, two at the most, so it really is a zero sum game. When I was working on the National Novel Writing Month project, I tried to blog after I wrote. I was hoping that there would be some synergy. I'd write the novel, write about writing the novel, and then that would give me more ideas for the novel, and then more ideas for writing about writing the novel. It sounds good in theory, but when I look at the clock and it's time to get to work, I realized that thinking about thinking about writing about writing doesn't put words on the screen in either place.

One of my faithful readers came up to me and asked me if I ever got in touch with the Breaking Bad people to get on the staff of Better Call Saul. I had indeed come up with a good solid outline. When I lived in LA, it was gospel that to get on staff of a show you need to write a spec script of another show. The idea seemed too easy, and while I was blogging everything just flowed. I blogged about it another few times, but then I realized something, I no longer had script software. I can blog all day, but I can't properly put in character names or Cut To:

That goes for writing the short scripts about Albuquerque. These stories are mainly about job interviews and dates that occurred during my nearly forty years of living here. Several people in the Albuquerque film community have approached me about turning the short stories from the Laws & Loves collection into films we can post on youtube. Needless to say without script software, I've been hesitant. I've been up doing this.

Not only am I blogging instead of writing, I'm checking on my blogs instead of writing. No, I'm not editing, I'm actually checking on the number of hits as if each blog is a stock. It would be one thing if like Facebook or Twitter, and it went up. I keep thinking that the hundred or so people that read me every morning will each recommend me to another hundred of their friends, and I will have Bud Fox take me public.

I would like to think that these blogs have some value of their own. Perhaps the local local publishers will publish a collection of these blogs as a book, and that book will be the basis of an HBO show like "Sex in the City" or God Forbid, Girls. I also have gained experience in coming up with short non-fiction on the fly. Perhaps I can use this as a writing sample for something else.

Still it is too early to tell whether the blogging is been for bad, or whether in the long run, I've been blogging good.

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