Candy and Characters.

E. generously supplies our apartment with candy. It's wonderful, except that it sits right in front of my on our dining room table where I do my work. It's vaguely reminiscent of the opening pages of The Princess Bride [most amazing book ever] where the Duchess de Guiche tries to bring down Annette the scullery maid [the most beautiful woman in the world the year Buttercup was born] by filling their palace with chocolate. And it works. I try to ignore the mounds of candy before me. It's an excercise in self control.

Also, if you've never read The Princess Bride, put everything else on hold until you do.

In the never ending battle of TV specs versus pilot, Bones creator Hart Hanson has extended the tie, saying that when he's looking to staff, he wants to see both a spec and original material. A point for both teams, and maybe it's time I pull that spec off the bookshelf.

Except I'm knee deep in two pilots as it is. I have maybe two full days' work left on the first draft of Places. I know already that I have a lot of work left to do on it, mostly stemming from the characters. One doesn't get enough interaction with the rest of the crew, one just isn't likeable at all [which is weird--since I sorta based the character on a friend... Oh, and don't everyone get paranoid, geez], and overall, they just aren't distinctive enough. I believe that characters need to be more than people; they need to be personalities. And they need to shine in ways that make us compulsively drawn to watch them. This doesn't mean that characters have to be over the top. They just have to be able to pull an audience in, and I don't think my slate of characters can do that yet.

And then I have a pilot out to friendly readers. It's been out for a while, and I haven't heard anything yet back, which inspires this terrible dread, mostly a fear that it was so boring that everyone read the first five pages, got distracted, and never returned. I think I'll be miserable if I found out I bored people.

I'd be miserable, and then I'd try to fix it.

In the meantime, I'm mulling over this contest from the Writer's Store. I haven't done a contest in forever, but I'd love to dabble in the spy genre. Also, what better way to procrastinate writing the Western I have percolating than by writing 15 pages of material that is unsellable and unuseable except for this contest? Perfect, I think.