I have a theory, it could be...

10 points if you know what I'm referencing.

Anway, just popping in to make two points.

1. I supposedly have the assistant stage management gig. Hopefully. They want me to come in on friday, and I'm waiting to hear back from them because of my inability to move another appointment that I have at 2 pm. So hopefully that doesn't shoot everything to hell.
But anyway, its to be the assistant stage manager for a director from Germany who's doing Midsummer. Hopefully there are attractive men on (or off) set, I mean...
That definitely shouldn't be something that I fixate on.
So cross your fingers and toes, and hope for the best!

2. You may or may not have heard...read... about how I'm trying to write a book. I've written plays just fine, short stories have gone swimmingly. But this novel thing, yeesh. The problems mostly lie in the fact that I hate description and imagine anything and everything as a film or play, which means emphasis on dialogue and narration, and an inability to stomach things like character description or just how grey the sky is on a Tuesday morning.
I have my ideas, I have an arch that goes for more than one "book," but I just can't get it written down.

So my first thought was, "Hey, Katie, why not just say damn it to hell and write the thing as a screenplay. You can always turn it back into a book later. And you love dialogue." Okay, great. One problem solved.

Second thought, "Yo, you need more people, especially since you have this ridiculous love of knocking off characters midway through the story. I get it, they're plot vehicles. You also have the nasty habit of letting the good guys die, and letting the antagonists remain amoral assholes. So more people, please." Fixed that problem as well. Now, I've got a whole 'nother band who appears every so often. Minor characters in the first book (or part, or whatever it is you want to call it), several of whom become bigger in the third part.

Now the third thought, and the one that I've been wrestling with all day. If I am to write this more as a screenplay, than I need to make the actual locations logical and grounded. I need the visuals just in terms of my own writing abilities. Not to mention, as a reader, I love to be able go "Okay, yeah, I'm with you on that, I know where that is" when reading a book or watching a film. Examples being Children of Men (London), Being Human (Bristol), True Blood (Louisiana, ignore the fact that 2/3 of it is filmed in that other LA... Los Angeles).

I love that connection, because it means less work for the writer, less work for the reader, and a fully fleshed out idea of the setting. In the earliest incarnation of my concept, I had it set 60 years in the future in London, but that just didn't jive. So I set it in a limbo world, present day, that looks like every major city and none of them at the same time. I loved that idea, really I did. For awhile. Due to my own lack of experience, stubborness, and let's face it, laziness, it got old.

So in the rapid fire brainstorming that I've been doing for the past week (and I've had a lot of time to do that, what with being in New York and having no friends or job to speak of), I started to think about what I love about those shows and films that incorporate the "set in a city near you" sort of mentality.

And I just figured out the answer. And of course it lay right there, with my Twilight Zone dvds. I love reading a book and thinking at first "Oh Hey, that's New York/San Francisco/wherever," but then realizing that something is amiss. And we all know that The Twilight Zone is the Godfather of that mentality. Thinking about that, brought to mind one show that I saw in London. In order to get the show we had to go way out into the dockyards, these monumental industrial revolution era slums that now lie completely empty and barren across the Thames (except when a theatre company rents one out for a showing of Faust, that is). It's bizarre because you can see how busy everything is, just across the river, but right there is as empty as the day is long. Walking around is beyond bizarre because it feels like you're in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And that emptiness is crushing and scary as hell.

Long story short, I combined that vision of London, the juxtaposition with the cramped and thriving living quarters all throughout the city with this empty shell, and the Twilight Zone one-two punch and thought "why not set it IN London. But not just London, but an inverted city. The bustling sections that we know and love are empty, the controlled area where few live, and the empty sections that no one ever goes to are over crowded with undesirables."

Yes, this isn't a particularly novel concept, but hell, it sure does ground a story.
And since I already read/write/see things as though it's already a film, I'd know exactly what locations I am talking about.

I guess it always comes back to London for me.




Ignore the switch in verb tense and my inability to spell. I could care, or I could go and re-plot, re-set, and re-watch ep2 of Being Human.