Year in review and the Ghosts of Topics Past

December 7, 2009 By 3 Comments
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FirstFridayFreeze
Image by Moriartys via Flickr

I’ve never been a big celebrator of the New Year – a reset of our planetary lap timer – as having any particular meaning.  I reset my life, goals, directions, and attitude whenever it seems time. But 2009 was a completely crazy year for me in nearly every possible sense.

I rode the Light Rail with no pants on, leading to the formation of ImprovAZ.  I posed as a coroner, welcomed back strangers at the airport, and dressed in spandex and a skull mask in broad daylight.  I left my job at Intel at the height of a recession, started to launch my own venture, then left-turned into joining a digital marketing firm. Ignite Phoenix went from 140 people to nearly 600, with the last one including a band, a radio station, and a t-shirt firing robot. I started chairing the Phoenix Social Media Club. I helped found the non-profit Phoenix Innovation Foundation to support local events. I attended a mountain of great local events, and a most excellent SXSW for the first time. I was featured on the cover of the Phoenix New Times. I met so many great and interesting people that I think I could have a full time job just trying to have coffee with them all.

I also received quite an education about social media, the Phoenix community, and most importantly about myself.

During much of all this there were interesting conversations that flew about on blogs and Twitter, but I became less involved as the year wore on. Partly was for lack of time, and partly was due to the nature of some of the conversations. Hindsight being what it is, in some cases I think I made the right call, but others I’m not so sure.  Sitting here now, there are some things I want to say. Nothing profound, nothing earth shattering, just things I want to clear out of my noggin’ for my own year end restart.

I’ll likely start here, then kick some topics over to Improv Media as I get going.  Hopefully it won’t be too much navel-gazing, and hopefully it will help me get back into a regular writing cadence.  We shall see.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome.

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Another new screenplay? My brain a’splodes.

January 30, 2008 By 2 Comments
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My Screenwriting III class starts tonight for me (I missed the REAL first class last week due to work related travel), and they want me to start a brand new screenplay for it.¬†¬† Let’s see… I have the “competition screenplay” that I worked on with two friends that I still want to rewrite, the screenplay I started for SW I, and the one I worked on for Script Frenzy last year and started refining in my SW II class.¬† Now with this new one I’ll have four active screenplays rattling around in my noggin.

Apparently each level of this SW curriculum¬† wants to start with a clean sheet of paper.¬† I get that from the standpoint of refining technique at script creation, which is a tricky process all by itself, but I think I’ve reached my brain limit.¬† I’ve taken the goal with my writing group to get Rev 2 of one of the screenplays done by end of March, which will be a nice feeling.¬† At least then the screenplays won’t all be at the same development stage.

Anyway, this is mostly idle grumbling as I do love writing and am getting much better at the screenplay style as these classes wind on.¬†¬† It’s all good.

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