Survive the City.

Hey, guys, do me a favor. Survive the City is undergoing an expansion and revamp, and I've become part of the team that's going to bring it to ya (yeah, 'cause I don't have enough projects to work on), so go and sign up for their monthly newsletter! It's all about what to do and how to live in the great city of L.A., and it's also just a neat way to stay on top of one of my projects and see occasional samples of my writing if you're into that sort of thing.

Postscript.

"It will be an excellent way for me to find out if I have what it takes to put in the 60, 70, 80!!! hours that a television writer puts in every week."

Be careful what you wish for. I was just informed by my boss at Yahoo! TV that they're going to need to gradually ramp up my hours over the next few months, culminating in a FRENZY of writing in October that will amount to about 40 hours of work a week. After that I'll go back to my 10 hours a week I believe, but add the autumn writing frenzy to my 20 hour internship and my work with Sheila, and for a couple of months there I may be working something close to TV writer hours!

In other news, I did my first 4 hours for the ghostwriting internship today, and it was exhilarating. The time flew by as though I were having fun, so I guess I was.

Full time.

So, I just signed up for a 20-hour-a-week unpaid internship as a ghostwriter. Add that onto the hours I'm working for Sheila Kelley and the increased hours Yahoo! TV just gave me and for the first time since before my marriage I find myself with a 40-hour work week.

Now, I never did very well with 40-hour work weeks before, but this is different, because I'm not spending 40 hours a week processing mortgage applications or shelving books or answering phones to finance my writing habit. I'm spending 40 hours a week writing, and 20 of it paid well enough to make up for the other 20. In fact, even with only half my hours paid, I'm still making more than I ever made at any of my other 40-hour-a-week gigs. That's not saying a lot, since I've only ever freelanced part-time, and my only full-time gigs were entry-level receptionist crap, but still, how cool is it that I can do what I love 40 hours a week and do as well or better financially than I've ever done?

In addition, my newly demanding schedule will serve as a sort of halfway point to what I want to put myself through later. It will be an excellent way for me to find out if I have what it takes to put in the 60, 70, 80!!! hours that a television writer puts in every week. Stay tuned for reports of my smashing success or dismal failure.

My new mantra.

"Your opinion of me is none of my business."

Heard this earlier in the week and fell in love with it, because it's the exact opposite of the way I've been living my life, but it's the exact way I should be living my life.

Frack.

So as if I haven't had the chance to do enough awesome things lately, last night by virtue of my semi-tenuous connection to Yahoo! TV I got to attend a special Battlestar Galactica event at the Arclight Cinerama Dome. For those of you who haven't watched the show because the title sounds silly or you don't like sci fi...

...watch it.

Anyhoo, the four "big guns" were there - Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff, as were the creators, Ron Moore and David Eick. Lucy Lawless acted as moderator. There was a cocktail party afterward, and fellow writers, this is where you should not take a page from my book... I chickened out and did not speak to Ron or David or any of the show's writers. I literally drew breath to address one of them, but then changed my mind.

Now obviously I wouldn't have been sleazy and tried directly to get myself a job, but it would have been a wonderful opportunity to get some insight into the biz by asking friendly questions, and I blew it!

I blame the fact that my skin had broken out into a constellation of stress-induced blemishes and I was doing my best to hide from the world in general. All the same, it was a fun little outing and I'm going to miss that show when it rides into the sunset.

New picture.

Matt took this photo at Disneyland, at the Pirates premiere. What you see reflected in my sunglasses are throngs of fans. Not my fans, but still. Pretty cool. I swear there was a mile of red carpet at that thing.

Everyone is stupid.

I don't care how smart you are. You're also stupid. I don't just mean, below average. I mean, painfully, mind-bogglingly, your-friends-wouldn't-believe-how stupid. You may just not know at what yet. You notice I say, you don't know yet. I've found mine.

Lately, in an effort to sharpen my somewhat cobwebby mind (quick thinking is a must for a television writer), I bought a couple of "mind training" games for my Nintendo DS (can everyone just notice the good use I'm making of the obscenely excessive free swag I got at the Pirates premiere?). So as I've doggedly worked at these little games every day, I've enjoyed watching my "mental age" slowly decrease from a creaky 48 to a svelte and sexy 24.

And then I met my nemesis: the dreaded slide puzzle. You know, the one with all the squares, and you have to slide them one by one into the empty spot left by the last one, thus rearranging them into the right order? Kind of like a 2-D Rubix Cube? Yeah. Those. I can't do those.

I'm not trying to say I'm slow at them. I'm not trying to say that they're difficult for me. What I'm saying is that I could sit in front of one of those puzzles for FIVE HOURS and be no closer to completing it than when I started. My mind simply cannot gain any traction on the problem. I stare helplessly and scoot things around randomly, as though someone had dumped some Farsi Scrabble letters onto a table in front of me and told me to reassemble them into words. I just sit there pushing them around, pushing them around, hoping that I'll mysteriously stumble upon the correct sequence like the proverbial monkey at the typewriter.

Don't laugh at me. You're stupid too. You just don't know at what yet. And when you find it, I don't care if your IQ is 165, you will come crashing down off your pinnacle of intellectual self-importance as you are forced to accept that the first random person you pick up off the street, at the drive-thru, or rooting around in the dumpster behind your apartment is, at this particular thing, smarter than you are.

In an odd sort of way, I think it's good for the soul.