The Search for Seed Funding

Today I've entered the pitch for my new drama to Kickstarter.com but as they're in beta at the moment I won't know immediately whether my project will be accepted. In the meantime I've made a separate site to raise funding; childrenofguantanamo.wordpress.com.

For the past several weeks I've been in New York staying with my father and attending endless hospital appointments with my mother who is suffering from heart failure. I've been isolating myself socially as a result and my stay has been a bit like Anne Frank meets Sex in the City (minus the sex). This is the first summer I've spent in my hometown since 1993 and I wish I could extend my stay a bit longer but the change fee will be $300, a princely sum whilst I can barely afford a cup of coffee. The best I can do is pray for volcanic ash.

Today the search for a quiet place for an internet connection has been more like The Search for Spock but I can't complain; my tumours are gone, I'm walking again and my hometown is a beautiful place even in the 90 degree summer heat.

Cold Molasses in Zero Weather

When talking to a friend yesterday I realised that although I feel like I'm functioning at a fraction of the speed I ought to, what my American grandmother used to refer to as "going uphill like cold molasses in zero degree weather," in fact I have achieved more in the last five weeks I have been recovering from my operation than I did in the previous year. I've started four online magazines which I've now incorporated into Northern Quarter Publishing and through this I'm meeting some amazing people who are very inspiring to me.

It's funny how people can devalue themselves because of others people's prejudices or false perceptions and take it on board as part of their own thought process. I've recently started to omit negative influences from my life and it's made a big difference to the way I feel mentally and emotionally, negative people can become like a vortex draining your emotional energy and although they may be so-called friends or aquaintances they always somehow seem to devalue everything you do through their perception of the world.

In my own life I find these are often people who have been molly-coddled throughout their lives and don't understand the difficult journey and the obstacles that many less advantaged people have managed overcome. I am often percieved as middle class when in fact I grew up in one room tenemants and SROs in New York. My highschool had such a serious gun problem it had to install airport style metal detectors and grown adults used to walk two streets around it to avoid the children. Coming from my background and simply being in one piece is a miracle that I do not take for granted so I have great empathy for anyone who has had to truly struggle through life. When my very middle class friend constantly complains about her weight as if it were of the same signifigance as wife-beating or back street abortions I wonder where her mind is; this is an educated person who has no concept of the world beyond herself and I think this is sad. It also becomes a kind of mantra that affects everyone around her because the tune never changes, I loved her like a sister but our relationship seemed to consist of mutual complaints and now it seems to have run its very long course. I hope she changes and I wish her the best but it still makes me sad as well, some people claim to want change in their lives but in reality they are in their comfort zone. It takes a lot of effort to refocus and this can sometimes seem overwhelming but without the willingness to do so then there is no hope.

So now I'm concentrating on other women around the world, I've started adding content to my new online magazine World Women International | www.worldwomeninternational.com and I'm seeking submissions from human rights journalists around the world. If you are a woman who can write articles of 800-2000 words without complaining about your cellulite I'd be very interested to hear from you.

A New Decade

I was hoping to achieve more in my two months back home in New York but most of my time was spent with my elderly parents, which was really the entire point of the journey. I feel more spiritually refreshed although I am now on crutches due to an operation to remove another hopefully benign soft tissue tumour from my knee. I'm on a combo of diclofenac, paracetamol and codiene for the pain and I cannot take my Zonisamide at the moment because it is so sedating I cannot navigate on the crutches!

I managed to write one short story "Kinesis" and start a new installment of Catticus which has a far more comic turn than the last one. When I was in New York I joined Amnesty International's Women's Human Rights Action Team which started to meet up for a book club before I left, the book of the month was "Half the Sky" written by Pulitzer Prize winning human rights jounalists Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. It tells the story of women who have endured some of the worst abuses and conditions on the planet, how they perservered and managed to overcome their oppressors and the hard struggle to survive, even for those who have managed to beat the odds. The story of the women of the untouchable Dalit village reminded me of the vigilante Gulabi Gang, who I heard about on the BBC website;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7068875.stm

This has inspired me to start a screenplay about their story and I hope I can do it justice.

Tonight I'm going to finish reading this book and I also have another project in the pipeline, an online magazine called Tokyo Cyberpunk Quarterly. Submissions are welcome, please email short stories or poetry to tokyocyberpunk@rocketmail.com

Clarity

This month my goal is to write and direct my first rough five minute short to submit as part of my application for a commision to produce my first dramatic digital short. It's a competition for the British Film Council and there is a possibility of a £12,000 budget up for grabs but I won't hold my breath. I'll just consider it an exercise in creativity as I'm probably too off-beat and too "foreign" to get my paws on any arts council funding. I'd probably have better luck selling gimp masks on eBay.

Last night Jackson came with me to do some lighting tests at Manchester Airport so I wouldn't look like the Puerto Rican wing of Al Quaeda canvassing the area with my video camera. The tunnels and the lighting in certain areas are particularly atmospheric, great for sci-fi themes and quite inspiring, it would be easy to produce a decent looking short film with a very low budget at this location but security restrictions mean that you can't really linger very long and you certainly couldn't bring tons of lighting equipment or boom microphones. Every shot would have to be carefully thought out and choreographed beforehand.

I've been thinking about the space in which dreams and reality overlap, as usual of course but I would have to condense this into a five to seven minute short and I have to get it done pronto as I plan to submit two proposals, one for a drama which I have not yet concieved and one for a documentary about the children of Guantanomo, a subject which suprisingly seldom gets press:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minors_detained_in_the_global_war_on_terror

I'm writing a full length fictionalized drama based on the Camp Iguana detainees and some of the research I am doing for this will be the basis for my work.

I guess I'd better get cracking now. I've had some difficulty with my concentration over the past couple of days so now I'm taking ProPlus caffeine tablets which seem to help but I have to take about four at a time to offset the Zonisamide. These along with Pepsi Max and Nescafe and I'm ready to go amigo!

 

Headspace

Although I'm certain it's a creative distraction rather than a clinical disorder I have the constant sensation of my head heating up. I feel as if I want to buy a giant helmut shaped ice pack and wear it whilst I write to alleviate the feeling that my head is in the defrost mode of a giant microwave oven. This is a diversion from my internal dialogue that I do not need when I am trying to write for long stretches at a time and it is very frustrating. I may need to go to the Writer's Hospital.

The first writers block exercise which I leave until I'm at the brink of desperation is to choose a lot of disconnected words from an unabridged dictionary. I spend about a half hour randomly opening pages choosing words I like, jotting them down and when I'm done I write a lot of random paragraphs and string them together to make a surreal short story. It's easier than choosing a theme when you're feeling depressed or uninspired and often it can get the ball rolling.

At the moment I'm away from home and I find that just a change of scenery can often be more inspiring, even though I'm just an hour down the road. I now have a list of different places in which I'm going to try to do some writing to see if I'm a bit more productive.

Most of my life I've had vivid dreams which I've been able to remember upon waking and which inspired me creatively but lately I find that I'm having these less often and need something more to ignite my creativity. 

I have turned to the British Cheese Board's "Cheese and Dreams" study which concluded that the amino acid tryptophan in cheese enhanced sleep and that stilton cheese in particular caused bizarre dreams in 85% of the women participants. I had previously considered a trip to Amsterdam to try magic mushrooms but as these are now outlawed I think I may have to settle for the mouldy cheese instead.

 

Lost Time

I seem to have a problem with lost time, not in the Whitley Strieber alien abduction sense but in the constructive usage thereof. 

I am not quite certain where this day has gone, I had grand creative plans for starting my new script and a short story but somehow between cleaning my kitchen, feeding the cat, checking my emails and surfing the web this time is gone. Certainly these activities could not have taken up six hours of the day so I resolve to make a diary detailing every activity I engage in that may be wasting my time.

My father, who is a very talented and creative person seldom spent much time on housework, organisation or any other practical matters and as a result lived in complete squalor but was a musical genius. Perhaps I should take a page out of his book and ignore all practicalities in life to concentrate on my art.

As long I the cat gets fed that's all that matters. 

The Secret

Anxiety and uncertainty have eaten away at me for a long time but now I have been introduced to a new concept in two different forms which is meant to radically change ones way of thinking and perhaps even realign the universe to work in your favour.

One is called "The Secret" and the other "positive affirmations." The theory is that if you change your thought patterns and attitudes to convince yourself that you are already on the road to success that you will find that miraculous changes in your life happen spontaneously. The theory is that any negative thoughts are actually the source of failure and bad luck and that anyone can change this through emanating more positive vibrations.

Lately I have had great difficulty with my appetite due to Zonisamide, the Japanese anti-epileptic mediation I am on. I think I may have to set an alarm clock to remind myself to eat so I can start emanating with these positive vibrations.

I'm feeling better already.