Special Announcement: It's A Movie!

I have a special announcement to make which has been in the making for a few months now. One of my short stories is going to be made into an independent, short film. The filmmaker, a young woman who graduated from a respected college for film, read two of my short stories and selected one for her next independent project. Her cinematographer, a young man who won an award for a short film of his own production, will work with her on the filming of the story, as well as in post-production.

The final run time for the film version of my short story “Hello Neighbor” will run approximately 7-10 minutes and most likely be entered into various independent film festivals. This is not a million dollar production, but professional actors and actresses will be used as well as state of the art studios and equipment. I don’t expect this project to be completed any time soon, as the young writer/director/filmmaker just picked up my draft of the story yesterday. She has to create a script, cast the actors and actresses, scout a location for the exteriors, budget the film, story board, etc, etc, etc. In addition, I’ve noticed that the world of filmmaking comes with many variables that us lay people aren’t privy to. When I saw both her and her cinematographer yesterday, their cell phones were ringing and they were busy giving instructions to others who were assisting them in another production they currently have underway. Still, she was excited about making this particular film because as she put it: “I absolutely love this story.” Hopefully, if this works out, she will absolutely love some of my lengthier works.

This is very exciting for me, and I am extremely flattered by this. I’ve been to screenings of films made by these two talented individuals and have been impressed by the professional quality of their filmmaking as well as their writing. They are up and coming stars in their field and their current workload proves this. This is something which I hope will happen to every writer out there who pours their heart and soul into their work. I am flattered beyond words.

film cinematographer filmmaker actors production independent film short story

When Life Turns To Stone

There’s a little something in my writing which the reader has no way of picking up on. In my novels, I honor my best friend who died when he was only twenty-one years old, way back in 1985. The Wade Thompson I knew would have scoffed at anyone doing something so trite; but, the way I see it, he may have changed his mind if he was alive today.

In my first novel, I have a character with the initials W.T. In my second novel, the protagonist buries a suitcase full of stolen cash in three feet of snow at a cemetery, in front of the headstone of Robert Wade Thompson. In my last novel, one of the characters based solely on his personality. My visits to him in my stories are my homage to his life, and they don’t necessarily reflect my actual visits to his grave.

Frozen in my mind as an athletic, young, long haired man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips, the Wade Thompson I knew remained someone I could visit even after death. He listened quietly, I imagined, as I told him about my life when I stopped by the cemetery. He’s buried just miles outside our hometown in a small, quiet, private graveyard next to his mother. She had passed away a few years after he did. Over the years, I’d make a side trip to see him while on the way to my parent’s home.

Last August, when my mother was dying, I went there once more to pay my respects before I headed to see my mom for maybe the last time before she passed away. As I always did, I kept him up to date with the events in my life and I told him about what was happening to my mother. This visit was different, though. Suddenly, when for all these years I’d been able to have my gratifying little graveside chats with my buddy, it lost its meaning.

I stooped over his headstone, looking at the inscribed words “Loving Son, Brother, and Friend” and was no longer able to attribute them to Wade. My head spun. My mom was going to be buried soon, and we made her funeral arrangements the day before. I didn’t want her to go, yet I knew it as inevitable. Still, there I was, asking my deceased friend for help with my grief. It was time I came to terms with the fact that he was dead.

Wade was twenty-one years old when he died suddenly from complications due to Juvenile Diabetes. We knew he was getting sicker, yet that didn’t stop the two of us from wanting to go to school for computer science together. Also, it didn’t hold up our plans to share an apartment and split the rent as two pals would. After his death, the reflection of his friendship stayed with me all the way through my acceptance to the New York City Police Academy, my marriage to my wife, the births of my two children, and up until the moment when my mom faced her own mortality. Then, in one moment of clarity, he was gone.

This was not his fault. I was the one who glorified him, both in my writing, and in the way I kept him alive by seeking him out for “chats” at the graveyard. My other friends over the years all learned about him, saw his photos, and tried to understand as I explained how much of an influence he had on my existence. There was always the question in my mind when I faced a problem, “What would Wade have done?” That day, a little over a year ago, on that tiny plot of grass, I couldn’t find my friend anymore. There was just a gray, carved stone. Dirt filled the crevices with the chiseled letters which formed his name. I don’t know how it happened, but I believe he wanted to go on. There had to be a point where I needed to grow up and face my problems without relying on a friend who died twenty-one years earlier.

Wade never went to college, never got married, did not have children, never had a career, and he died before his mother did. Maybe he couldn’t be there for me. Perhaps he was never around the way I believed he was, and I couldn’t, or wouldn’t realize it. I walked away from his headstone that day and went to my parent’s house, around the corner from where my friend grew up, and watched my mother leave us the next afternoon. It’s okay, they are both gone now, and we are all going to meet the same fate. I’ll continue to hide secrets about my buddy in the paragraphs of my novels and short stories. He’d like that, if he was still alive.



cemetery death friend grave graveyard headstone Juvenile Diabetes New York City novels Police Academy, Writing

"I'm Not From Lawn-Guy-Land"

There's a list going around the internet which has been compiled by, added to, and passed around by Long Islanders. This list is called (you guessed it) "You Know You're From Long Island When..." One of my favorite items on that list is "You never realize you have an accent until you leave." This has happened to me, numerous times.

Yes, we do speak funny, and it is typically arrogant of us New Yawkers to think we speak like Harvard law professors. In Florida a few years ago, I took my family to Disney World. At Typhoon Lagoon, I was sitting poolside when my then three year old son began to play with the sand. Actually, he was tossing handfulls of it into the air. I told him to knock it off, and the burly man behind me said something that sounded like "Arf nargle eeg offay ay nad." Huh?

Not wanting to be rude, I smiled in much the same way one does when we don't want to aggitate the man holding the bloody meat cleaver. I ordered my son once more to quit throwing sand in the air or I'd bury him in it (or words to that effect).

The big hairy guy with the marbles in his mouth walked over. He was with his family, a wife, two little ones (boy and girl) who were playing peacefully in the sand with buckets and shovels.

"It's alright, mate. he's just being a lad. It's just sand, ya know." he said. Oh, he's from England, I thought. Whew, I though I had to whisk my family away and call the Mouse Police.
"Yeah, thanks," I said "I still don't want him to get sand all over." I offered. Really, It was none of his business what I said to my son, but it was obvious that this guy wanted to talk. So, we did.

His wife sidled over to him and smiled as he introduced "Aubremary", or whatever the hell he said her name is, to me. I searched the pool frantically for my wife and daughter so I would have an excuse to grab my kid by the waistband of his shorts and say "Gotta go, wifey's calling..." and hurry off into the artificial surf with my boy flailing helplessy in my grip. But no, my wife only comes around when I'm relaxing and she has something for me to do.

They talked and gushed about how friendly and lovely Americans are, and that everywhere they went, people are just so friendly and want to talk and talk and talk. Ouch. I continued to grin like an idiot as I realized that they didn't visit New York, or more specifically, Long Island, where I was born, raised, and continue to be miserable.

Friendly people? There's a deli I go to every morning for coffee and a newspaper before I go to work. I've been a regular customer there for about fifteen years and I don't think I've exchanged more then three words with anyone behind the counter, and I'm okay with that. I show you what I want, you get it for me, take my money, and then I leave. End of transaction. I've noticed that outside of the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut region, people change. There's something pathological about all of these nice folks who want to know how you're doing, and tell you to have a nice day. In a way, I was glad that this happy English family landed in "nice country." If they came to Long Island, I'd be appalled.

Anyway, I did my best to look interested and tried hard to decipher their language. They had accents, heavy ones. These were hard working commoners from Manchester who saved up all of their pounds and pence to visit Disney World where families toss around fifty dollar bills with reckless abandon and wind up with nothing to show for it. That morning, they found themsleves in Typhoon Lagoon, talking to me.

At one point, after they told me everything about themsleves, their family, the dream vacation they were on, and how happy they were to be in the United States, they asked about me. They wanted to know if this was our first trip to Disney.
"Well, no. My wife and I came here a long time ago after we were first married. We didn't have kids then."
"Did you fly down, mate?"

"Uh, no. We drove. I have a thing against flying." I don't really, we just thought we'd save money. We're never doing that again.

"How long did it take you to drive down?" Did he say "drive down"? I thought, how would he know where I came from?

"Well, I live on Long Island..." I started to say.

"Long Island?" The wife said. She smiled and looked over at her husband as if she'd won a bet. He had a knowing grin on his face too. "Oh yes, Long Island." he said. "We can tell."
It didn't matter what he told me after that. I felt duped, like they were leading me on in an effort to fulfill their own curiosity.

"That bloke is from New York, don't you think Aubremary?"
"Oh no, Simon, he sounds like he must be from Long Island. Let's talk to him and find out."

There you have it. Even folks who hail from jolly old England have us Long Islanders pegged. Oh, and another thing. We don't say Lawn-Guy-Land. Only people who are trying to make fun of Long Islanders say Lawn-Guy-Land. Thanks for reading. I have to go now and drive my caw to the mawl and get some cawfee. Afta dat, I have ta take da famlee to that restront faw dinnuh.



Long Island England Disney World New York language accents Florida deli Typhoon Lagoon

Tagged By A Friend: A Desktop Meme

newspaper
My Friend Lisa McGlaun who publishes the inspirational Lifeprints blog tagged me with a meme; and, needless to say that I am flattered. I am relatively new to blogging in this format, and having such talented and generous folks such as Lisa as a supporter is uplifting.

This meme is called "What is the personality of your computer?" I'm supposed to take a snapshot of my computer desktop, and attempt to explain what it means about me. For the purposes of this exercise, I chose my laptop because my work computer has information on it I wouldn't want to disclose to the public, and because my laptop is the only computer in my home which my wife and children haven't completely hijacked.

Note the Joe Girardi baseball card as my desktop wallpaper. Yankees fans will know that just this week, one of the greatest Yankees managers of all time, Joe Torre, delined the Yankees offer of a one year contract and could be managing the Dodgers next year. Joe Girardi, one of my favorite Yankees, although his career in pinstripes lasted only three years, has taken over as the new Yankees' skipper. Baseball is a huge part of my life, and this blog began as a baseball blog (though I failed miserably at it). Much of what I read, listen to, watch, and discuss with my friends revolves around baseball. Lately, I've taken to football, just to give my pals a break. But, don't expect to see any Eli Manning wallpaper any time soon.

Many of the files and folders on the desktop contain my writing and images for this blog. I have two, full length novel manuscripts residing on this hard drive (backed up elsewhere) and hundreds of family photos. The desktop itself may appear boring, but inside every megabyte of that hard disk is a scene from one of my character’s lives. At the point when this snapshot was taken, there may have been one of my protagonists getting shot, or losing a family member, or just plain being happy. There's an unseen world happening behind that baseball card on the screen. I liken it to an apartment building hiding in plain sight in the skyline of a city. There are families within, each with their daily dramas occurring just out of view of the hundreds of thousands of commuters whose eyes can't see past their windshields to notice them. Yet, there they are, my notes, manuscripts, and outlines, like news stories within the folds of a newspaper, on my desktop waiting impatiently for you, my blog visitors, to read them.

This has been a fun experience for me, this meme; and, I want to once again thank Lisa at Lifeprints for giving me the opportunity to tell a little about myself. It has been an honor to receive comments from such friendly voices, the good folks who take the time to read my posts, that I am determined to keep writing to the best of my ability.

To keep spreading the fun, I'd like to tag some new blogging friends I've made over the past few months to continue this meme. Please feel free to opt out of this, as it is only good fun, and there is no pressure to to do this. Also, let me know if you've already participated in this meme. There's a writer who visits here often and I'd like to extend an invitation to Kristyn over at Kristyn Writes, who is a terrific writer to keep this meme going. Also, I'd like to ask Elaine over at Elaine's Place to help out, and finally, I'd like to Invite Eng Foo Tiam at Beautiful World to participate as well.

Thank you, everyone, for being a loyal readers of Mr. Grudge.

Write Whatever You %$#@*%$! Want

My former career as a police officer seemed like an alluring one to many. All the way back to the old 1951 TV series "Dragnet" with Jack Webb, and later on with 1968 to "Adam-12" with Martin Milner and Kent McCord, these shows planted an image of police officers as curt professionals in the minds of the public. Their language was official, and they were all business. Jack Webb's character, Sgt. Joe Friday, made "Just the facts, Ma'am" part of the American lexicon. The awful truth however, is that cops have filthy mouths. Also, the criminals that police interact with tend to spew obscenities as a second language. Together, police and "suspects" become a cursing, swearing, and profane, mega-force whose power doesn’t always switch off in polite company. I’ve been to many an occasion where I had to suddenly remember "where I was" and not drop the "F-Bomb" at my wife's, Grandmother's 83rd birthday party.

Since I left the police department in 1999, I switched careers and now work in the information technology field. Still, I am a writer as much as I was a cop or a computer geek. Much of my writing revolves around the world of crime, patrol officers, and the occasional shootout. But, to balance my credibility with the reader and the dialogue between my characters, I am very selective with my use of profanity. It is said that a good novel is not what you put into it, but what you take out of it. So, in order to allow my characters to converse with each other without my story reading like a wall in a public restroom, I save the vulgarities for moments where it would have the most impact.

For example, in my most recent story, my protagonist is a retired cop who lost his wife and daughter to a drunk driver. His best friend is a retired detective whose lover died of cancer. They bond because of their loneliness, but have to defend themselves from the organized crime figures who wish to take revenge against the detective for arresting them decades earlier and landing them in prison. My original draft had the two of them cursing, swearing, and expressing themselves with incredible vulgarity to the point where it became tedious, boring, and ultimately ineffective. In the end, I deleted all of the four letter words and discovered that in some scenes they really weren’t saying much of anything each other, let alone the reader, and that much of the dialogue was worthless. After scrapping much of the unnecessary bad language, I began to write more dramatic discourse without the F-word and the like, and I told the story with a fresh voice.

Towards the climax of the story, where my protagonist is confronted by the murderer of his wife and daughter, I finally allowed my character to unleash his rage, and he did it with every available tool on his belt, including the four-letter variety. The words became more vile, hurtful, and effective because the reader hadn’t seen them for most of the book and they come on as a bit of a surprise. At least that’s the feedback I’ve received from those who have read the manuscript already. So, I’m glad I held back, trusted my instincts, and washed my characters' mouths out with soap.

Am I saying that a writer shouldn’t allow his or her characters to curse? Of course not. As always, these articles reflect my method of writing. If anyone finds any of this useful, I am happy to have helped. If you think that I am being too careful and that you can have your characters curse early and often in your stories, then go ahead. Do whatever the fuck you want.

curse swear profanity Adam-12 Dragnet police cops suspects writer police department information technology shootout novel dilogue characters protagonist organized crime