So true

This is basically how it works.

 

 Via Screenwriters Utopia on IG.

Wait, what???

• 

 

On the other hand, bacon...YUM!

The story of my life...

For me, ideas are the easy part. It's turning them into stories where the heavy lifting comes in.

 

 (Get it, STORY of my life...heh heh...)

The Name Game

This is one way to do it, I guess.

Thank you for your sacrifice to literature, Isaac.

May Words of Wisdom

Being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane. --Fredrik Backman

 

A snake will bite you in private, where no one sees it....then offer to remove the venom for you in public, so that he will look like the hero. --Unknown

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. --Friedrich Nietzsche

 

If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people. --Victor Cousin

 

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. --Leo Tolstoy 

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. --George Bernard Shaw

The individual who has experienced solitude will not easily become a victim of mass suggestion. --Albert Einstein

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. --Desmond Tutu

Recent reading: "The Murder at the Vicarage"

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

I'm still behind on #ReadChristie2024, but got another one done this week. Almost there...

There's been a murder in the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead and there are suspects galore. The pompous, powerful, and unpopular Colonel Protheroe is shot to death while waiting alone in the vicar's study. Suspects include Protheroe's wife Anne, his daughter Lettice, Lawrence Redding, a painter currently working on a portrait of Lettice, the mysterious and recently arrived Mrs. Lestrange, Leonard Clement, the vicar himself (he's the narrator and I was getting Roger Ackroyd vibes), the vicar's charming younger wife Griselda, and the vicar's nephew Dennis, who is besotted with Lettice. A few other questionable characters/motives also populate the story. And of course there's Miss Jane Marple, whose favorite hobby - the study of human nature - gives her a unique insight to the various suspects and helps bring the killer to justice.

The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930, was the first Miss Marple novel and this was also my first experience with her. She was actually a very pleasant, interesting character, not the grating, nosy busybody I was expecting. 

The Murder at the Vicarage is the April selection for #ReadChristie2024. Each quarter features Christie novels from a specific decade(s). First quarter is the 1920's, second quarter is the 1930's, third quarter is the 1940's-1950's, and fourth quarter is the 1960's-1970's. The complete list is:

 

January: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot)

February: The Secret Adversary (Tommy & Tuppence)

March: The Mystery of the Blue Train (Poirot)

April: The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple)

May: The ABC Murders (Poirot)

June: And Then There Were None (stand alone)

July: Taken at the Flood (Poirot)

August: A Murder is Announced (Miss Marple)

September: Ordeal by Innocence (stand alone)

October: The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side (Miss Marple)

November: Third Girl (Poirot)

December: Elephants Can Remember (Poirot)

 

Home of the free, because of the brave

Memorial Day 2024.

The only way this could be funnier is if it was a Colorado plate

Credit where credit is due.

This guy is my new idol

This speech by Swedish author Fredrik Backman (Beartown, A Man Called Ove) is taking the writing world by storm. I will probably watch this on a daily basis for inspiration.

 

 

Thirteen years

Time marches on, whether you like it or not.

Everyone was so young when I was born, so for most of my life I was spoiled in having most of the whole family around well into adulthood. Now that the older generations are gone I miss having everyone around. 

No one lives forever.

Recent reading: "Behind the Door"

Behind the Door: The Dark Truths and Untold Stories of the Cecil Hotel 

by Amy Price

I picked this up at the L.A. Times Festival of Books last month after seeing Price on a historic L.A. panel. Price was the general manager of the notorious Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles near Skid Row for ten years. In spite of the hotel's depressing location and often tragic history, she fell in love with the place, hoping that the gentrification of DTLA would reach it and restore it to its former glory. 

When Price arrived at the Cecil in 2007 it already had a checkered past. Built as a luxury hotel, its fortunes had fallen decades earlier as it deteriorated along with the area. Numerous deaths - both suicides and homicides - occurred at the Cecil. At least two serial killers (Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker - and Jack Unterweger) had called the Cecil home during the commission of their crimes. 

Price - then a jewelry designer and aspiring interior decorator - was originally hired by a friend to help give the Cecil a hipster update to bring the hotel back to life. This was complicated by a number of long-term residents who were more reflective of the Skid Row neighborhood than the Cecil's former glory. Other issues had to do with the hotel's design - many rooms did not have their own bathrooms or showers, requiring the use of communal facilities, and the Cecil also had neither heat nor air conditioning. The residents had been relocated to just a couple of lower floors, while Stay on Main, as the hotel aspect was dubbed, utilized non-resident floors. And for a while, Stay worked as a popular, dirt-cheap, hipster hostel. However, when summer arrived the lack of AC became a major issue, and Stay's reviews began to reflect the disenchanted guests. 

 

Then came the Elisa Lam case. When LAPD failed to locate the missing young woman, they released security video of Elisa behaving oddly in a Cecil elevator and the case became an internet sensation. Several weeks later Elisa was found on the premises, and the Cecil became world-infamous as the hotel where the missing girl turned up in its water tank after guests complained about issues with water, including low pressure, filth, and a weird taste.

After ten years at the Cecil, attempting to restore the hotel and manage its colorful residents, Price was relieved of her duties by new ownership. She embarked on a successful interior decorating career and an unsuccessful marriage. Then Netflix came calling about a planned documentary about the Cecil Hotel, and Price, led to believe that Elisa Lam wouldn't be the focus and eager to let the world know there was more to the hotel than the girl in the water tank, signed up to participate.

 

One thing I remember about the resulting docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, is that I thought it was a major cheat that Lam's mental illness and her issues with her medications weren't brought up until late in the story, instead suggesting several theories of who murdered Lam when it turned out she wasn't really a murder victim. And not only did the show focus on the Lam case, it also gave some viewers the impression that Price was possibly suspect in Lam's death, or that she may have tampered with the infamous elevator video footage. When the show debuted, Price's life was turned upside down. She received vicious and even threatening messages online by people obsessed with the Lam case.

 

Fortunately, Price came through the ordeal a self-described stronger person. She showed a great deal of compassion toward the Cecil's unfortunate residents during her tenure, but seems to have made her peace with the whole experience. Today, the Cecil Hotel has been repurposed as a low-income housing facility.

 

From the book (discussing the "tragedy tourism" triggered by the Elisa Lam case:

 

But booking a stay to be closer to tragedy paled in comparison to the weird performances spawned by Elisa's death. Once, I got a call from someone at the Pacific Electric Building telling me there was a man playing the guitar on top of one of the water tanks. It was ten o'clock at night. The man had risked his life to put on this show. He'd had to climb the fire escape up to the top of a 150-foot building, just as Elisa had most likely done.

RIP to the world's most famous shark attack victim

Actress and stuntwoman Susan Backlinie passed away yesterday. Backlinie became a screen legend on the strength of just one scene - as Chrissie Watkins, the unfortunate first shark attack victim on Amity Island in the classic film Jaws. Considering that she had to portray someone having something unimaginable happening to them, I always thought she did an amazing job in conveying Chrissie's horrific death.

 

 

Not one frame of gore and you knew exactly what was happening to this poor woman.

 

RIP Susan Backlinie