to share with u
Recently I've become so jaded with social media and the general flow of modern days that I've started writing by hand. Not a whole lot, mind you, because work is exhausting and the train is bumpy and I'm tired and so on. It's a deep level of satisfaction when a word looks written out properly, but my heavy hand drags the ink on the paper and I'm often too judgemental to think straight. And anyway here's this roundabout realization: I would like TO SHARE my writing. Am I gonna let everything sit unfinished and post snippets of it on TikTok and stay sad about that? I should hope not.
I think I will split up this blog page according the projects I'm working on or would like to work on. At the moment this would be,
- New King Kiva LP
- Prose rewrite of apocalypse screenplay
- Script rewrite of superhero / sci-fi screenplay
- limited TV series screenplay (pilot done)
- King Kiva dungeon synth EP
Putting this down in writing (rather than vague mentions to coworkers) helps me organize on what I could work on. I could sit there for days on end overwhelmed with not knowing what to do when in fact I already have things I could be doing. Politically the world is in such a dark place in that we don't really know what to do with ourselves. I have the aching desire to express my views on where we are, where we are going, the humanities, anthropology, anarchy, etc. in the hopes that people will listen and treat each other better, but I never know where such desires should be expressed and I get paralyzed with options.
The pattern: exhaustion can be real but also makes up excuses for itself. If I actually put my nose to the grindstone, such humanitarian views and political jabs will be the sparks flying. I get caught up on "but what am I trying to say?" well how can the train move forward if the tracks aren't laid out? Whether it's just my fingies typing or my whole body moving, mental thought necessitates physical movements and vice versa.
Let's discuss the above projects,
New King Kiva LP: at the moment, it's called For Squanto. Why? Surface level explanation: good albums are fun to say out loud. "Have you heard Brat?" "Have you heard Currents?" "Have you heard All My Heroes Are Cornballs?" "Have you heard For Squanto?" Deeper explanation: I think for far too long me and this land have been pulled in directions we don't need to pretend to be. My DNA points to many generations of colonizing, of being from a place other than here. But I feel like I belong, and I feel like it's time to be more of myself, and if I'm doing that for anyone other than me, surely it must be for Squanto -- for Tisquantum. At the moment I've recorded the instrumentals for tracks one and two. I think there will be 16 tracks, based off the line I wrote "16 espresso shots for Squanto" and they will be short bursts for the most part. Each following track descends the root note chromatically -- why I don't fully know, maybe as a descent into the mind.
Prose rewrite of apocalypse screenplay: in the fall of 2016 I got the idea of a family road trip movie being blown up into an apocalypse story. From summer 2017 to winter 2018 I wrote the first draft but the story won't fully leave my freaking brainnnn. Since 2020 I have had plans to make radical rewrites and I've attempted a few times. My most recent attempt started this summer by hand. The changes are tentatively good, but so slow. I'm talking just a few pages over years and years. The 2018 first draft was 140 pages. It used to be called The Adventures of a Nuclear Family. I think some portions will still be called that, but lately I've been more of a fan of the ominous and painfully true word, Tumultuous.
Script rewrite of superhero / sci-fi fantasy: used to be called The Mystery of Planet City. New title might be Fightgirl, Spookyman, Planet City, God. This story was also originally thought of in the fall of 2016 and was written in the first half of 2017 (I was writing this, beating the Morrowind main quest for the first time, and failing biology). This year, 2024, I started a new script from scratch with no outline and basically entirely different from the old one aside from character mannerisms and a few big beats. In 2016 the story took place on earth, then in 2017 and for a few years after the idea of Planet City was a man made structure orbiting the moon that's half city and half green rolling hills, and now in the new script Planet City is a terraformed Pan (one of Saturn's moons).
Limited TV screenplay: called Bring Me the Sun. The pilot actually advanced into the quarterfinals of the ScreenCraft's 2024 TV Pilot Script Competition, which is actually the furthest I've made it anywhere artistically. It might be worth continuing this story to completion, but for some reason the idea always makes me feel exhausted. I think I'm just being a weenie though. Basically the story is a group of three social outcasts road tripping from New York to LA in 1910 because one of them is a filmmaker trying to make it big. There's more to it like trans identity and the humanitarian effort of showing humans had the same problems then as now, as well as the protagonist having a wild fantasy and passion for space which is depicted visually, but ya. It'd be five episodes total, with each episode further along their manifest destiny.
King Kiva dungeon synth EP: I've been working on this on and off since 2021. Basically, I've had some dreams before where there's a land that never stops raining. 1000 years or more. Possibly artificial climate change. And the bourgeoisie pay the sun wizards in their mountain towers for airglides above the clouds so they may view the sun, and when they come back down their eyes are dotted yellow, and the peasants hate them. The dungeon synth EP is halfway done, instrumental, and mostly from the peasant perspective. I am also thinking about tying this story/world to the Bring Me the Sun script since that protagonist imagines worlds and stuff. It's a lot to type in one blog post lol.
Anyway here's to hoping u will see more of me, because it means I'm busy making art :)