The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me?

I am wondering if there is a way to make a living without anymore soul crushing shitty jobs. I did that for nearly a decade, do I really need to spend a few MORE decades living in dreary horror to get by? Lord I hope not.

Next month, in addition to looking FOR soul crushing work, and trying to get into grad school, I am going to be trying to complete NaNoWriMo. So my whole month will be working on writing a first draft of a novel, from scratch. Wow.

In addition, my friend and I will be filming episodes of Zombie Conversational. Which I'm a bit worried about. I (like you know, most people) am not happy with how I look or how my voice sounds on tape. So of course my biggest and really ONLY project that is in existence is something where I have to be on camera and talking. I'm not the most worried about it, but I'm sure I will hate a lot of what I do anyways.

I'm more excited about writing scripts, coming up with stories, and working on advertising the site. But there ain't shit to advertise until we have something filmed, which sucks. I'm VERY excited about the advertising.

Speaking of which, we did zombie day, filming a bunch of people dressed up as zombies for the theme song for Zombie Conversational. It was lots of fun and neat. There are tons of pictures! I'm done now, think I'm going to try and get on a normal sleeping pattern and actually wake up in the morning two days in a row.

Vonnegut's rules for writing

Just stumbled upon Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing. What follows is completely and utterly HIS words, not mine.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Saturday

This is actually what I posted on Whitechapel's Open Mic, but I wanted to keep it around for some reason. Don't ask me why... and stop looking at me like that! Don't judge me!!!

The future: Next week (weather permitting) we will be filming a bunch of people dressed as zombies for our new web show. And I now realize that I will be acting in a web series that I co-wrote. This is a bit scary, since I don't like my voice or how I look on a camera. I'm wondering why I'm doing this, then remember it's the one thing that has kept me very excited these last few months.

Also next week I go back to my school, or I guess old school since I graduated, and talk about graduate programs. Hopefully this will be more positive then I'm fearing, applying to places (namely jobs) hasn't been that good as of late so I have some fear applying for school.

What is pissing me off: Being a plague monkey for over a week. I keep getting close to being clear of this flu/cold and then boom something else just sits around and keeps me sick and not at 100% I want to fucking exercise so badly it's killing me, but no... I must be a plague monkey!

Filthy: The things I've hacked up being a plague monkey are disgusting and filthy. I thankfully have been in a fever induced haze to not really recall them well.

Where, who and will be: I'm outside St. Louis in my room. I want to be happy and succesful. I'd like to make enough cash to live by going to school and doing web shows. I want to make new things and make someone besides myself and my friends laugh. And I'd love to have a real camera, something I could take with me as I play tourist and really capture some of the amazing and beautiful things I see in those journeys.

Picture: I still need an actual digital camera and it is my planned first purchase if someone ever decides to pay me for work ever again. But here is one taken on my crappy phone camera. Here I am with the beard I've grown due to being lazy while dying of the plague.