Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for May 2005

A somewhat cloudy forecast

Posted on Written by

I haven’t been having a good week. I’m rapid-cycling, which always makes me fun to be around. I’m stalled in the middle of my rewrite, and when I finally sat down to figure out why, it was like, Oh. Duh. I felt like I’d violated a few tenets of Fiction 101 and I was going to have to give back my MFA.

Then there have been a few incidents that normally wouldn’t have bothered me instead have me on the phone to Darin, asking him to pleeeeeeeease come home already. The dark nights of the soul are not supposed to happen during the daytime, when the kids are at preschool and you have a few hours to get cracking.

I’m just glad people I know have had good weeks of late.

The weather hasn’t helped. Hello, it’s May; hello, we live in California. What’s with all the cold temperatures and incessant rain?

§

Cute Kid Story Alert: The other day I asked Sophia, “Are you a kid or a kiddie?”

“A kiddie.”

“Are you a cute kiddie or a pretty kiddie?” (Say that five times fast.)

“A fancy kiddie.”

I am so in over my head with her.

§

Cute Kid Story Alert #2: Tonight at dinner, Simon took a break from inhaling polenta like we’re about to have a trade war with Italy to listen to the roar of the kitchen fan I’d left on at the stove. He then announced, “I like that sound not.”

Shakespearean? Or yet more promotion for the latest Star Wars nonsense? You be the judge.

§

A few years ago in LA, I went to see Author A do a bookstore reading. We went out for beers afterward, and during the rest of our get-together, A gave me gossip gleaned from the author escort who was taking her around town. The escort said Author B, who’d gone through on tour right before A’s visit, was amazingly insecure and needy. B has a blog, one of my secret treasures, and all this week the neediness has been bleeding out, making it one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I’d love to point you to it, but…well, that would just be mean. I’m trying not to be mean. It’s a new thing for me. But I’m still checking in hopes of more freak-outs.

§

Recently Author C posted something so vile in their blog that I was flabbergasted. C is having career difficulties, and I kept coming across other blogs supporting C, rapturously describing their work. I was like, Hello? Do you approve of the sorts of things C has said (in the blog, not in the books, although let’s face it—one does influence the other)? I’m glad I didn’t like the one book I’ve read by C (in contrast to the glowing reviews I’ve read, I thought it was all that and a bag of chips). Yes, what you post in your blog can affect what readers think of you. Just so you know. No, I won’t tell you who this is; just the thought of getting out that URL again gives me hives.

§

Blacklist, the MT plugin to prevent spam, is failing. I don’t know what’s going on—I’ve had a couple of regular expressions that caught 95% of the cases coming through (URLs containing “poker” or “casino” or “sex”) that were working for…I dunno. A long time. Months.

Suddenly, they’ve disappeared.

Disappeared. As in, no longer show up.

What happened? Did they expire or something? I re-added a whole bunch of them yesterday.

As of today, they aren’t there any more.

I’ve been considering moving to Word Press for a while, and this might just do it. If there’s one thing I hate more than creating a list of keywords of sites to ban, it’s creating it twice.

And frankly, given the way I’ve felt this week, I’m just not in the mood.

Fame and fortune makes people weird

Posted on Written by

The LA Times had an article on one-time uber-screenwriter Shane Black, who disappeared in the mid-90s. He’s back, having written and directed a new flick named Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The story contained what must be one of the weirdest anecdotes I’ve ever read:

A falling out with his best friend in the mid-’90s only added to his guilt. The man, whom he’d first met at UCLA, had decided he wanted to be a writer too, but his career never caught fire. Black said “he was very angered by my success,” and several months after they stopped speaking Black received a letter. “[It] said, ‘I still hate you, I don’t want to see you anymore, but here’s a bank account number. Wire as much as you think our friendship is worth into it.’ ”

Black, who sent the man a large sum, remains stunned. “I said, ‘Is this what writing does? Does it make you lose your friends? Make people hate you?’ ”

Okay, I’m right with you on this up until who sent the man a large sum. Say what? You sent the guy money?

Since reading that, I’ve been trying to come up with possible explanations for that. None of them are particularly flattering to Mr. Black.

I know fame and fortune makes things tough. Money does, in fact, change everything. And writers, who should know better, are often the worst: writing can be the worst sort of competitive sport, with rounds decided on advances, print runs, and glowing features in the NYTBR. There’s a screenwriter in Hollywood whose name is synonymous, for me (and quite a few others), with shitty, awful screenplays—and even worse, he has an Oscar! A true “There is a God, and boy is she a mean and vicious bastard” type of moment if there ever was one.

And I don’t even know the guy personally.

It goes the other way too: if you have success, and someone else doesn’t, your ego (the Evil Ego, natch) can whisper in your ear, “Me good. Them…not so much.” One woman at USC actually came out and said that (slightly more grammatically) exact sentiment. (Haven’t heard from her since. ) If you don’t have a good handle on what’s you and what’s your work, you’re going to lose perspective. And it’s going to hit you in bad, bad ways.

In the end, though, somebody else’s success is not about you. You can pretty much only handle what you can do: work on your writing, be your own expert, write better stories. You may think somebody else grabbed the brass ring under false pretenses, but who cares? Their success has nothing to do with you. You worry about you. And if you’re successful…that has as much to do with who you are as a person as your failures do. You can analyze it—substituting it for a strong sense of self is deadly.

Dare I mention that I feel really, really sorry for Shane Black that he lost his friend…and then felt obligated to pay his former friend off? Whether he did it to soothe himself, to relieve feelings of guilt, or for more nefarious reasons, that he did it is messed up. Both success and friendships are tough enough without attaching monetary values to them.