JaneEspenson.com

Ahhh! I’m back, Gentle Readers, and happy to be so. You know those vacations that leave you less well rested than you were before? I had one of those. TWO bouts of food poisoning on one trip? Really? That’s not right.

But I’m back and I’m in fightin’ form and ready to blog!

First, let me call your attention to tvguide.com again, as they’re doing another poll of viewer support for the strike. I think they’re expecting to see the support numbers slipping. I think they’re wrong. What do you think? It’s easy to register and vote on their site.

Moving on! Here’s a neat bit of writing vocabulary for you. I recently heard a new one. How cool is this? I am told by a writer in a certain sitcom room that in his room, a “fly chamber” is when there’s a tiny element from a past draft completely ruining your present script, a la Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY.

This is significant, of course, not so much for the terminology itself, although that is delightful. Many rooms, like isolated islands, develop dialects incomprehensible even to their nearest neighbors. The term is more notable for serving to call attention to the phenomenon itself. I often think the worst enemy of a well-written second draft is a first draft. You end up bending scenes to try to retain stuff that worked, and you also overcompensate for stuff that didn’t work by going too far the other way. For example, if the first draft of a scene was too sentimental, you might rewrite it too hard-edged to avoid getting that note again.

Often, the key to a good rewrite is a clean new page.

Lunch: a very nasty airplane lunch that seemed to be cheese and too-salty ham in a hot-dog bun. Oh, dear.