By Christian M. Lee

Soon enough, I’ll be starting to post short stories on the site.

Meanwhile…

Baseball Thoughts: Dodgers are my team since my homeless experience in Los Angeles. It’s been awesome following their progress this season. Watching Game 2 last night was great. A strong comeback to the blowout Friday night. Hopefully I’ll get to watch more of the World Series games this week.

Movie News Thoughts: The director of La La Land is prepping to make a prison drama with Cillian Murphy and Daniel Craig! Sounds badass. Can’t wait.

With ideas like this, and movies that have been coming to theatres lately, I’m hoping this means that theaters and mid-budget genre picks with big names will be coming back in trend with a vengeance. Some had been worrying for the last ten years whether superhero movies and streaming services were going to kill movie theatres and the concept of the ‘movie star’; replacing actors with just characters. I hoped not. It seemed that way for a while.

Matt Damon when he was on an episode of Hot Ones years ago mentioned that in the early 2000s, mid-tier budget films were his bread and butter. They could make a decent amount and then when they released on DVD months later, it was like the film was getting a second release and revenue would start rolling in for producers and the actors and studio attached. He said how streaming was making all that process sort of disappear.

Now it looks like movie stars are coming back. Theater films are coming back. And many people on social media have been complaining about streaming services between prices and studio control and mergers have been prompting their discussions about buying physical media again so the consumer can own their copy of a film or series again. Made me start thinking about it again.

W.I.P. Thoughts: Been re-examining my writing process again in the last week. I really love the screenplay format for rough drafting. I may not get to be paid to write a script for many years — maybe never, Fate forbid — but at least I can use it for rough drafting. It’s been freeing.

I’ve gotten to scripting Chapter Six scene by scene in the last couple weeks. Currently today I’m doing index cards for scenes before I write them. I’m doing a process of rough draft script before rough draft manuscript later. Hoping it works for me. So far it has. It’s been many years of me experimenting with turning script pages into narrative. Sort of the opposite of what novel to script processes are like traditionally.

More updates to come…

Social Media Thoughts: So much about the way technology and Artificial Intelligence has been developing in the last few months and years with posts and stories on Instagram and Facebook and everything has been scaring me a little.

So many stories about robots replacing workers, AI making low level office workers eventually obsolete — there’s many reasons why writers like James Cameron are having trouble getting new sci-fi written. He made a statement that he was working on a new Terminator script but was having trouble coming up with new ideas since real life tech is moving faster than fiction can keep up with or to say anything new.