Nizzibet and I are having a mini Vin Diesel film festival. Monday night we watched XXX and tonight we’re seeing The Fast and the Furious. We watched Pitch Black months ago. That’s one I liked enough to pick up off the clearance rack at Safeway when they were selling off their excess copies. That was before we got the DVD player for a wedding present. Now I don’t buy videos because DVDs are a more permanent format and I don’t buy DVDs because we’re working at saving money. Which is an unnecessary tangent.

We’re having this retrospect of Mr. Diesel’s career in order to prep for our screenwriting session this Saturday. The Nizz and I have an infant partnership writing screenplays with ScarletBlue and PresiD. They own a high definition film/video/audio production house with studios here and in Los Angeles. They’ve produced a number of documentaries and some television series and are wanting to get into making “real” movies. ScarletBlue, the wife, is a fairly decent writer who suffers from a huge case of niceness. PresiD has hooked her up with other partners in the past to try and assist her in producing a salable script. When we first started working together last fall we were working on rewriting a love story that ScarletBlue had already done a script for.

She’d actually already done and redone the script with various partners over the years and was pretty attached to it. Being very nice, she tried not to get upset when we started taking it all apart, but she wasn’t enjoying the process. I understand that. I’m not interested in having someone rewrite one of my projects. If we’re writing in collaboration that’s different. Myself, I wouldn’t have offered up one of my projects as a test subject to see whether we would be good writing partners.

We put the writing on hiatus at Thanksgiving due to the crazy packedness of all our holiday schedules. Last weekend we got the word that ScarletBlue and PresiD wanted to shelve the love story and jam out an action adventure script for Mr. Charisma. This is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. Shelving the love story is the least bad part of it. I’ve met Mr. Charisma. He’s very entertaining. He’s intelligent and dynamic and very used to running his show his way. He wants to get into starring in action movies. He and PresiD have been working on putting together a partnership to produce those movies.

Now we’re not going to write a spec script for Mr.Charisma. Nizzibet and I are agreed on that. We’d be trying to hack out a script quickly in order to beat out one of his friends. That’s a recipe for disaster. We are, however interested in writing action adventure scripts. That’s genre we both enjoy – more so than romance. We may both be sentimentalists but we do like to see stuff blow up. We’re looking at the Vin Diesel films as inspiration for our session this Saturday. Apparently Mr. Charisma wants to be the next Vin Diesel.

Pitch Black is a nifty little science fiction horror movie that I think works in part because Diesel’s character isn’t the hero. Radha Mitchell’s character is. She’s the one whose viewpoint we mainly follow and one we can most relate to. Riddick, Diesel’s character, is a dangerous killer with the ability to see in the dark. Not exactly Mr. Normal. It also has some nasty antagonists in the native lifeforms of the planet on which our protagonists are shipwrecked.

I enjoyed XXX less than I probably would have if I had been watching it because I wanted to watch it. Vivisection takes some of the fun out of a story. I’m spending more time looking for plot holes and inciting events and character arcs and other oh-so-significant script structures than I normally would. XXX is an entertaining movie but it doesn’t tell a terribly interesting story. Xander is basically the same guy at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He hasn’t really challenged himself any differently than he would have if Mr. Gibbons hadn’t recruited him. Nothing wrong with that. The movie isn’t boring. Lots of stuff blows up. It’s basically a James Bond movie with an American extreme sports jock in the place of an English secret agent. James Bond doesn’t exactly go through any character arcs in his films either.

XXX is the movie that ScarletBlue and PresiD are apparently thinking of when they’re talking about writing a script for the next Vin Diesel. Fine. I like a challenge. The subtext of the assignment is that we’re writing a story that’s filled with enough action that the star doesn’t have to be a good actor. (Not commenting on Diesel’s acting ability. If we were writing a script for Mr. Charisma we would be writing a script for someone who has never acted on film or stage before.) So I spent a good part of yesterday thinking of possible action movie protagonists. I got stumped after a trio of ideas.

A protagonist is defined by his antagonist. I don’t got to Bond movies to see a British secret agent. If that were that case I’d enjoy a John Le Carre movie as much as a Bond movie. I go to Bond movies to see a suave and dynamic British secret agent take on a powerful villain who has an excess of money, power and interesting henchmen and is threatening to destroy the world as we know it. It’s the villain, baby. A good villain is priceless. The more ways your villain can smack the hero the more interesting he is.

So today I’m thinking about bad guys.

Organizing the cave. Or more specifically, the basement library.

I’ve been considering other categories to group the books in. It’s often difficult for me to limit what a category encompasses. It was part of the fun of keeping Half Price Books organized. Was Danielle Steele a romance author? Did V.C. Andrews belong in mystery or horror? When is a book sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies or history? As the manager of a store I got to set the limits. Mostly. Horror novels featured supernatural events therefore V.C. Andrews didn’t belong there. Except every other HPB filed her there so I couldn’t move her out. Thank heavens she died. The appearance of V.C. Andrews novels from beyond the grave allowed me to feel comfortable about her continued placement in the Horror category.

Shelving fiction at home isn’t an issue. As long as I keep all the books by a single author in one place I’m happy. Subcategories such as science-fiction, horror, mystery, etc aren’t too important to me. It’s my library. I’ve only got books in it that I want or need. The only fiction category I’ve set aside is the Lovecraftian shelves. I get a silly thrill looking at the books there and thinking “Ooooh. Concentrated creepiness.”

It’s all the non-fiction that I’d like to get into some kind of pattern. So far I’ve got the MAH books grouped in one place and the Animal Kingdom in another. For the rest – I’m starting with broad categories of Business, History, Art and Photography. I can already see myself running into problems with those. Business is Nizzibet’s category. History will encompass sociology, crime and religion. Everything that’s not Business, Art and Photography really. Once I’ve got those books caged up I can think about subcategories. That leaves videos and comics/drawn books as orphans to be shuffled into the space the other books aren’t.. Computer books too. Those are mostly in place already. No thinking needed there.

I’m expecting that the process of organizing the books is going to help me organize the rest of the clutter. Skook will sleep through all of it. Nizzibet will be at work today. Jaydogg will be in his office. The only likely interruptions will be keeping laundry in motion and calling The Mother at 11:30. Should be a busy day.

Today is Date Day for Nizzibet and me. That is, we spend the day together doing something mostly fun.

At the moment she’s napping. It’s been a tiring week for her. She danced with The Demon a few times at the beginning of the week and that wears anyone down.

I’m typing out a few thoughts in between frying up turkey bacon. I’m a big fan of eating bacon but not a big fan of eating pigs so turkey bacon is a good compromise for everyone except the turkey.

Jaydogg is in his office doing whatever it is that he does in there. I know part of the time he’s working on The Co-op’s website. He has an obsession for simplicity and exactness that I find useful to be around. It helps me focus when working on my own art and design projects. My tendencies are toward chaos and noise and detail – colors clash, every brick is on the wall, the page is filled with lines.

About time to wake Nizzibet.