Wednesday, February 04, 2009

February 2009 Writing News

It seems I haven’t sent one of these out since September- Egad! Was I caught up in a pre-election tizzy? Knocked for a loop by the holidays? In one of those periodic funks about what my writing efforts were adding up to that we all get from time to time? All of the above! But now I’m back, full of New Year’s fervor, to unleash the latest updates about my creative efforts on you, my hapless victims:

Film- I’ve been low activity in the last two rounds of Scary Cow, the independent film-making co-op that I’m part of. But I was script supervisor and production assistant on a video for a song by local musician Tony Maddox, “The Waiting Game”, which will air at their screening this Saturday (February 7th) at the Castro Theatre. It’s always worth checking out, you can get tickets here: http://scarycow.com/news_pages/2008-12-round7Screening.html . I am approaching 90% likelihood of writing and producing my own short film in their upcoming round, I’ll keep you posted.

Publication- Through the second half of last year I made a pledge to myself to submit something somewhere on a weekly basis, which I kept to pretty well. I am hereby extending that into 2009! For those of you interested in statistics, the 2008 effort has so far led to a 14% acceptance rate, 25% rejection rate and 61% eerie whistling silence rate. 2009 is still in its infancy, but has already yielded one might-become semi-regular outing blogging on music for the ‘around the web” section of the new online culture magazine The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/sections/music/ . And I’m continuing to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle, where I’ve just become a regular Thursday contributor. You can read my January 9th grouchy musical New Year’s resolution column for them here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/01/09/musical-years-resolutions-san-francisco-09

Performance- I’m making a commitment to read in public at least once a month this year. My first outing was an open mic at the Bazaar Café this past Thursday. My February installment will likely be at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference (for more about which, see below). I’ll update you on where I’ll be in March and going forward. If anybody has some good venue suggestions, let me know!

Novel- After a year of working together, things with my agent seem to be winding down. So, despite the fact that the publishing industry is collapsing along with the rest of the economy, I’ll be trying various new means to find a publisher for my novel Out In The Neon Night this coming year. The first of these is attending the San Francisco Writer’s Conference this month (http://www.sfwriters.org/ ), which includes “speed dating” events with agents and publishers. If nothing else, it should make for a fun story…

Blog- Forty one blog entires in 2008, and two so far in 2009, for better or for worse. You can read them in any or all of the following three locations: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/, http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/, http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

That’s it for now, see you in March!

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