thefly

Sorry, I didn't know you had a website. I'd like to have seen it.

E-book self-publishing might be the way to go. Kerry Wilkinson, Amanda Hocking and others have self-published ebook bestsellers and parlayed that success into contracts with traditional publishers.

I wish you luck.

I make BLT's with Boca!! hahah.

Let's face it, medical treatment in this country is just bad. Presented with an injury, doctors will know what to do. But when called upon to make a differential diagnosis (the patient could have one thing or something else) they'll probably get it it wrong. One study by an AMA panel on chronic pain found that doctors did, in fact, misdiagnose the source of the pain about 50% of the time.

Doctors order a lot of tests, not just because of fee for service payment, but because they don't have a clue what's wrong with you. They hope the tests will show something, but they don't really know what they're looking for. In any case, they get paid the same thing for making a wrong diagnosis as a right. Why spend a lot of time with a patient, when you can just give him an off-the-cuff diagnosis, give him a prescription for something, and tell him to make an appointment to come back. If the prescription doesn't help, all the better. In a month the doctor can begin the whole futile process over again.

God, I wish "House" wasn't just a fictional TV show. I'd love to go to that hospital and be attended to by a team of doctors who really care.

Don't get me started on doctors. I have this motion disorder in my feet. My toes move involuntarily. I showed it to one doctor and he told me I'm making them do that. I showed it to a neurologist and told him what I thought it was (something he had never heard of, even though there's a lot of literature on it). I even showed him a bunch of medical journal abstracts (from the www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed website). Of course, he gave me a prescription and told me to come back. When I came back, he hadn't even looked at the articles, but insisted I had something else. The condition I have is called "painful legs and moving toes" syndrome. The articles on it describe what I have to a tee, but these arrogant know it alls won't listen.

But enough about real doctors. I much prefer the fictional kind. I love "House." It's a new wrinkle on the "procedural" genre, where the team use medical procedures to solve medical, as opposed to legal, mysteries. I'm working on a TV pilot idea myself, where FBI agents use computer forensics to contend with hackers, suspects with evidence on their hard drives, etc. But there's also a partner/love interest la "Castle" or "Bones." I really think this would make a great series.

And, of course, there's Bull Moose Jackson, who's much better endowed.

Thanks for commenting on my blog.

Dramatic writing has to be more structured than long-form fiction because it has to fit the story into a fixed period of time. A movie needs to tell its story in about 2 hours. A show on commercial TV needs to be even more structured.

That's because shows are a set length and commercials have to be inserted. There's a basic format, typically a Teaser (a pre-title sequence) and 4 acts, the act-breaks being where the commercials go, and a Tag, the very short scene at the end.

Within that format, each show has its own rules: The number of pages per act, the overall length, etc. Gilmore Girls scripts, where every talks super-fast, like their in a Howard Hawks' screwball comedy, is much longer than other shows with the same running time. A writer has to study each individual show, learn these rules and follow them.

With plays and movies, you're not under the same time constraints, but you still have to worry about holding an audience's attention. Nothing I've read by Truby really speaks to this basic problem. Lajos Egri, in "The Art of Dramatic Writing" does, but his prescription, is to write Well-Made Plays in the manner of Henrik Ibsen. But, as Walter Kerr noted in his excellent "How Not to Write a Play," this approach tends to produce characters who are more mouthpieces than human beings. To be fair to Ibsen, though, his plays do keep an audience wondering "what happens next?"

And isn't that the key to fiction writing, keeping the audience wondering what happens next. Truby, with his very left-brain, very rational system, isn't likely to yield a story that surprises an audience, or keep it in suspense. He actually advocates that writers come up with the "self-revelation" first. Come to think of it, so does Egri, who claims your play should have a premise. So the Premise for "Romeo and Juliet" is, according to Egri, love conquers allsomething trite like that.

This kind of writing is good, if you're writing "After School Specials" and the premise is look both ways before you cross the street. This type of writing tends to get boring for an adult audience, especially where the premise is something an audience already knows and agrees with.

There are, however, valuable lessons to be learned from Lajos Egri and, as I've said before, from John Truby. I guess, what I'm really saying, is, with advice on dramatic writing, as with advice on everything else, you take what makes sense to you, and you leave the rest.