My New Publisher...

My publisher for Money Shot non-fiction version, Thunder's Mouth, sent me an author's questionaire. I put it away and said I'd do it later. And then it became even more later. Now it's due tomorrow. You'd think that it would be short, but NOOOO, this questionaire is a BEAST. They're going to use this questionaire for their publicity, but they ask so many questions, I wouldn't be surprised if they asked for my first born child. So that's on the agenda to get done tonight.

I've fleshed out the first draft of my Yardie story, and I'll continue to mess with it over the next two days. I'm going to do a character sketch, detailing the physiology, psychology, and sociology of my characters. Also, I'm going to add the ethics of each character. It is assumed that gangsters are bad, but the reason we like The Godfather characters is because they have an ethos, family, loyalty, respect, etc. that keeps them "ethical" within their own point of view. So I need to know the ethics of my characters. That should make them more well rounded and less two dimensional.

Remember BlackCafeLit? I'm working with my fellow UCLA film school student MK Asante on it. We're shooting a pilot over the next few weeks, and I think we have a winner.

In the NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: About a month ago, I pitched a reality show that went really well, except it didn't sell. I read yesterday that Steven Spielberg is producing (with Mark Burnett) a reality show that is EXACTLY the show I pitched. I'm not talking kinda like it. Or sorta like it. EXACTLY like it. What does that tell me? One: That there are no original ideas, but just original ways of doing the same old thing. TWO: Ideas don't happen in a vaccum. And THREE: Whereas the name "Lawrence Ross" has no cache in this town, the name "Steven Spielberg" can sell damn near anything. I gots ta get me some name recognition.