The Great Leap

There comes a moment when you just have to let it all fly. Sometimes you choose the moment, sometimes the moment chooses you. And here I am, at the moment.

No longer a wage slave, I now toil solely for myself and my partners at Zenmovie and Lightwheel. It is, of course, utterly terrifying. And there are so many things to do that I'm still a bit flustered, trying to sort out how to get it all done efficiently. The result, at least for now, seems to involve flitting from one project to another, getting a little bit accomplished in several tasks but not quite finishing anything. I'll surely get a better feel for it, but right now I think I'm still a little flummoxed at the idea that there isn't much difference anymore between Friday and Saturday. All that easy built-in structure, gone, leaving just Me and Time. Little Me; Big, Big Vasty Time.

I've got money laid aside for a couple months, and something has to happen during that time. I've always hated deadlines but I just gave myself the mother of all deadlines. And it won't be catastrophic if it doesn't work (after an unpaid summer internship with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival I got home with $35 in my bank account and a huge stack of bills, but came out from under that just fine); but oh man, I really need it to work. It's time to get down to it, to take that risk, to do what I've always said I was going to do.

Started working on a short story over the weekend, the first time I've worked in straight prose for a remarkably long while. I had a tiny little idea that has already blossomed into something mysterious and strange, and it has definitely been a challenge to write. Which is good: the best way to deal with my new life-challenge is with an art-challenge. And if I pull it off, there's a little money coming in--from writing. From that which I must do.

We've had some interesting meetings with some interesting people concerning City of Truth, and we're going to be workshopping it tomorrow night with some more interesting people. Already we have a host of ideas to make the script better and deeper, and they're all good character ideas, not just showy set pieces. So I'm hopeful there will be good news to report, pretty soon.

Because man. Now there's no choice--there has to be good news, and sooner than soon. I so don't want to have to go back to someone else's office, ever ever again.

Lightwheel Entertainment

We have begun a new company--arising from and yet unrelated to Zenmovie, LLC. The new entity will, in future, serve as the umbrella for everything we do, and it is for this company that we recruited Monica Kim to serve as our third partner. After several days of running through every name we could possibly imagine (I'm still annoyed that Mythos was taken), we finally settled on Lightwheel Entertainment, Inc.

What does it mean? Well, we were initially thinking about spinning wheels, turning straw into film, and saw the wheel itself as a reel of film, a wheel of light. But then I discovered this--a phenomenon known as a marine lightwheel, one of those unexplained wonders that is probably just bioluminescent algae or plankton, organized into colonies, set into motion in the sea. But I loved the image, and found that it suited our mission very well, that a broad description of one phenomenon matched with the kind of movies we want to make: something mysterious, just below the surface.

And so we are named. Filed the papers last week, got our employer ID number, all that. We all have murderous to-do lists already, we have registered several versions of the domain name, we don't yet have a website but we will when the time is right. Lightwheel will be a production company above all else, probably working on co-productions with other production companies, and we have already begun the process of getting our first project off the ground--maybe even our first two projects.

Can't wait for the day when we first see our logo, a wheel of light turning beneath the surface of the sea, flickering across a movie screen. The start of something, right here.