Zombie Tales
I took my laptop out to the corner "mom and pop" coffee place recently and actually started on draft #4 of Zombie Movie. I've had this dynamite opening scene in my head for over a year, and in the pre-seasonal warm weather we've been having, I was able to get it down on paper - I mean, on laptop screen and saved in a file.

I also experienced a strange sensation while doing it, one that I've forgotten about in the context of writing. The only way to explain it is to compare it to working out. You know how you feel if you've been away from the gym for a couple of weeks and then get over your inertia and show up - only to find that your muscles protest against lifting and pushing weights around? And the protest with a kind of creaking pain?

That's the sensation, only it was in my head. It actually hurt to write. Bizarre. But I did get five pages written, and most of what I wrote conformed to what has been sitting in my brain for the longest time.

Now if work would just calm down and quit being so exhausting I can then write some more...

A Real Life Place
I spent all morning in a hearing on Capitol Hill today, and developed a headache that felt like railroad spikes driving into my skull. After a couple of ibuprofen, the pain subsided. I'm glad I don't have to go there very often, just enough to make me what politics are like!

In the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn says to George Peppard:

If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

And I asked myself: what place makes me feel like Tiffany's? Certainly not Capitol Hill. Without over-analyzing exactly what Tiffany's is supposed to make one feel like in this context, I came up with the following:

1. Mt. Washington (although it can be deadly.)
2. Route 50 (driving east across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on 6pm on a summer Friday.)
3. In front of any pair of speakers playing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.
4. Barcelona (although I've only been there once.)

Other than that, there aren't any more. But maybe that's the point.

Oh yeah, I also started writing draft #4 of Kickass Zombie Movie.