“… like a swiss watch”

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Before the pandemic, Schrader had a standard routine when beginning a screenplay. He'd tell the germ of a story out loud; if the tale held a small group's attention for ten minutes, he'd go home, write it down with more detail, and run through the process again. He'd get up to twenty minutes, then forty-five. If the story still kept people interested, he'd set it all down on a legal pad, devoting a handful of words and a time stamp to every scene he envisioned. These final outlines are dense, uniform--almost without exception, they fit onto one page--and visually striking, like mathematical proofs. "Paul's writing is all about concision," Scorsese told me. "Everything counts, there's not a word out of place, and all the parts work together like a Swiss watch."

The Shadow Coloring Book (1974)

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A few pages from Saalfield’s 1974 coloring book that’s part of my beloved “weird 1970s Shadow stuff” sub-collection:

Interior art is credited to Tony Tallarico (1933-2022) and, while I haven’t been able to verify it, my suspicion is that the signed “LoBianco” of the cover is illustrator Nick LoBianco, whose credits, according to the linked blurb, include ghost-illustrating 1960s Peanuts merch, illustrating many, many lunchboxes, and, perhaps most interestingly, designing The Monkees’ logo.

shut up linear brain

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Pretty sure that my (one of my many) problem(s) over the last few writing weeks is that I've slipped back into a pattern of thinking too linearly. Seems to manifest itself most when working in fiction, so I probably should have spotted it before and recognized it as the problem, or at least part of it. Most likely some residual trepidation about fiction that I was long ago able to (more or less) abandon with non-fiction; like anything, it takes time and practice and the occasional renewing of vows.

Solution: return to "slips of paper" or the zettel/Obsidian way of parsing out individual notes from the notebook cacophony, tag them, and stuff in a project file (or the general digital brain catch-all if devoid of a certain project). Embrace the chaos, resist the urge to organize too soon; order and a whole comes later.

Tagging as Note to Self so I can reference if not the entirety of this piece then at least its title.

realization upon the shadow's wheels

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Cemented while staring into space and stuck on the current thing: that the only two Shadow toy lines (Madison's oddities in the mid-70's and Kenner's '94 movie line) ever made both feature weird vehicles lends my collection an interesting - if perplexing - cohesion (which is the best kind of cohesion, IMHO):

At least the Kenner ones are moderately less anachronistic (and "side-swiping swords" are a now requirement for my next car)…