The Rough Draft

Okay, it snowed today in Mallorca, Spain. The first time it’s snowed there in, well ever. For those of you who don’t know Mallorca is right on the Mediterranean. There is something very disquieting about seeing palm trees with snow on them. At least it is to me. I guess it’s just business as usual for the governments, oil barons and corporate polluters of the world. But for me, it’s plain not right. Even though so called, “Skeptics,” abound to declare that the sky is not falling, everything is fine. Now just shut up and take your, “Soma.” Even Tony Blair that most sycophantic of American friends wants the US to weigh in and get onboard with Kyoto. Of course non of this will mean anything if mainland China and India don’t also get onboard. In the case of China, I fear it may be too late as communist policy has always been more in favor of industry over the environment no matter what they paint on their posters. And while we’re on the subject, the former soviet republics are all in dire need of environmental clean up.

Of course in our hubris we think that we are the manifest biological destiny of our planet. One day the Earth will prove us wrong by taking us down a peg or two through virulent microbiology or as we have so recently seen, with geologic might or maybe it will take a more Asian approach and simply wait us out. What is our brief lifespan to that of a mountain?

Then again, maybe we can turn the corner. Maybe we can make a difference now. I hope we can. For our grandchildren’s sake.

Well after receiving over ninety seven comments yesterday alone on how if my members click on this or that link they can get viagra, or play poker or learn about the secrets of the universe, we have decided to disable the comments section on the blog for the time being. If there is a patch created to stem this growing tide of spam, we wil install it and resume allowing the comments once again. Don’t however hold your breath on this.

If you do wish to comment on an article, you can do it via email. Any one of us can be contacted through this page here.

If you would like me to post on a specific topic or have an inquiry into a current Sabot Project, working member or associate and what they’re up to. You can reach me at the same above address. Please be sure to include your contact info.

Thanks

Steve Abbott
Sabot Productions

“Who Dares Wins”

Writing is at best a stressful endeavour. At times you feel like you’re being torn apart trying to keep everybody’s notes straight and of course there’s the whole problem of implementing the notes into the existing screenplay. There’s also the constant time cruch of the rapidly approaching deadline that you always seem to be up against. Not to mention all the constant pressures of life and the demands of your family. It can all get to be a bit more than a simple country boy can take.

So when it all gets too much, I go play paintball. You pull the trigger on a thousand rounds or so, how can you not feel better? Not to mention as I rapidly approach my fortieth birthday, there’s something deeply satisfying in putting a bunch of rounds into that lippy twelve year old who was shit talking you in the safe area. But none of that really matters on the field. The count goes to, “Go,” and it all breaks down to your team and theirs. There is nothing else in your head but the game and the angles and dangles you need to go through to get those other players walking off the field while yours stays on.

How did I find this mecca of inner peace? Well unlike most other player, I came to the game from the darkest depths of emotional turmoil. I’d lost my youngest son in a house fire four years previous to my involvement with the sport. My other son had been badly burned in the fire so that was an ongoing thing. While most families were putting band aids on cuts and scrapes, we were dealing with daily, “Wound care.” I’d kept myself pretty much together for the first year after the fire but the only person I was fooling was myself. So I didn’t break down all at once but in jagged pieces over a course of months.

Realizing I was a danger to myself and to others I got myself hooked up with a good psychologist to try and put the majority of my mental bits back together. It was a process that would take the better part of three years to accomplish. Apparently I had a lot of anger issues. Which explained the sudden rages and a bunch of other nasty self injurious stuff that I won’t go into. My doctor was top rate however and for the most part she put me pretty much back together through a process of self examination and providing me with coping strategies for stressful situations. I say for the most part. The only analogy I can provide is that if you think of yourself as being painted on a sheet of glass and then the glass is shattered. You can put the pattern back into it’s original shape but bits of it are missing, crushed into dust or simply lost. That’s how I see myself today. Mostly there but with some of the original bits still missing.

But that still doesn’t answer how I got into the sport. Well a friend of mine got some free passes to go play at a local field. I went he bailed and I ended up playing with some other friends of another friend who was in UBC’s acting program at the time. If you are going to play the game, you’re first time should be with a bunch of guys who can riff on Shakespere.

“If we are meant to die, we are enought to do our country loss, and if to live, the greater share of honour.”

That was my first taste but I was not hooked yet. It took me a couple more times to realize that for the money I was paying my doctor for an hour after which I felt like shit, I could play paintball for a day and feel great. And then there was a book called, “Tornado Down,” about one of the aircrews shot down in the Gulf War. In the back of the book was a check list for PTSD or post traumatic stress dissorder. It had every symptom on the list. Once you can put a name to something, you’re halfway there to solving it.

There was one other thing. I bought an Enduro motorcycle and had taken to riding up the mountain behind our house by myself, to also aid in the clearing of my head. There were plenty of unexplored logging roads up there. At the end of one of those roads I came across the members of The Black Watch Painball club. I asked them if they were looking for any new players and that was the start of my association with a bunch of guys who would help bring me back into a state of wholeness.

I started playing with them once a month after that meeting. And while people would come and go I became part of that core of guys, Mike, Alan, and Andy. When I left BC to come here to Toronto, the hardest part was leaving behind my team mates, guys who I knew would always have my back or my flank on the field of honour. It also heralded a short departure from my favorite game for three years. Where I’d managed to play once a moth. I was lucky to be able to play once a year. Luckily I’ve been able to play in other parts of the country including the US (though they suck at Painball USA in LA). The guys from Black Watch and I played together again this summer when I was back in town on business and it was as if I never left. We fit back together like fingers on a hand. It was one of the best days ever. It made me remember what I loved about the sport.

And then my daughter liked this boy who is into the sport. We should go out someday and trade shots I said. You could see in his eyes the thought of an old guy on the field would be entertaining to him. My daughter in an effort to impress this lad asked to come play too. as there are not enough girls in the sport (though I understand their numbers are growing), I said sure. We met this young lad on a Saturday at one of the local indoor fields. Indoor is a good start up for most people. The gun speeds are set lower but the play is closer so it gets pretty fast and furious out there on the field. The lad was a little intimidated when he saw my gun setup, a fully tricked out classic .68 automag with shredder hopper and custom Bob Long squeezebore barrel. Youth of course has it’s own arrogance. Which I sent away later in the day with a game that lasted all of three minutes against an opposing team three times our number. My five man team took out all eighteen including the lad (whom I dispatched with a solid ankle to forehead fanning of balls).

The bug has bit again and with my new WGP Cocker I’m back in the game that I love and playing the only way I know how, full tilt boogie. Yeah I’m almost forty but so what? There’s a bunch of us older players out there and somebody has to show these kids they’re not invincible. And for that time I’m on the field, we’re all the same anyway. Not worrying about anything but the angles and dangles of the game, we all love.

PS: The young lad also picked up the same cocker as me. I still shot his ass out from under him. He thinks his gun may not be as accurate as mine. I told him it’s the player, not the gun.

Old age and treachery, wins every time.

See you in the middle.

Steve Abbott

Hey all,

I know I’ve got a ton of post data on this site but the truth be told I was doing the blog thing well before it became the blog thing. I just liked writing stuff down and posting it online because it always seemed to me that there was never anybody out there just telling it like it is. Like anything this went through a few evolutions. Originally I worked with a PHP-Nuke template (I’m sure it’s more complicated than that but I don’t know enough to comment), which worked great until PHP’s security became so porous that well we were being hacked more than I was posting. So we switched to the much more secure (this week at least) online blog software.

It has been with this newer program that I’ve now encountered the next wave of cyber morons. Now we’ve all been sucked in by the occasional viral marketing ploy online. Some of them are pretty good and others even serve a secret promotional purpose. Such as the www.ilovebees.com viral marketing put on by Bungie to promote Halo 2 (as if none of us weren’t salivating over the prospect of getting our hands on the game anyway). People who figured out the clues in that campaign got to play Halo Live in five seperate locations. Fun, fun, fun (jealous, jealous, jealous). However the latest wave of blog spam is just weak and crappy.

As you know, anybody who likes an article is welcome to leave a comment to that effect, or to even read past comments. Spammers also know this is the only pocket available to them in the security of the site and will post comments and of course handy weblinks looking to sell you Penis extention drugs and then the Viagra, and the girls to go with. Or any number of equally usless services. Needless to say if it’s not a site designated link or in the body of one of my or contributors posts, we do not endorse this stuff. In fact it renders the comments section useless except to suck up bandwidth. I personally am worried by the apparent deep and real need for erectile drugs in the US. Perhaps this explains the current administration’s need to go to war with everybody. I’m amazed that we must be such a culture of consumer zombies that we need to be bombarded at every turn with more and more products that we do not need by these retarded get rich schemes of filling up bandwidth with junk. I wonder if the originators of the web ever thought that their resilient tool would become just another way to sell low grade porn and fake pharmaceuticals? And while we’re on the subject. Maybe if parents didn’t just give their kids everything they ever asked for we wouldn’t have a bunch of downloading freeloaders ripping off the intelectual properties of music and film. I wish they could understand that every time they rip off a film, it makes it harder for me to get one made. (Except for Sky Captain, rip that fucker off, those guys we have to keep in check)

So if you do like the articles send me a personal email. If you’re a spammer, it’ll go directly to trash thanks to my junk controls.

Nobody is more aware of the passage of time as much as people in the film industry. Everybody always wants stuff, faster and cheaper. You’re always working to a deadline whether it’s self imposed or contractual. Then they’re always surprised when you come up with the goods.

“How do you write so fast?” They always ask.

“What other choice do I have?” Is always my answer.

The truth is a good outline, makes for a fast write or rewrite. Of course, your personal life suffers. My wife doesn’t see me for days when I work to deadline Of course the dealine in those cases usually is full draft in two weeks or less. My personal best is eight days. Andrew Genaille, I believe bashed one out in seventy two hours. Both these examples are from page one. I really only like to write like that when I have to. I like a pretty leisurely research phase. Andrew writes like a demon right now but that’ll change once he gets a girlfriend.

So I guess the reality of the writing life is you never balance it all out. There’s never enough hours in the day to get everything done. Your personal life suffers because you’re never around and even when you are around, you’re not really there anyway. My son (who is autistic) knows that the best place for him to look for me is in the basement by my computer. My wife and I talk motsly in bed because it’s the only place in the house where I’m not three feet from a keyboard.

Now of course we’re talking in the extreme here. When I’m working on my own spec stuff, I’ll get between four and six pages out a day. That’s mostly because I like to write and revise as I go along, so I’ll review the previous days work and make changes before I go onto the current days work. so the only time the process is short circuited is when I ‘ve got to bash out the prose and get it in to the production company on a daily basis.

That is of course just the writing side of things. There’s a whole other social aspect of the job that has to be attended to as well. So there are constant meetings with directors casting about for the writer for their next project (you can go broke working for these guys so look out). These courtships can take months. I usually try to get a meal and a beer out of them. There’s the opening parties and wrap parties, cause God knows to be in the scene you’ve got to be seen in the scene. And last but by no means least there’s the family obligations you have to fulfill.

So how do you balance it all out time wise? You just do and in the immortal words of Tom Stoppard, “But it all works out well in the end, and it’s a mystery.”

Good luck and good writing.

Steve Abbott

The real question is are we smart naked apes or dumb ones.

The recent Tsunami in South East Asia is a reminder to us all that we live on a young and active planet. However a Tsunami is a geological event and extremely hard to detect or prepare against. In fact this is the case of most geologic events. We can pretty much tell if a volcano is going active but we have no idea of how soon or how powerful the seismic event will be. And while the current death toll is an immense 157,000 killed with the number still climbing and hundreds of thousands more displaced and homeless, we need to be increasingly more aware of the other great threat to mankind, extreme weather patterns due to global warming.

Now I know many say this is just a theory especially if they own a big factory throwing Carbon DiOxide into the sky. But the fact of the matter is that the poles are shrinking and the Ross Ice Shelf is breaking up. If the mid ocean current known as, “The Atlantic Conveyor,” stalls we’ll be living in our very own Hollywood disaster movie.

Iceberg B-15 broke from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in late March. Among the largest ever observed, the new iceberg is approximately 170 miles long x 25 miles wide. Its 4,250 square-mile area is nearly as large as the state of Connecticut.

The iceberg was formed from glacial ice moving off the Antarctic continent and calved along pre-existing cracks in the Ross Ice Shelf near Roosevelt Island. The calving of the iceberg essentially moves the northern boundary of the ice shelf about 25 miles to the south, a loss that would normally take the ice shelf as long as 50-100 years to replace.

Here’s the image from the 13th of January
Now this could just be one of those freak events but I don’t think so. Expect to see more icebergs calving off in the coming years. If they get out into the Southern Atlantic, they could change the salinity and effectively stall the Atlantic Conveyor current. Which would trigger flooding, drought, hurricanes. Essentially every kind of destructive weather pattern known to man.

The worst part of this is that we know the cause, we even know what we have to do but the majority of the world sits idly by and does not try to enforce Kyoto. Something has to be done and if it has to start with us then so be it. I’m open to suggestions and innitiatives here. Because I’m not sure of how long I can tread water.

As stated in some of his articles, Andrew Genaille enjoys the film party scene. Me, not so much. Now I should point out that Andrew does not drink or partake in any other libatious substance be it legal or not. He is to be commended for this. As a writer, this means he gives up a lot of freebies.

I being of Scottish descent am doubly cursed in that I like to drink, and I also really like free stuff. Free booze is very much a lit match to gasoline when I am concerned. Which can be bad. I’m not sure why alcoholism and writing really seem to go hand in hand but it could have something to do with how good a story sounds when you tell it with a whiskey in your fist. Alcoholics while colorful seldom get the work done and usually end up destroying not only their career but their families and personal relationships as well. And if ever there was an arena of personal relationships, this is it.

So I have a simple rule for the party circuit. Two drinks maximum, always a hard liquor, always in a tall glass. Once you’re through those it’s club soda and lime in a tall glass for the rest of the night. The club soda and lime is the standard drink of twelve step program survivors around the globe. Your bartender will give you a respectful nod of understanding. Sounds boring but it beats your friends relating how you went off the previous night in front of the executive producer you were trying desperately to get interested in your next film. Not being drunk yourself also allows you to be able to guage the intoxication level of the person you are talking to. Persons who are really swacked have a tendency to react in unforseen ways during the course of a conversation. My advice is to let the drunkest person carry the conversation. That way if they go down in flames you can step well out of the way of the fire.

And while film is a world of temptation, and God only knows these parties tend to trot out the temptations one at a time and parade them around you. Resist. Resist with every fiber of your being. They are but glamours there to distract you from your final goal. Actors are great to have on your arm going into a room but chances are they’ll be leaving on the arms of another (more helpful to their career person because lets face it, you’re a writer) later on. People will sling you a line of shit to get you onboard their project, they’ll offer you the world (literally). Sometimes they’ll offer themselves (confusing at best). I’m even pretty sure that if you asked some of them, they’d sign over their souls to you (sad at best) but all in all it’s a weird circular herd motion through the bar and groups break off and clump together and then break apart again to repeat the cycle.

And of course, the golden rule is you don’t talk shop unless pressed to do so by the person in your group with the most credits on IMDB. Never talk about your own stuff unless asked. Always ask the other person what they’re working on first or if it’s a wrap or premiere party discuss what you liked about their film / acting choices / cinematography, etc. That sort of thing goes a long way. It might be bullshit but it’s golden bullshit.

So there it is, stay sober, stay sharp, and stay humble.

One other small note about Andrew and myself, I hate crowds, he has no problem with them but he always ends up with a cold when he goes to the city.

Good luck and good writing.

Steve Abbott

Five years into the new Millenium (or four if your that way inclined) and the only things that keep getting smaller are my cell phone and my money. If the science fiction guys had gotten it right, I’d be half way to Alpha Centauri right now or at least driving my hovercraft. But I’m not and do you know who I blame? Gene Rodenberry, the Albert Einstien of the sci-fi show.

Actually I blame Paramount studios. Gene just wanted to do Cowboys and Indians in space. The original Star Trek’s production values were so low that nobody could really take it seriously except as a pretty fun show. Nobody got the show at the studio while it was on and they chopped it the minute the numbers seemed to drop. The real damage was done when Next Generation was born and then of course the inevitable spin offs which really just exist to provide sci-fi cons with guests for the fans to look at. Though what I’ve seen of the new series, “Enterprise,” has been pretty good (I’ve always been a sucker for Scott Bakula).

The real trouble is not in the story telling. The writing has always been very good, after all it’s a rich universe to draw from. The problem is that the shows have all looked so good that I really believe it’s robbed us of an impetus to get our asses into orbit and beyond. I mean there it is, we’re in space. Too bad it’s not real.

So a big hats off to Burt Ruttan and his amazing company Scaled Composites for putting somebody in low orbit and bringing them back safely twice! Burt has always been a visionary and it’s nice to see somebody still doing nuts and bolts design out there. What has NASA fielded in new rocketry in the last thirty years? Good thing the Russians stuck with their good old Soyuz rockets or the ISS and their crew would be screwed.

What has any of this have to do with writing? Nothing really except you should be passionate about what you write. Reach for the stars because it’s pretty cool what can be achieved when you do. 2004 bit, for a number of reasons. I haven’t talked to too many people who have had good things to say about last year. Let’s make this year better, much better. Let’s concentrate on reaching further, on pushing the envelope.

Hey, you make the right sale and you’ll have just enough money to catch a flight on Virgin Galactic, and then you really can touch the stars.

Welcome to the New Year

Steve Abbott