Something different.

I wanted to do some writing tonight, but didn't feel up to writing a story, so I tried something new. Here's a little freelance poetry for you.

We by J.D. Oliva

When we roll across the moors

We fear death through open doors,

We ape the sky and bail at the moon

We cross the tracks that spell our doom.

We ask the sky “when will you fall”

We cry at the loss of our mother's call

We fight the light of all that speaks

We light the fight at those who teach.

We run through the grass and hold our loves

We chase the dragon who looked like doves

Who are we to pass such doubt

Who are we to scream and shout

We are those who ask what's best.

We are those who've passed the test.

We stand tall, we stand right

We owned up when we lost the fight

We wrestled the angels and fought the beasts

We won the day and joined the feasts.

Who are we who write such tomes?

We are those who write terrible poems!

April 2010

Hey, so I've been absolutely slammed with work latley.

The good news is "WELL BEYOND REASON," that 5 page story I wrote for Andy Schmidt's Comics Experience class has been published. And some people have actually bought it! I guess that kinda makes me a professional? I dunno, it was a lot of fun though. It makes me want to do another.

The next couple months are going to be interesting as far as my writing/filmmaking career go.

Off season wrestling is taking up way too much of my time, but I really enjoy the kids and the sport, so I'm having fun.

Life's been good.

Status update

Sorry, been busy since October.

In that time, I pitched a movie that people were interested based on the quality of the eventually finished script. A script that I have now grown to hate. While suffering a little writers block, I finally wrote another script that I've been messing with for almost twenty years and I love it. Problem, I can't get anyone to read it!

I "graduated" from Andy Schmidt's Comics Experience online course. I loved it and I think it's made a big difference in my writing. At least that's what I've been told from the select few that did read my new script. Along with a bunch of dudes from my class, I'm part of a anthology book coming out in spring. I will finally be a published comic author. Where to go from here?

The team is having their best season ever. We won the Maine East Thanksgiving tournament and I have 6 or 7 guys with over twenty wins already (one with 30!). Conference is this weekend, regionals is two. I don't to have any guesses on our progress published as I think it shot me in the foot last year. Lets put it this way, my 215 is ranked number 3 and I think he's largely ignored...

My judo is getting better, I think. I need to compete to see where I'm at.

Other than that...I can't complain...life's good.

Back again.

So, I'm feeling kinda bloggy today, having started a second, more politically based blog. Based on that, I'm going to keep this my personal journal, while the other one will let me get my other thoughts out there.

So, Grotesque is set to have its world premier at the Vampire Film Festival (ironically enough our film has no vampires!) in NOLA on Monday October, 26th. I'm jazzed as I've never participated in a real film fest before. I'm also trying to use the event to springboard my "Well Beyond Reason" feature into reality.

I've also been going back to school!

Yep, I'm in my second week of comic writing school. So far, so good. I'm learning the craft of writing better than I ever have before. I've never taken a writing class, so this is really awesome to work with someone who has such a strong grip on the concept of "story." This can only help my career.

Wrestling team's looking good. I like one of Driscoll kids who transfered over this year. I think he and his brother will fit in great with what we do.

I love judo, though my body hurts a bit today from our randori session yesterday.

I'm in a good mood, which is unique for my blogging, which is usually where I vent my frustrations.

All right, with that I'm out.

Turn your dream into a reality that hasn't happened yet.

I've been in a much better mood the past two weeks. Mostly because I took a "slight" step back and refocused my goals and how I plan to attack them. This actually allowed me to get quite a bit of planning of my next project and writing done the past two weeks.

I wrote first drafts on both my portions of the final three quarter of the Charlie Welles movie, "Well Beyond Reason." "The Virgin Sacrifice" and "Ashes to Ashes" are both in decent shape. Easily the best first drafts I've ever done. I really think my writing is coming along, which was the entire point of spending so much time writing this summer.

Seriously, in the past three months, I've written six comics, three and a half short screenplays, a corporate script, some novel work, and a bunch of long form blog entries, not to mention scripting and pitching a TV show (which failed). More importantly, I think they're pretty good. I think I can feel myself making significant strides in my writing.

Here's the thing with me: I'm all about out working people. It's how I succeeded at sports. I'm not that great of an athlete but I was always successful (not as successful as I'd like to have been, of course), not matter what level I was participating on. I think of my self as a winner athletically because I was always willing to do things other people weren't in order to improve.

However, when I began getting into the creative arts, I foolishly thought that talent was rewarded and because I was talented it would be different. It would only be a matter of time before I was discovered....

Yep, I'm an ass-clown.

I'm not sure if it was arrogance, ignorance or a combination of both but I didn't attack "my dream" the same way I attacked "my mission." Did you catch that? Cause I have a hunch that this is where and why a lot of people fail. It has always been "my dream" to be a filmmaker and a comic book writer. Growing up I'd spend hours day dreaming and plotting out ideas, but very little time actually writing them down. Don't get me wrong, I probably wrote more than most kids around my age, but I didn't spend nearly as much time jotting down my thoughts as I did conjuring them up. Part of that was because I have a near photographic memory, so if I commit a thought or idea to memory, it's there. I still have stories from my childhood etched into my brain. Like most kids, make believe was my escape. My shelter. It was a comfort zone.

Contrast that to my high school/college athletic experience. As I said before, I'm not a gifted, natural athlete. I didn't even start developing athletically till junior high school. Part of that might be because of the eyes, but that really doesn't factor into the equation here. As I was saying, in high school, I decided that I was going to be forever enshrined in the "legendary" Streamwood High School Athletic Hall of Fame (I put legendary in quotations because my high school was notoriously bad in sports) as a 2 sport athlete in football and wrestling.

See the difference. I decided wanted to be a filmmaker/writer, come hell or high water, I was going to be in that Hall of Fame. It wasn't a dream, it was a reality that simply hadn't come to pass yet.

So that's what I did in high school. I played sports not because I necessarily wanted to (don't get wrong I love sports and am not saying that I didn't enjoy what I did) because I HAD to. It's what drove me every day. It's how I defined myself. I don't know if anybody believed that I was going to...I don't want to say "achieve those goals" because it's a cliche and they really weren't goals, they were a future that had not yet come to pass, as I said. I didn't care if anybody believed me either, it was going to happen. And sure enough my senior year, it happened. I was an All-Conference/All Area Nose Guard, Captain and Most Valuable Lineman on the Football team and All-Conference/All-Area, Regional and State Championship Wrestler.

I did it. Sort of.

You see my wrestling State Championship wasn't the State Championship I really wanted. I won a Greco-Roman state title, not a "true" Illinois High School title. You see, I fell short of my goals. Did you catch that? "Goals." More on that later.

I was so upset and devastated about my senior wrestling season, that I decided that I would continue my path and wrestle at the division 1 level. That was always important to me, being a Division 1 athlete. D1 athletes are generally regarded as the cream of the crop in their sports and freshman year of high school, I decided that I was going to be one and NOBODY believed I could do that. You see it takes something special to be a D1 athlete. Most people think it's talent. They're kinda right in a way.

Sophomore year in high school, I was given the most backhanded compliment I ever received, "J.D. isn't very athletic but he'll out work anybody." I say backhanded because it is. There's nothing an athlete wants to hear less than you aren't very athletic and I refused to believe it until after my athletic career wrapped. Another reason I thought it was backhanded was because I naively assumed that everybody worked hard. I spent so much time focusing on my own growth that I never really noticed what my teammates were doing. I started taking notice afterwards.

When I decided on Northern Illinois University, a small D1 school with a young, up-and-coming wrestling program, a coach from Miliken University, a D3 school, actually called my dad and told him not to let me go there because I'd be "making the biggest mistake of (my) life." Some people would use that to fuel them. Not me, I was way too arrogant to care what a D3 coach thought. I was going to be a D1 starter at NIU and my goal was to be an NCAA All-American.

Take a guess what happened and what didn't?

Five rough years later, I was NIU's starter at 197 pounds and ranked 25 in the country. I was one match away from qualifying for the NCAA tournament and I failed. That failure is something that still stings me. I'll never get over it completely because it should've happened. I should've had my story-book ending. But I didn't I failed. I've thought about that a lot over the years and have replayed a thousand different scenarios in my head but I know why I failed. I never believed.

It was only after my dad, while trying to comfort me said, "you were never supposed to make it this far," that it really clicked. In my mind, making the team was just like the HOF, it was a reality that hadn't happened yet, my goal was to All-American. See, I knew I was going to make that team, even though by all accounts I shouldn't have for several reasons (not athletic enough, not big enough, not technical enough, no high school State Championship), it was going to happen, at least in my mind....

There it is, right there. People talk about believing in yourself, but believing isn't really the right term. It's accepting it. There's a big difference there. In order to believe there has to be a certain amount into the equation. But when you accept, you're faced with the truth. There's no need for doubt, because it's there, it just hasn't happened yet.

So when I got out of school, I immediately went right into writing. My first screenplay was about wrestling. My second was a horror story (that's me in a nutshell). I worked on them both in my off time for about a year a piece. In retrospect, they were both brutal. But so were my first two wrestling matches.

The first script went on the shelf for about a year and I eventually worked it till it was decent enough to be the subject of my first film, which I find brutal, but other people tell me is good (I don't believe them). My second script got a few reads but in reality wasn't good enough to be picked up by anyone.

I didn't write my next script till December of 05 and do you know what I did with that script? Nothing. Two year later, we decided to film it. That would take another year and a half to finish. A co-wrote another script in that time but the less said about that the better.

I've been beating myself up recently because I'm almost 30 and I feel that I haven't achieved my professional goals. Now, don't get me wrong, I am director, again that was a foregone conclusion in the making, but I'm nowhere near where I want...no, where I should be.

But have I done? Three scripts. 1 indie feature and 2 shorts. All that in six years. It's not that I haven't had ideas. My brain is so full of ideas that it feels like a virtual multiplex is going on in there. Why haven't I achieved the success that I feel I should have?

The answer is simple: While I still have my mind made up that I will be a success, I haven't pushed myself the way I used to. I don't force myself to sit and create with the same sense of urgency that drove me athletically. I've been waiting for someone to hand me my future because I think I'm something special (BTW you have to in order to succeed) and I've haven't done nearly enough to earn it.

The same thing with comics. In the fall of 07, I decided I wanted to get into that ballpark to, so what did I do? Did I go out and create my own stories and self-publish and kick and scratch to get my name out there? Nope, like a total tool, I wrote to Marvel, DC and Dark Horse trying to get them to look at me....

I swear to God, I can be the biggest moron ever....

Instead, I became the kind of person I used to mock: the guy who just talks about stuff. That was never me. I was a doer, but unfortunately, I let life sideline me. Be it my job, my diet, my hobbies, whatever. It all became more important to me than the actual work I needed to do to get where I need to be.

The best thing that ever came out of wrestling for me was the revelation that "hard work is a talent because most people can't do it." The wise words of John Stutzman.

This isn't a revelation that came to me today. I figured this out this past spring, that's why I've had this creative rebirth. Why in the past three months I've done more than I have in years and I still like I could be doing more.

Maybe I'm not as good a writer or director as I think I am. The actual truth hasn't really ever been a concern of mine before, shouldn't really start being one now. All that matter is the perceived truth. Your perceived truth.

Don't set goals. Don't dream. Dreams by their very definition cannot be attained. They aren't real. Whatever you want to do with your life, make a decision and accept that not as your "dream" or your "goal" but as reality. A reality that just hasn't happened yet.

I am a director. I have three films to my credit. I am a writer. I have several scripts under my belt now. My stuff will be out there for everyone to enjoy, it just hasn't happened yet...

But it will.

Another b(itch)log

So, Sony rejected my pitch for Homecoming. "Good concept," "tired genre," "not digging story and characters." Can't say I disagree. Though it sucks, cause getting it picked up would've been a game changer, I wasn't "in love" with the idea. I developed it specifically for Crackle, keeping things like demographics and stuff in mind. The lesson learned, if you're going to spend some time developing a story make it something you're passionate about and something you believe in, otherwise your true intentions will bleed through on the page.

I truly feel that this was the case with Homecoming. While I liked the concept, when I was daydreaming and working out, my mind was on other stories. That just goes to show that I CANNOT phone it in. I don't mean that I "should not" write stuff I'm not passionate about but I "am unable to" write stuff I'm not passionate about. That's how I win people over, by getting them excited and writing from the heart, I can honestly say that Homecoming was not this case.

The question is "where do I go from here?" In all honesty, my plan at the beginning of the summer was to work on BLOODSHOT and some WELL BEYOND REASON stuff and VISION QUEST however when the Sony thing came up I changed my focus. In hindsight, I may have made a mistake.

On the other hand, I choose to think that instead of a mistake, I got to do some more writing and get better and I do think that Homecoming was well written (Brian Krause thought so) even if the story and characters weren't up to snuff, at least (I believe) the technique was better. Plus, just getting the opportunity to pitch to a major company is huge. I got to pitch a television program to Sony Pictures Television, that's freaking huge. Most pitches are rejected and it's something that even the best (from Steven Spielberg to Alan Moore) have had pitches turned down. So, at least I'm in good company.

On the retrospective side, my sensibilities might not be quite right for that particular network and that's cool. Creatively speaking, you'll always be better off staying true to yourself and while stepping outside and trying something different might not be a bad thing, you'll always be better  off.

So, I need to focus myself on new creative fronts. Perhaps, I should just keep pushing Charlie Welles stories as they were meant to be? It's not like artists have been telling me how great my comic scripts are. So maybe I should... I just don't know.

I just don't know... but I know that I can keep trying.

Chasing Windmills Again

Yo, what it is?

So we're home after a bit of a vacation up to the Northern areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota. My buddy Scott, the inspiration for 7 Minutes, got married and it was fun to reconnect with some old college wrestling buddies. One may have some work possibilities for me in the future. Video game writing. Nothing solid, more of a "I'll pass your info to the right people" kinda thing, which is always cool.

I also pitched HOMECOMING to Sony yesterday. I'm smart enough to know I won't hear back for awhile, still can't help but be a bit nervous. At least I think I have a backup plan in case it doesn't happen.

Writing these WELL BEYOND REASON scripts and I haven't heard back from either of the artists I sent them too. I'm pretty sure one is not returning because they've lost interest, the other I may have offended. I dunno, I can't be upset, I mean they were gonna work for free. I have access (possibly) to two artists that would be awesome but they would cost money. I'm still thinking. I really want to do this, and if I do, I need to self-publish. Though the thought does run through my head, if I'm going to pay an artist, why not just pay Neil and go forward with Vision Quest? I still have a lot of thinking to do in that department. 

Of course, it's also possible that I'm not that talented and I've just chosen another path in which I can't possibly succeed. I tend to do that to myself every now and again. I believe myself to be something special and the rest of the world doesn't find me to be so great and then I'm left with mediocrity. Hell, I'd settle for mediocre instead of just plain sucking and failure. 

Maybe that online course would be a good idea. Of course, $500 is a lot to find out you're not very good. But maybe I need to hear that from an industry professional? I think I'm a good writer, I know that I make mistakes from time to time (who doesn't). When I rewrote my talent search entry, I noticed a few mistakes and figured those would probably do me in and sure enough I was right.

It's still possible I could hear back and get some feedback. It's also possible that it'll never happen. I'll wait a month or so and send an email asking for some constructive criticism. We'll see if I ever hear back.

This is going to be one of those days where I shit on myself. I know I'm a "good guy." I have a good work situation and I really should just work to keep growing my business but the truth is my heart just lies in a different place. And, as always, it's a place that is rather difficult to reach. I guess my fear is that end up like my grandfather. A wannabe writer with something to say but not enough talent to realize that it can't be done.

I do get sick of being Don Freakin' Quixote all the time. I guess the reason I've been pushing so hard lately is that I'm 29 and getting closer to 30 and I'm really starting to fear that it just isn't going to happen with me. I'm getting closer to Jose's age when I met him and I really fear becoming him even more than my grandfather.

It's also possible that I spread myself too thin and don't focus enough on one particular project at a time.

Wow, I'm such a freaking drama queen. So I didn't win a talent search; big deal. I've always made up for talent with hard work, so why would this be any different. Of course, I was hoping that this time it would be different.

Meh, I'm done feeling sorry for myself. Blogs are great for getting stuff off your chest.

J.D.