“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” – Thomas Jefferson
Jonas Kyratzes
Writer, filmmaker, game designer
Here’s a bit of news you might like: I’m collaborating on a flash game with Terry Cavanagh, creator of VVVVVV.
It’s an RPG, and its working title is Nexus City.
It’s set in Arizona.
It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve ever written.
You’re going to like it.
I don’t have enough time or strength for a long blog post – today’s been a hard day – but Verena recently published the newest part of The Twilight Experiment. Go read it, for it is funny.
More about my too many creative endeavours tomorrow.
(Did I mention you should vote for Echoes and Awakening on YouTube? And share it? Come on, people! It only takes a few seconds, and lives depend on you. OK, maybe not lives, but… well… important things. Yes. Trust me on this. Just go.)
I’m still here. Working very hard on creative things and being entirely too obsessive. Will be able to reveal more soon, I hope. Financially everything is still shit, so any donations (even if only of a few dollars) are greatly appreciated. But creatively things are mostly good. Rejections for short stories suck and no book news yet, but the other projects might make up for that, at least psychologically.
Damn. Being too vague. More soon. I hope. Very much.
Please keep supporting Echoes and Awakening. Awakening in particular seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people, but it could really use more visibility. A “making of” will hopefully follow in the near future. And it should be about time for the Phenomenon 32 bloopers.
The whole tooth disaster has kind of thrown everything into confusion here, and we’re still trying to catch up. So many boring things need to be done: the flat needs to be cleaned, paperwork taken care of, that sort of thing. And we also have to work on creative or at least creativity-related issues: sending Verena’s novel out to agents, and finishing my own novel. (And a couple of other things I’m working on, that I’ll say more about later.)
It’s all kind of shitty right now, though. The weather is incredibly depressing; three weeks of sunshine just aren’t enough, and no matter how much I try to ignore it, I feel this underlying sense of heaviness, of being in the wrong place. Verena feels much the same. The money situation could also be better, and I fear looking for yet another mind-numbing job will soon be a priority. I don’t mind working, and working hard (we did 36-hour days in the theatre and never complained), but I wish I could do something I’m actually good at.
I haven’t lost faith. Watching Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story (a documentary about Eddie Izzard’s life) reminded me just how many times the people I admire fell on their faces before they got the chance to do what they wanted, and that no matter how many people tell you that you’re mad, that doesn’t mean they’re right.
But man, we’ve been working at this for a long time, and the dark days sure are dark…
Well, fuck that. Back to work.
Our two short films for the Parallel Lines competition are up. (Both have the same dialogue, because that’s the point of the competition.)
The first one is a question.
The second one is an answer, but not necessarily to the same question.
There are connections.
Please watch them, like them, and share them with your friends, family, colleagues, and perfect strangers. Every bit of support means we’re a tiny bit closer to being able to tell more stories.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a post about my tooth breaking in two. That happened on Friday night, when I was supposed to be editing the two short films we made for the Philips Cinema Parallel Lines competition. Instead, eating a Snickers ice cream caused one of my teeth to split in two, and we had to get to a dentist. The only open dentist at that time of night was at the other end of Frankfurt, but it was an emergency, so we had to take a taxi, which cost us more than we would normally spend on food in several days. Still, we’re lucky; we got away with paying something like 60€ for taxis and dentist; if we lived in the United States, things might have been quite different.
The Dentist of Doom, as Verena called him, turned out to be a lunatic. What is it with strange racist dentists? This is my second one now. (My normal dentist is very nice, and not racist at all.) This one honed in on my last name and couldn’t shut up about Greece. But everything he said was bizarre, and conversations went exactly like this (with my mouth wide open and him poking at my gums):
Jonas: Is there no way of repairing the tooth?
Dentist: Alexander the Great destroyed Persepolis, did you know that?
Jonas: Well, he conquered it, and…
Dentist: He killed everyone there. Not even the dogs were allowed to live. A Greek person told me that.
Jonas: Uh, yes, well…
Dentist: But he wasn’t Greek, right? Alexander the Great. He was Persian.
Jonas: Actually he was Greek. Northern Greek. Macedonian.
Dentist: Is that so? Well, I don’t speak any Greek. Sorry. Maybe I’ll learn some today. Hah hah. I had a Greek assistant once. She was very nice.
Jonas: Aha.
And it kept getting weirder and more non sequitur. He was not happy when I pointed out that German is actually also a native language of mine, and I’m only part Greek. He also went on about the fact that he likes to pull out teeth. Which is what he did with mine. Whether or not it was really necessary, I will probably never know. He sure had fun.
It could all have been much more painful. I suppose you could say I was lucky that the tooth was almost dead anyway – if its deadness had not involved an eight-month root canal (or endodontic therapy, as the Wikipedia calls it) that on occasion caused me pains that words have yet to be invented for. Now I have a missing tooth at the back of my mouth and a strange glob of congealed blood, and I kind of wish they’d pulled the tooth out back when it first started hurting like a motherfucker.
Oh well. At least the impolite elitists have struck again in Harold Bloom and the Death of Art, aka The Comments Thread That Will Not Die. Someday I’ll have to write a real follow-up to that one.
Despite a couple of minor hiccups, good progress is being made with the two short films, and we should be able to enter the competition with two respectable, even cool entries. None of us are expecting even remotely to win – given that we are certain to be up against people (i.e. film students) with far superior equipment and effects – but we can at least try to do our best, and see where we end up. Your support, when if the time comes, will be greatly appreciated.
Finished filming another short; also edited the previous one. Results are looking good. More editing tomorrow. Lack of sleep is evident in short sentences. Cat is making typing difficult by headbutting me.
We’re back. Exhausted. Have ordered pizza.
I didn’t entirely finish my novel in Greece, but I did some very important work that pleased me a great deal (Verena: “You should make some kind of deal with Kleenex, so that the book comes with tissues.”). Also shot a short film, and will shoot another one on Sunday, for the Parallel Lines short film competition. Yeah.
Much to talk about creatively (including games!), and some very amusing stories to tell – who is ready for the Dread History of the Tangaman and His Organ of Destruction? Yes, indeed. And there was a turtle called Böb. Very interesting.
But first, food and relaxation. Most necessary after this incredibly long day.
