Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.

Robert F. Kennedy, Berkeley, Oct 22, 1966

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986

This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.

Barack Obama, Grant Park, Chicago, Nov 4, 2008

I believe 1948 was the one year Gallup got it wrong…

Final Presidential Estimate: Obama 55%, McCain 44%

[Edited 11/04/08 7:05 am to remove broken widget.]

Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.

Someone who knew a good story when he heard one.

I think it’s realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: ‘I despair. The world’s no good.’ That’s a perverse idealist. It’s practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That’s very realistic.

Studs Terkel

As portrayed by Anna Deavere Smith:

Note: This entry is for Mac users. In fact, it’s only for users of Leopard (AKA OSx 10.5.x).

I did a little review this week on the submissions I made this year, and in that process revamped my tracking system. It’s not just because I’m a data geek that I feel it’s important to track submissions. Once upon a time, I sent a submission out to a place I’d already sent one to some months before. The theatre had a strict policy of only one submission per twelve-month period. My submission was shredded. No matter how nice they were about it, I was embarrassed by my mistake. What an amateur…

And so, I keep track of the scripts I send out. I used to design databases for a living, and while I enjoyed that for a long time, it was work. There’s nothing fun about creating some complicated system for personal use. Well, sometimes. Except I’m too busy. So, off the shelf software was where I began.

I used to use software called Power Tracker than ran on OS9. I received it as a freebie the first time I bought Screenwriter in a very early iteration of that software. Power Tracker was built to track screenplay submissions, and handled stage play submissions, too. I chugged along with that until Apple abandoned OS9, and I needed some other way to track my submissions. I remembered we had a copy of FileMaker Pro somewhere. The Beloved had won a copy of it in a raffle at MacWorld some time ago.

Bento is a neat, cheap, and unsophisticated data management tool.

With FileMaker I went a little overboard designing reports for myself. I like slicing and dicing information in every which way. The only problem with FP really was it was at least two versions old, and not supported by Leopard. FileMaker 7 crashes in Leopard. Some days, FP7 crashes a lot. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to spend nearly a couple of hundred bucks to upgrade, when I only use FP for my little tracking program.

Excel is a great option. MBH uses Excel, I think, to track his submissions. Very easy to sort, group, see what you’ve done. I thought about that. And then I downloaded the trial version of Bento.

Bento is not FileMaker lite. It’s hardly a database. Yet, I think Bento may be my new solution to my script tracking. If not, I’ll just move over to a spreadsheet, and keep an even simplier list.

Within about an hour, I transferred my data from FileMaker into Bento, and using it in conjunction with Address Book, and iCal, I got back to not thinking about software.

How I set Bento up:

My data is now found in these places…

• Submission places (theatres, grants, festivals, workshops, etc.) are kept in Address Book.
• Submission deadlines (for festivals, workshops, competitions) are kept in iCal
• A list of “projects” or scripts is contained in a Bento table.
• A list of submissions made is contained in a Bento table.

Within my Bento, the primary table and display form, is the list of submissions, or the “what’s been submitted” info. That table is linked to the Address Book, which holds the “submitted to where” info. The submissions table is also linked to the Bento projects/scripts table.

A secondary table, or display form, is a list of upcoming deadlines for things I might want to submit something to. This form contains some Bento fields so that I know if I have made a submission to this.

In an ideal database world, the Deadlines table/form would be able to automatically link data to the Scripts Submitted table/form when I click on “Submission Sent.” Bento doesn’t do this type of task. The deadlines table does not contain the theatre name or the dates associated with it. These two data items exist in iCal alone, and Bento doesn’t allow more sophisticated manipulating among Bento tables or forms. There is no Apple script for Bento, or programming code in Bento. A downside of this psuedo-linking is that I cannot search on the theatre name because the theatre name is stored in iCal, or, for the Scripts Submitted form, stored in Address Book. That’s just silly, and I suspect Bento will add that searching feature along with a few other features in the next version.

Below, are three screen shots that pretty much tell you everything about how I’m looking at the data. That’s it. Not as simple as Excel, but simple nonetheless. No special reports. Just a screen display, arrowing through the records.

The danger in looking at a product like Bento is that if you want a database, Bento is not for you. Even though you can attach Address Book and iCal to Bento, and manipulate these sources, Bento is not a true relational database product. If you need a lot of scripts, data sorts, reports and all that good stuff, again, a word of caution that Bento is not for you. I see a lot of folks trying to make Bento into a kind of cheap FileMaker Pro. That’s a lot like trying to turn a hard boiled egg into an souffle.

Bento currently costs $49. It only runs on Leopard.

To conclude…

• Fountain pens mean using inks of all colors and flavors for one pen.
• Piston filler pens mean an easy way to fill pen with ink.
• Bottled inks mean no consuming of little plastic ink cartridges which end up in the landfill. Unless you use plastic bottled ink. Oh dear.
• Vintage fountain pens mean a form of recycling/re-using something that still performs.

A correction to my first post, Nothing But Pens: My pal, MBH, doesn’t throw a box of Bic pens in a drawer for a year. He throws a box of PaperMate pens in a drawer to age them. Some special, skinny kind of PaperMate, as he’s tried to explain to me, but his explanation goes over my head.

All those other fountain pens I wrote about are finding their way to new homes. I have a thing about releasing stuff I will not utilize. I’m not using those pens anymore.

I have found the pens I love.

The utilitarian Reform 1745 lead me to Pelikan fountain pens. My new found fountain pen friends waxed on about a Pelikan’s dependability, and smooth operation. First I tried on an M 200, and my pleasure at writing with a fountain pen increased two-fold. No skips on the page; my inky words wholly formed. Then I picked up a M 150, slightly smaller, slimmer, easier to stuff into my jeans pocket, to be my carry-around pen. A great arrangement, I thought.

I was happy for a time. These two fine pens that wrote so well for me, were not as fun to use as my scratchy little Esterbrook SJs, or even the Reform 1745. I thought a lot about three other Pelikans that might fit the, uh you know, bill. All three of these pens have since made their way to me. Amazing how that can happen.

Find the best writing tool is a subjective quest.

Someone offered me a terrific deal on a M 250 in the exact model and color I wanted. This pen provided me the most sensual writing experience yet. One of the other pens I wanted was a vintage Pelikan Tortoise 400, and one made its way to me from a friend’s personal collection. Again, my writing pleasure increased. The last pen was another vintage 400 of the traditional green-striated Pelikan variety. I bought it from a fascinating man, from my home state, who is an acknowledged expert on Pelikan pens. The green Pelikan has become the pen I can’t wait to write with every day.

These three pens in their weight, size, and balance are perfect in my small hands. I look forward to putting pen to paper using them. One at a time of course. The green is the pen at my desk; it is my first choice pen. The brown is at my desk too, holding an alternate ink color to reach for. The amber has become my knock-about pen, that stays in my pocket or my bag when I’m not home.

The pens make me smile when I pick them up. Yet, they do not require much but a little care for their use. I don’t have to think about them in the sense of “how do I get this pen to flow better? why is it skipping? why is it leaking all over my paper? why why why?” I don’t need more than these three Pelikans. So it feels in this moment.

These pens make me feel connected to a tradition of writing that my laptop does not provide. Mind you, I love my Powerbook. It is a great tool that functions well for my writing. While I will not go back to using a typewriter, I miss the sound, smell and feel of one. Re-discovering fountain pens seems to have satisfied that part of me that needs ritual in, and a visceral element to, the act of writing. These pens are a technology so perfect that even one more than 50 years old works beautifully even now.

The three pens that remain:

Black Cover is a website devoted to the search for “the perfect little black notebook.” He’s running a contest to win a new Picadilly notebook. Check it out and enter for yourself. (Yeah, this post is my entry!)

Previously mentioned this site last April…

Notebooks are good. Unless you use them for evil.

This year my quest for writing tools turned to fountain pens. Or should I say return to fountain pens? I hadn’t used fountain pens since I was a kid, and I was forced to fumble with a cheap Shaeffer ink-cartridge fountain pen. The ink was blue, and all over my fingers. Using that Shaeffer pen never gave me any satisfaction. So much so, I was greatly relieved when I reached high school where Bic pens were allowed. You know those skinny, yellow pens, don’t you? The ink still got on my fingers.

Pens are of a very personal preference for writers. Unless, of course, you’re a writer who doesn’t use pens, and I’m sure you stopped reading some time ago. My friend, MBH, says his favorite pen is a year old Bic. He buys a box of ‘em, stashes them in a drawer, and cracks the box open a year later.

An element of my quest has been for a pen that inks lightly on the planet…

Myself, I have tried in my later years to stear clear of disposable pens. Difficult task as some part of a pen always seems to be disposable and in need of replacement. An element of my quest has been for a pen that inks lightly on the planet, and so I used refillable rollerballs and ball points. Finally, the nagging voice at the back of my head wondered if not all fountain pens were doomed to failure like my old scratchy Schaeffer.

I read more than once about the Jinhao, an inexpensive smooth as butter fountain pen. I found one for under $10. To my surprise, it wasn’t scratchy at all. The ink, however, would stop flowing whenever I took a writing break, and it was a lot of work to get the ink moving again. Plus the pen was huge and weighty by my small hand’s standards. Thus, the pen was, uh, hand fatiguing. Not good.

Next, I got a PaperMate fountain pen. It reminded me of my Dad, who always had a PaperMate ballpoint pen in his pocket. He gave me one once, and I cherished it because, well, my Dad gave it to me. Gifts were a rare event in my family. Especially from Dad. I suspect he pinched it from his office. Anyway, the PaperMate fountain pen was lighter than the Jinhao. Slightly scratchy on the paper, yet not intolerably so.

Someone suggested to me that vintage pens could be inexpensive, and fun to use. And so, I ended up with an Esterbrook SJ to try. The Esterbrook made the PaperMate feel like a PaperWeight. And then I had three more SJs in different colors, because Esterbrooks are like potato chips. You end up craving more than one. I spent quite a bit of time on pen sacs, renew points, restoral tools, and talking Esterbrooks. I stopped when I realized the pen had become something other than a tool for writing. Freeing myself from the Esterbrooks was a NOS Reform 1745 fountain pen.

Left to right: Jinhao 450, PaperMate, Esterbrook SJ, Reform 1745

The Reform 1745 was made in the 1980′s. Like the Jinhao, the Reform cost me $8. It wrote much more smoothly than the inexplicably addictive Esterbrooks in my possession.

The Jinhao and PaperMate fountain pens used converters in place of ink cartridges. The Esterbrook had a lever mechanism to fill the pen with ink. So far so good on my treading lightly scale. The Reform pen, however, had a feature I’d never imagined before in my fountain pen ignorant state: a piston filler. While all four of these pens allowed me to use bottled ink, the piston filler changed my life. I relaxed, and stopped thinking about pen sacs, how to get the lever up (it was always awkward for me), or taking pens apart to get at a converter. The Reform became something I used, and didn’t think about.

Until I began typing up what I’d hand-written with the Reform. It was then I noticed how much the ink skipped on the page, and left the words malformed.

There’s more… just taking a breath.

The last few weeks have been quite sleepless. Our Dog had nighttime diarrhea, and finally all-time diarrhea. I won’t go on about her flatulence, which was 100 times regular dog flatulence. Our Dog is some 13 years old, which physically compared to human years is like 72. It’s dog years and physical size that determine the comparison human years. The larger the dog, the older she is. Her doc has determined she’s got IBS. She seems to be on the right combo of food and meds for the moment, and she’s finally sleeping through the night.

Last Sunday, a 2-3 hour wind storm took down a ton of trees and power lines. We were without power until Friday. There’s many folks still without power. Not sure in retrospect what exactly caused such sleepless nights during the outage. I only know I didn’t sleep until Friday. Grocery stores and restaurants continued to function, neighbors looked out for each other, and our updated California earthquake kits came in very handy. We are not poor, infirm, or sick, and so the lack of power was not threatening to our lives in any way. You gotta keep at least one eye outside your own life, and see what’s happening around and beyond you.

I can’t write when I’m exhausted. Well, I could. It wouldn’t be any good. During these last few weeks, I’ve mostly made notes about new play ideas which are grabbing hold, reading and researching for some of those potential plays. And obsessively following the U.S. campaign for President. I’m looking forward to the debates beginning, and making our way to November. I’m pulling for an Obama landslide, in case you wanna know.

Today I am feeling replenished. I’ve set myself a modest writing re-entry goal: Five pages on the play I haven’t finished. If they don’t come, I’m putting that play in a drawer and moving on.

One of many examples of trees downed in my neighborhood.

This is the new site for

intermission.typepad.com

also known as

writing the play

The typepad account has been closed!

This is the first in a series of posts about WordPress and Intermission’s design. As I’ve posted previously, when I decided to move the site to a WordPress hosted site, I wanted to learn how to create a WordPress theme from the ground up. The WordPress Codex contains most of the documentation needed to understand the underpinnings of WordPress.

It bears oft repeating: read the WordPress Codex at Codex.WordPress.org

I hope this is obvious: The WordPress software must be installed on your server. The software comprises a lot of PHP scripts, some CSS and JavaScript files, and MySQL databases. The database aspect of WordPress, and blogging software, is what provides blogging its flexibility and instant publishing abilities. Your posts or pages are stored in a database. The old-fashioned HTML websites required your post, if you will, embedded in HTML code and then republished somehow to the web each and every time you edited your post. That’s a very clunky, very platform dependent way of publishing. With blogging software, generally you are creating or editing a database record which is then instantly displayed and formatted by your blog theme. Anywho… you can install the WordPress software and never touch it, except to update the software as needed. If you’re a little geeky like me, you might want to know more about the “core” of WordPress, and I’ll write a bit about my explorations of it in future posts.

A WordPress theme is what manages your site’s design. A WordPress theme is made up of several components: a style sheet (at least one, you can have more if you must), template files, functions, and images. Plug-ins are optional.

The style sheet is a CSS file which controls the fonts, the paragraphs, the formatting of your posts and site design. In the short time I’ve revamped Intermission, I’ve learned a great deal more about CSS and creating style sheets, and so I’ll be making adjustments to this site, or more precisely my style.css file, in order to make posts easier to read. Useful troubleshooting tools for CSS and XHTML code are the W3C CSS and the W3C XHTML Validators. (The only pages on Intermission that will not validate properly are posts with videos embedded. That’s another story…)

Template files are PHP script files. The PHP files generate the HTML and access the MySQL database for posts, pages, and whatever site information is needed. (All that WordPress dashboard stuff is stored in an MySQL table.) In theory, you only need an index.php template file, and a style.css. Ideally, you have at least the index.php, a header.php, and a footer.php. When you view a WordPress blog, the following files are called and put together to form the page you see: header.php, index.php, and footer.php.

The header.php, of course, contains the HTML or XHTML or DHTML or whatnotHTML header references (for compliant web design). Also the code for your header are included here. Thus, Intermission’s header.php contains my graphic, the website title information. The menu system, the quotation space, and the search box are also contained in the header.php because that’s where I wanted them, or where I found they worked best. Most sites would include these latter items in the index.php or sidebar.php.

The index.php contains the WordPress “loop.” A loop is a “do while” or “for” somethingorother piece of PHP code. For WordPress, you are telling PHP to do something as long as there are posts to display. In Intermission’s case, the loop displays the most recent post in full, and then the next 11 posts in extract form. If you use sidebars for various navigation items, the sidebar.php is called from the index.php. Intermission does not use sidebars except on the “About” pages.

The footer.php contains anything you want displayed in the footer. Usually this contains the name of your theme, any acknowledgements, copyright, and hosting stuff. You can put whatever you want displayed at the bottom of your pages in the footer.

You can include other template files for specific looks to pages, single posts, search, archives, etc. An exploration of how WordPress calls template files can help you determine what additional looks you want or need. The Codex has a great graphic representation of the template hierarchy.

Intermission includes single.php, pages.php, search.php, archives.php, and sidebar.php. Single.php is called when you click on an individual post. It works in conjunction with the header.php and footer.php. The pages.php and sidebar.php make up, along with the header.php and footer.php, the “About” pages of Intermission. Search.php formats the search results (if you type something in the Search input box and press the enter key…), and the archives.php formats the archive pages of the site. Finally, Intermission includes a 404.php template file for the displaying of an error message if a page you click on cannot be found.

Functions can be included in the theme, contained in an optional functions.php file. A function is a task specific piece of PHP code. Or… you can make use of WordPress Plug-ins. Plug-ins are written by the WordPress geek community, and contain PHP code, or PHP with a combination of JavaScript and/or Ajax code. Currently Intermission makes use of several useful plug-ins, which are listed on the Site Design page. For example, the Coffee House Wall uses a plug-in specific to allowing comments on a single page. I hope to write my own plug-ins as the new site evolves. I think learning to use PHP within WordPress helped me to make smarter choices in including WordPress Plug-ins. Not all plug-ins, nor are all themes, are coded well.

These posts will get geekier as they go along…next up will be a dissection of the MySQL tables.

No timeline on these, just goals for posts.

The next post, probably next week, will return to Thoughts on Developing Plays.

• FRANK
• Charlie, I read your two plays last night. They were so wonderful I couldn’t sleep.
• CHARLIE
• …I have to tell all the people who stay over to wake me whenever they think I’m wonderful.
• George Furth, Playwright, Merrily We Roll Along

December 14, 1932 – August 11, 2008