So, I kinda just got back from a casualish meeting to discuss Lurkers.

For those not caught up on this whole thing: neither am I, really; hence the meeting. But also some things just work better live; you can't really talk with your hands through EMail. Even if some people seem to type with their palms. So, we got together at the Dresden FireSale Cafe [you know the one: that place designed to remind you that intellectual has stopped being an adjective and has since become a selfimposed title] to drink fivedollar pints of almond latte [not complaining, really] and bounce shit off shit like a superball in zerogravity for a few hours. And actually work a few things out, I suppose.

It's not all bad. I just wanna frontload that truism that nothing in the history of ever has been accomplished in a meeting. A meeting is by definition a coffeebreak with writing implements. If that's not redundant on its own, around me.

So. We talked about some things. Including the filmscript. Which I only wrote in the sense that I wrote the novel, and Not One Word Has Been Omitted. Seriously. 448 pages of filmscript. At minimum eight hours of relentless footage. Which is sad since, knowing I was gonna be doing this tonight, I read Lurkers last night for the first time in a year, and that took me three hours. I guess I just read faster than people tend to talk.

That said, long though the filmscript is, it's missing some stuff. Because the novel's missing some stuff. Some of the missing stuff is more recent developments [the book was released nearly a year before its story took place, and you can't predict everything]; some of the missing stuff shoulda been obvious in 2008, so it just never occurred to me anyway. But, since the film's only eight hours: pfft; I've got scads of room to add a few other things.

Most of which, of course, I just sorta said while I was sitting there. Then had to remember what I'd just said to get it written down. Because, being an idiot, I had the Mino with me, and never thought to turn it on. So, now, I'm supposed to remember something, but probably not quite exactly, like this:

'Here's a good example. The planet's seventy percent water. Therefore, water's in such short supply that I have to ask for it—probably more than once—if I want any in a restaurant. Meanwhile, regardless how many times I go into the same place and talk to the same people, the servers invariably ask "Cream?", I invariably answer "Nope", and I invariably get a huge bowl of the stuff anyway, apparently just to anger the petards into Spontaneous Moron Combustion: there are children in Africa drinking their coffee black because every yoctolitre of cream in the developed world is being sent to my table, where it probably can't be legally recycled back into the Great Cream Cache when I still don't use it, because no one in the history of dinerdom has ever learned to listen to me.'

When the laughter began to die down, it was decreed that that's going into the filmscript somewhere. So yay; go me.

Also a laughriot, by intention or otherwise, was the cursory discussion of product placement. Those of you who have read Lurkers can probably guess where the lulz might be found. For everyone else: nothing in the novel, at least, is remotely sacred. Sure, trademarks and concepts and products are named; but never in a particularly undisparaging way. There's a rant against MySpace.com bordering [my lawyers assure me I'm a couple millimetres inside the border] on libel; the closest anything ever gets to naming a product without suggesting that it shouldn't exist might be the Novelist mentioning that he's got an LG Dare, which is irrelevant now that, while it technically still exists, the real drive is to sell Androided HTCs over at Verizon. Meaning that, if we're looking to score free bags of cash from a phonemaker, we're looking at that or iPhone. Where of course iPhone got a dishonourable mention in the novel already.

So that's this whole big thing which, again, is accidentally hilarious. But it seems to matter to people. Serious questions. 'What's in the kitchen at a restaurant? Hobart? Would they pay to be in a film? Do they even do anything consumergrade? Who does? Can we get a MrCoffee thing back there?' And all that.

The most amusing part, to me, was the idea of merging a couple characters. Not that I'm exactly opposed to doing that; but, here's a quick multiple choice:

A) We should merge this guy with that guy because they're really the same character
B) We should merge them because the runtime's eight hours
C) We should merge them because we're looking at a budget of seven figures, and the guy with ten lines being on the set for a matter of hours would get seven hundred bucks a day

You guessed it: the answer is C) We May Be Retarded.

On the bright side—again—it wasn't all that bad. But, man do people come up with some stupid reasons to support the unreasonable.

Talked a bit about the MPAA. Settled on fuck'em. At the risk of acknowledging Mel Gibson's existence, I'm kinda with him: the bible's rated R, and so is any restaurant after the sun goes down; welcome to the world.

Has anyone else seen what those idiots are up to lately? I'll group in Standards&Practises while I'm here. I actually saw something recentlyish on television—some nameless [to me] courtroom bullshit drama thing—with a witness whimpering that something online contained things like WTF and GTFO and whatever, then asked to define the acronyms, and literally saying, 'They mean "What the Bleep", and "Get the Bleep out".' It was deplorable.

So there's some smallish question of going too far and scaring companies trying to maintain the hapless belief that the world's a decent place. To which I say Lion's Gate. Shouldn't be a big deal. I assume. Haplessly hoping that the world's a decent place displaying something like intellectual honesty here and there.

Talked a lot about casting. Including the basic If You Could Get Anyone game. Since it was hypothetical anyway, I went all timetravelly, getting anyone at any time, thusly casting Christopher Lee at thirty for the Novelist. Meaning, in a word, Me. I guess. Maybe.

That's its own discussion, of course. The Novelist isn't exactly me; it's not an autobiography [even inasmuch as most of the story is actually totally true], but the guy's more like me than anyone else out there. That I know of. So it kinda stands to reason. Except for the unreasonable part. Which is the simple, obvious fact that, if I'm in a film—even about a guy writing a book despite idiots trying to stop him with their meaningless blathering—it pretty well becomes [more of] a selffulfilling prophesy. Which is sorta bad. Obviously.

Though we did get into that quick and easy topic of actors being idiots. Which is kinda why they're actors. I guess. Sometimes it works out, like when there's a director; other times, there's no director, and actors turn out to be gotards in need of directors, lest they say something both political and laughable. Which is usually.

So we correlated into the hypothesis that maybe—just maybe—someone who isn't innately a gotard could be an actor on occasion, and reasonably clever the rest of the time too. For the sake of argument, we'll suppose we're talking about me; if not, we're talking about James Woods. That sort of thing.

Meaning ultimately that, in the worstcase, I could probably do this, end any vestigial ability to get dick done in restaurants [with or without electronic cigarettes], and just kick over into making films. Not really what I'd planned on; but people have been telling me I should do this for a few decades anyway. So: in the worstcase. Maybe. I'm considering it. A little.

The part that technically sucks is that it's up to me. Meaning that, having written this thing, I can hold out and demand to, like, star in it. If I want to. Which I'm merely thinking about. Which kinda means that, either way, if it sucks, it's pretty well totally my fault. It's probably good that I kinda don't care what's my fault. So, we'll see.

We covered a number of other things, of course. Mostly little technical ideas. And most of those deep into the land of spoilers. So I shouldn't go into them here. But I will acknowledge that, by bringing in other people to look at the book and the script and whatever else, people are coming up with some brilliant ideas. Which sucks, since I really shoulda come up with them personally, and then instead didn't. I kinda hate to admit that sorta thing. Some of the new ideas were good enough that I spent a tenth of a second thinking about killing the option here and now, running off with the idea, and dropping it into the next book. Since I'm evil. And lazy. And evil. But I got over it. I think we're green. For the moment. Conditional on various factors, some still under my control. Most not. Which also kinda sucks.

But: we'll see. More than we have seen. Which is quite a bit. We may be casting Christopher Lee 1957, but other things are already in place. Little things. Like investors and all. I hear those are a good thing to have when making a film. Or, in fact, a necessary evil. Which probably makes me myself an unnecessary evil, fun though I might be.

I dunno. Mostly I'm getting that making a film is a lot like publishing a book would be, if the publishing industry weren't merely the fourth most evil thing on the planet, behind filmmaking, the recording industry, and Congress; I think in fact that it's currently tied for fourth with whoever's in charge of sealing immediately important things in blisterpacks, like blisterpack opening tools; I'm not sure which is in the lead, really.

Oh yeah and: this is way seriously preliminary, but, Lurkers on the scene, having been written by someone, who might have written other stuff, which might be far more than eight hours long, there are weak mumblings about developing Paroxysm into a television series, currently likely to be prewritten for four or five seasons. Which is about all I can say about it at the moment, and almost all I've heard about it to date.

More later....