The Movie is Done

It was a lot of work but we finally finished filming the movie over the weekend. There were about 17 people involved, which makes it the most complicated one we've ever done. We were on set for 10.5 hours over two days with an hour and a half of footage. Lesson learned? I need to keep my craptacular self out of the shots with my #@$@#$#@ boom stick. Fortunately, we still got a lot of good footage despite my attempts to utterly ruin it.

No luck on the job search. I've had a lot of blank times, and lots of people are unemployed now. The difference is that I have gotten exactly TWO phone calls in the last 4 weeks. Bear in mind that normally this is THE best time of the year to find a job. There are almost no jobs out there. And we are one month away from the cold season which typically lasts from November through Jan....Feb is usually not good though which means the earliest a likely job is looking like is...March.

Fun.

Otherwise things go well. I've been a bit defocused but I'm getting back into the groove of things this week and hope to restart a lot of projects that had been temporarily waylaid. We'll see how that goes.

Good News and Bad News

The bad news is that the job search suddenly went from promising to void. As you know I measure the strength of the economy and the job market by the number of calls I get. Today marks the official two month mark in my search and while things were great right before Dragoncon, I haven't gotten a SINGLE call since then. Usually I'm at least getting calls for jobs in New Jersey or the like that I'm not available to take. At the two month mark I lower my salary requirements slightly and do so on a monthly basis thereafter until I reach my absolute minimum. We'll see how this turns out but since in my experience September is THE best time of the year to find a job, its not a good sign.

The good news is that the rehearsal for the movie went well yesterday. People are enthusiastic and seem to be enjoying themselves. My writing is very slow but progressing.

This week

Dragon Con was a lot of fun. We were able to prepay the hotel room and the ticket which meant that it was a very nice vacation at a time when we needed it. Thursday night was the first night we stayed at a hotel there which helped give us more time on Friday since most of the other times we've gone to Dragoncon, Friday morning was always hectic. Jennifer got pictures and we hope to put them up soon.

Some highlights include:

*A neat panel with Nimoy and Shatner Friday morning. Shatner is a total attention hog but was cool at the same time. Nimoy was rather zen the whole time. Interesting questions.

*Felicia Day was in the Dollhouse panel which was quite packed. I think we may see more Dollhouse guests next year.

*Warehouse 13 also had a lot of people though it had no guests. The panels with a lot of fans talking to each other generally just aren't as interesting.

*A rather cool panel with Michael Stackpole and other podcast authors that gave me some good insights into putting my own novels on podcast. I'm considering doing so but haven't decided the exact way I'm going to do it. Might establish a second podcast which is ....yeah. Too many blogs already. Logistics have yet to be decided, but apparently putting a novel in podcast form doesn't (according to them anyway) interfere with the ability to sell it...and considering my luck selling it anyway....We'll see.

*Went to the parade for the first time this year. It was awesome. Even if you don't go to dragoncon, this should be an annual event for anyone seriously into sci-fi/fantasy. It was quite fun and its totally free.

*Gave blood for the first time this year at Dragon Con. Vaccinations and foreign travel plus other circumstances prevented me before. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

*Masquerade was cool but not as cool as years past.

*Steam punk is in vogue. So much so that I'm making my next novel Steam Punk...of course....I'm only vaguely aware of what steam punk is, so it is a bit blind. That and I do like retro tech which helps in this case. It might end up being something more like "Tompunk"....

*Saw Pete Abrams at a panel. He does the comic Sluggy Freelance. It was very interesting. :)

*Saw a lot of rather cool short films. The production value on the films they show at Dragoncon are just...light years beyond what I can do, but I still intend to do them. We'll see how Other People's Musicals comes out. So far it is on track.

*Jennifer had a LOT of fun at the Oragami panels.

*Jennifer also enjoyed seeing Draco Malfoy, who is apparently a pretty cool guy.

*There were lots of Twilight fans there due to the guy who played the lead in the movie being there, but they didn't really cross my path, which is just as well.

*Seeing a live performance of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog in a room with 2000 screaming Whedonites is just plain awesome.

*Jennifer's costume was also awesome.

Link to a political post

Without going into details, here is a link to my political blog about a video given to me by my friend Ken Lightner that I think sums up the current discussion (or lack thereof) quite well.

Life

I had a phone interview today and another interview scheduled next week. But with the economy being the way it is, who can tell? I heard back from my recruiter and apparently I slam dunked the interview I had last week but they are still not sure which way they want to go. And that's a government contractor, which tells me that even if I have a lot of interviews that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I have too many second hand accounts from family and friends from all of the companies that are in absolute turtle mode until 2010.

We'll see.

In a related note, I am quite happy for a personal issue that has recently been partially solved. I won't go into details but suffice to say it was worrying me greatly and now it isn't.

Fortunately we'd gotten the Dragoncon tickets early (ie when I had a job) which makes the whole impending vacation affordable. It happens to be right here in Atlanta which helps too. :) More details will probably be posted during the weekend.