“The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Fates Worse than Death, 1991.

I am finding this to be true. For years, maybe even decades, I have been envisioning a film, a movie, that I might one day make. It’s not as odd an idea as you might think: I do have an undergraduate degree in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures, from the University of North Carolina!

But at this point in my life (I recently turned 49) the movie does not seem to be as inevitable as it once was. So, I am turning it into a novel, the comic science-fiction novel I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. There are some great advantages to the novel format. For instance, to conjure up my friend Chuck’s fantasy of a room papered entirely with the classic Herb Albert album cover Whipped Cream And Other Delights in a FILM, a room would have to be covered with Whipped Cream And Other Delights albums, and this would required great effort and expense. Over the last decade or so I have only collected about 20 copies of this record at thrift stores and yard sales . . . so it would have to be a special effects job, and you can see that the situation is now sprawling out of control. But, in writing a novel, all I have to do is put a few words in the right order. Easy peasy! Easy as pie.

But, to get back to Kurt Vonnegut’s point, the thought process that takes place behind a movie or a novel is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! I am in the process of reconsidering my whole story, with alien concepts like “character” and “motivation” in mind. It’s another world, it’s taking a while, it might take all summer, but at least now it’s within my budget.