The video below has me breaking the news to our audience that we need to stop working on episode 6 post to get ready for production on episode 7, thus delaying the release of episode 6 even further. It also includes a time lapse of all the work I put into the show during the week. 

I was really nervous about breaking that particular news, but everyone in the comments was so incredibly nice about it. I think I put that time lapse together as a preventative measure against negativity to show people that I’m working really hard on the show all the time.

I was reading all the other blog entries on the NexTV site this week (bunch of really great bloggers) and it made me nostalgic for my early days on the blog. I started out by doling out all the tricks in the no-budget trade I had picked up over the years. Concept to script writing to pre-production, production, and post, I laid out everything I thought I knew. Now I just talk about our weekly production progress, which is all well and good, but I want to be helpful too. So here’s a tip I thought of as we work on pre-production for episode 7. Get rid of that little nagging thing called pride that wants you to think you can do everything yourself and ask for help. If you’re trying to make a show that looks way bigger than it’s budget, you need help from everybody. Your friends have access to locations or know people who do. So do your parents. So do your parents’ friends. These people may also have a pivotal prop that you need or know where you can find it. Right before I make one of these phone calls or send one of these emails I take a deep breath and just dive in. I use phrases like, “It’s ABSOLUTELY no problem if it doesn’t work out…” or “I REALLY don’t want to inconvenience you…” because I really don’t want to put people out, but if you’re going to get what you want for free, it depends on people being willing to inconvenience themselves. Here’s the amazing thing though. People want to help. Against all odds, when the easiest thing to say is “no,” most people instead say “no problem.” I’ve theorized as to why this is—maybe they like seeing people try to pull something off, maybe they feel obligated to say yes, maybe they’re simply miracle-people—but I tend to hear “yes” way more often than I hear “no.” It doesn’t mean asking gets any easier, but our show looks way better thanks to a thousand little inconveniences people have borne as the cost of our creativity.

So just take a deep breath and ask for what you need. Just be straight with people, don’t tell them it’ll take less time than you think it will or try to sugarcoat production. Just tell them what’s going on and take ultimate care of whatever they’re lending you. And, of course, thank them profusely, ‘cause they just made you look good.

Thanks for reading.

--Jarvi

NEXTV'S LITERATURE BLOG WRITTEN BY JAMES GOERTEL

Click HERE for the full 'ALL LIT UP' archive....and check out James' latest book, CARRY EACH HIS BURDEN.

THE ALL 'LIT' UP LOST WEEKEND 6-PACK with NexTV's RANDY BECKER

LOST WEEKEND 6-PACK 2 BOOKS, 2 MOVIES, 2 DRINKS

I thought I'd turn the tables a bit this week by starting the weekend early - real early -  but more so by tapping Randy Becker at NexTv Entertainment for a Lost Weekend  6-Pack. After all, it was Randy who tapped me to put together the literature blog for his NexTv's website. It's been an amazing partnership and I am indebted to him for the opportunity and for being such a champion of my writing - he was one of the first people in Hollywood to notice my screenwriting and among the first to work to promote it. That said, I thought I was the writer and he was the Hollywood wheeler and dealer... I mean, damn, when I asked him for a 6-Pack, I thought I'd get a list of "suggestions" for changes to the blog, you know Hollywood-style notes... "Maybe the blog could be a website?" / "Lost Weekend Wine List is polling better as a name with the 35-55 demographic than Lost Weekend 6-Pack." / "We're bringing a few people just for a 'polish' on the blog." Instead, I got something passionate and heartfelt - just like Randy, who's NexTv Entertainment has been hooking up talented filmmakers, directors, and actors with the the top players in Tinsel Town for the past few years. I love Randy's 6-Pack so much, that I am declaring a long weekend to enjoy it... starting right now. Cheers - J. Goertel

RANDY BECKER

A lost weekend 6-pack, eh?  Wow…with 2 kids and a business that kicks and screams all day every day, the idea of filling a lost weekend with movies, books and alcohol, while deliciously fun to imagine, is simply not going to happen. But even before I indulge my imagination with this exercise, I need to step back and look at the great accomplishment of James Goertel.  When I first asked James to consider creating the lit blog for us at NexTV, I figured that he’d provide a few excellent articles and then we’d slowly feel our way forward.  

Instead, he has created this incredible experience for writers both to participate in and to experience as readers.  With some of the hottest authors and poets generously donating work, simply because James asked them to, I have been BLOWN AWAY by ALL ‘LIT’ UP.  Blown out of the water, in fact.  It’s not often when you find someone to take ownership over an idea, then take it to the next level (and 17 levels beyond…18, even). The LOST WEEKEND 6-PACK is one of my favorite examples of James’ great ability to provide a sandbox for others to play in. THANK YOU JAMES!  

Having said that…curse you James Goertel…CURSE YOU AND THIS BLOG! That’s right, I said it…Since I founded NexTV in 2009, I have read over 1,500 scripts, watched over 3,000 videos and taught one 4 year old how to ride his bike without training wheels (two days ago, in fact…an incredible sight).  But you are asking me to identify my 2 books, 2 movies and 2 drinks for this mythical lost weekend.  Well, James…let’s see…I’ve read 1 book in the past 3 years, I’ve seen 4 movies in the theater, each of which came with disposable glasses and, as for alcohol?  Well, I wish I was drunk now, but instead I sit here at 2:38am, intoxicated by the tingly sensation in my ass from having 185 pounds of sagging body weight pressing down on it for the past 15 hours….so this task is more an exercise in remembering who I’ve been, than a genuine look into who I am today.

Still, I’m up for it, so what the hell…lets’ give her a shot.

2 Drinks:  

Vodka on the rocks with onions…and a straw.  Any brand of vodka works for me.  They all feel like a poke in the eye going down, but I love ‘em anyway.  And I like to fantasize that my wife thinks I’m still a bad-ass for going mixer-free.  Which brings me to drink #2.  Wine Coolers.  Okay, not exactly, but the acceptable male euphemism; Mike’s Hard Lemonade…the purple one.  

2 movies:

MIDNIGHT RUN and QUEEN MARGOT.  The former because it’s awesome.  If you haven’t seen it, I think it’s Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin at their best…really.  Just brilliantly executed on all levels and a blast from beginning to end.  I force myself to NOT watch it for at least 4 straight years, just so I can enjoy it when I stumble upon it.  #2…Patrice Chereau’s QUEEN MARGOT is everything I love about cinema (aside from the subtitles, but Isabelle Adjani makes even that worth it).  Historical fiction at its best.  Rich characters, gripping love story, awesome performances, but more than anything else…a great, edge-of-your-seat story. If you haven’t seen it, it’s so worth renting or buying or, what, downloading?

2 Books: 

This is a tricky one.  Of the books that have stuck with me, I’ll choose two that are particularly meaningful…even after all these years.  GROUND BENEATH HER FEET by Salman Rushdie.  One of my favorite books ever.  A great story about an Indian Female Rock Star, but what Rushdie does that I just love, is he gives you an experience that can only be had with a novel. He makes you work hard, at first, to keep up or even to understand what the hell he’s talking about, but when you finally break through and the challenges of his style fade away, you start to experience a tonal sense of his particular India and these particular characters.  The smells, the point of view, the irony, all of those ephemeral, underlying things that are essential to the real experience of a specific life in a specific context…I close that book and feel like I’ve been on a ride through someone’s perception of a place and time and a people.  I love so many Rushdie novels, but this is the one that I just keep going back to. 

WATER MUSIC by TC Boyle would have to be #2.  Boyle is simply a great story-teller, and since I’m always partial to historical fiction, this is my favorite of his.  It’s an adventure story that follows a petty criminal in Scotland and a famous British explorer as he seeks to find the Niger River in 18^th Century Africa.  I used this book as an example when working with a writer on his action-adventure film, yesterday, in fact.  If you want to go on a ride, an ever-escalating, nearly exhausting, rollicking tale…this is it.  Purely for story, this book covers so much ground.  I mean, you are literally out of breath halfway through the book and Boyle just keeps amping up the trouble his tainted heroes find themselves in.  Pure fun.

So, for a Randy Becker Lost Weekend 6-Pack, you’ll be transported back about 10 years to a time when he actually read books and watched movies.  Don’t pity me, though…my life is awfully good.

For a lot more information on all the good things Randy is doing with NexTV out in L.A., please feel free to visit here:  http://www.mynextv.com

NexTV finalist, Guy Shahar founded The Cortland Review (TCR) in 1997, a premiere literary magazine twice distinguished by Forbes as "Best of the Web."  Enjoy this personal account of TCR's experience at the 2012 AWP Writer's Conference by Cortland Review editor Ginger Murchison:

The Cortland Review goes to AWP 2012

By Ginger Murchison

Left to right: TCR Staff: Christian Guillette, Guy Shahar, Ginger Murchison, David Moody

It was AWP 2012, Chicago. I arrived at the Chicago Hilton, downtown Michigan Avenue in a storm of taxis. It was February 29^th and a surprising 61^o , unheard of against the experience of those two record winters I lived in Wilmette on Chicago’s North Shore. AWP is the largest conference for poets and writers in North America with some 12,000 expected to attend all or part, and I put my key in the door to discover the double room I’d be sharing with Glenis Redmond on the 25^th floor overlooked Lake Michigan. I was going to like this.

At registration, I picked up AWP’s 325-page program. From its 750 events, I would have to decide how to spend the next three days. Doing the math, I realized I could go from one event to another, back-to-back for the next 3 days, and attend only 21.

But I was here for The Cortland Review, the first online literary journal to publish in both audio and text, the journal that, since 2009, has also been publishing its “Poets in Person” video series. 

I volunteered online to work for The Cortland Review in 1997, just after I’d quit teaching to write, and survived (or stubbornly persisted) until I became its editor in 2003. Even in 1997, I knew I was fortunate for the virtual elbow-rubbing with Guy Shahar, the bright mind that founded the journal and the poets who were beginning to publish there.

In AWP’s Friday morning event, “A Year in the Life of Electronic Publishing.” Guy Shahar took The Cortland Review back to its beginning. When I sent that e-mail volunteering to work for The Cortland Review, Issue 3 was about to be published, and Guy Shahar was still an undergraduate at New York’s New School. A student of sound engineering, he had been enlisted to do audio restorations and convert The Academy of American Poets’ cassette tapes of old poetry readings from the 50’s to CDs. What he heard was the oral art. What he thought was why not publish poetry in audio. The Internet was right there, ready.

The trouble for Shahar was that no respectable poet would consider publishing on the Internet—not in 1997. Issue 1 had published 3 poets and got 3 hits; Issue 2 published 5 poets and got 7 hits, so Shahar wrote to poets he liked asking for poems. Most of those letters went unanswered until a “Sure, why not” came from Charles Simic. From there, able to say he’d published Charles Simic, other poets gradually began to risk sending poems. Robert Creeley, I remember, was one of the first to trust us.

In 2003, when Guy Shahar shifted his interests to filmmaking, his career path was unknowingly leading him back to TCR’s mission to bring poetry closer to its audience and, in 2009, he conceived of a “Poets in Person” video web series, filming the poets in their own homes. This month, the newly re-designed Cortland Review published the 5^th “Poets in Person” episode with Pulitzer Prize winner, Claudia Emerson and 20 invited poets. 

Now, with 54 Issues and 44 Features and more than 1000 poets archived in audio, The Cortland Review is accessible on iPads and iPhones, and looks forward to the immanent launch of its “Poetry Streamer” that will randomly select from 15 years of poems archived in audio to play on our own radio station. Those four bright guys on that electronic publishing panel (from Carve, CellPoems, The Cortland Review and Escape into Life) proved that technology is clearly in the service of poetry, fiction and art, and for little more than vision and time. I have no doubt that someone left that room with the confidence to undertake what none of us has thought of yet and make it work.

            But there was more to come. On Saturday morning The Cortland Review’s all-volunteer staff began arriving one-by-one in the Hilton’s impressive 3^rd floor Wiliford A, most of us meeting for the first time. We’d spent days and hours (much of it in the middle of the night) at our computers, together apart, making issues and features happen, and AWP would be the one chance we’d all have to be in the same room. Amid smiles, hugs and handshakes, we sealed the deal on the family we had become.

But the party had just begun. We still faced that mission to make poetry a personal experience, and just like the magic an AWP promises, they showed up: Claudia Emerson, Thomas Lux, Jamaal May and Glenis Redmond, the TCR poets who’d come to read in celebration with us. The Cortland Review has spent 15 years honoring the oral art. Voices don’t get any better than this, and our AWP audience would feel it in their bones. The real surprise happened when Claudia Emerson, after her reading, asked her musician husband, Kent Ippolito, to join her in her original song, “I Shot Her Dead.”

Right there, The Cortland Review’s new music category was launched. 

The very best part may have been after the reading when dozens of poets came out of that audience to tell us we’d published them in issue 34, or 41 or 52, and seemed relieved, I think, to discover we were real people. Remember the commercial with those GE employees standing on the runway and watching that 747 take off for the first time? We met these poets knowing The Cortland Review had launched something pretty awesome too.

             Every letter on this page is a blown kiss to Claudia Emerson, Thomas Lux, Jamaal May, Glenis Redmond, Jennifer Wallace, Anna Catone, Christian Gullette, Elizabeth Cornell, Amy MacLennan, David Moody, David Rigsbee, and especially Guy Shahar, whose video of both these events will be up on our website as soon as they are edited. Watch for that announcement soon.

I’ve never won the lottery, but I’ve certainly had the great, good luck to bump into the fledgling Cortland Review in 1997, to work alongside its talented founder and staff, to have had the pleasure of reading and listening to the poems of the 1000+ poets we’ve published and all the fun of bouncing along on this 15-year ride. 

Ginger Murchison

Editor

The Cortland Review

www.cortlandreview.com

Ginger Murchison is Editor of The Cortland Review. In 2000, together with Thomas Lux, she founded POETRY at TECH where she served as associate director for five years and where, since 2009, she has been one of its McEver Visiting Chairs in Poetry. A three-time Pushcart nominee, she is a graduate of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, and her first collection of poems Out Here, was published in 2008.