Samurai, Outkast, Stephen King, oh my!

a few things:

Today I finished the first draft of Samurai on 47th, or, as Dave and I like to call it, 7 Breaths. This is a feature screenplay my friend David Navratil and I have co-written for Winnipeg director/producer Joseph Novak. This is the fourth feature script we have written for Joe. The others are Son of the Storm, Way of the Samurai and Yakuza. The first attracted the attention of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who you might remember from such films as Mortal Kombat, Rising Sun, Elektra, Memoirs of a Geisha and a bunch of other stuff. He actually signed on to the latter two, but long story short, the films languish unmade. I am thinking about petitioning for them to be made into graphic novels, but we'll see. Maybe if I have more time one day. Anyway, cross your fingers on this one -- it would be nice to have some money in my pocket.

The New Outkast album can be heard, in its entirety, here: http://www.myspace.com/outkast. I think it's incredibly cool of Outkast to offer the album for listening. It's not Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, but it's pretty solid.

In case you have been living in a cave, Stephen King completed the Dark Tower , a seven-book series which he began publishing in 1982 and finished publishing in 2004. I have been a fan of Stephen King for some time -- though many of my writer friends will undoubtably claim otherwise, I will argue up and down that King is a good writer (this isn't to say that he hasn't published his fair share -- and someone else's besides -- of crap). Anyway, I have decided to read this series in its entirety. I read the first four books before King started saying he would likely die before he ever finished it, then gave it up for dead. (The first four books were published between 1982 and 1997, and the latter three published from 2003-2004.) So I am looking forward to this as a break from my studying-reading. I recommend you also read the books. We can then talk about how great they are or how much they suck, whichever the case may be. At any rate, whether you like sci-fantasy, fantasy, horror, westerns, or metafictional literature, this series is for you. Oh, also if you want to read something that is about 4000 pages long.