genrevirgin

Look, it's a perogative of the story department to hate your Net Weasel, so we hate ours. especially when he suggests that we start cribbing from Balzac and James Joyce and other dead white guys to "elevate our material."

Our Material is on at 8 pm and it's designed to lure teenagers. i'm not dissing the teenagers - they're lapping up Veronica Mars, as am I, but frankly, i think they don't give a shit about us shooting our mouths off to prove that our parents paid the big bucks to send us to a faux-Ivy League university.

or perhaps more correctly, that if you Google "succubus" and "author" you'll eventually find Balzac.

but back to the slap-down.

there were some good points buried in the Weasel's overwhelming verbiage. honestly. i live by the notion that a note might be bad, but the impulse behind the note must be explored. any old Weasel might not know what is wrong, exactly, but they're tripping over something and it's your job to find out what it is.

So the Chief read the notes and it twigged something in him that was absolutely valid, and absolutely ABOUT GENRE.

see, i had a Demon in the show. Two, actually. and how one "came across" the veil between the human realm and the demon realm is fully explained, but the other one Just Shows Up.

as Cagney would sneer it, There's rules about them sorts of things, see?

i've got to EXPLAIN my demon. how'd she get across?

and suddenly my demon etymology's up for grabs, and the deaths have to be different, and now the husband has to look even more guilty, and i've lost the maid, and the climax in the bed with the demon and the heroine just might not happen (my desperate attempts to bring some sex into the heroine's life possibly foiled, once again...)

suddenly, i miss writing for humans.

Net notes came in.

we keep losing traction.

it works like this.

we're writing a show where Supernatural Creatures do Battle with one another. Creatures like vampires, and witches, and demons. Homicidal Creatures. Nasty Creatures.

so we write the big battle scenes. People fly across the room. Injuries occur. Occasionally, arms are ripped off.

and then we get the notes.

one of the EPs - the least experienced one, it practically goes without saying - keeps trying to lower the body count. And i sympathize with him, to a degree. I'm the newbie here, remember, the one who didn't watch five, or six, or seven years of Buffy, the one who confused "Angel" with "Touched by an Angel," the one who blocked the Space Channel on my satellite. But even i know that you need stakes, and impending doom by desanguination is one nifty way to achieve it.

so we've got one guy trying to suck the stakes out of the show by lowering the body count. across the way, we've got the Net Weasel responding to our scripts by suggesting we take our cue from arty French films. Nothing wrong with being inspired by heady material, he tells us.

absolutely. but nothing wrong with ripping the great B stuff either, especially when that's WHAT THE SHOW IS!

so here's where the ratio thing comes in.

when i started TV writing, the internet was young(er). now, we're sitting in the writer's room, fully wired, bitching about our connection when we can't download shit fast enough.

what happens is, we get some dumb-ass suggestion from the EP, or another condescending note from the Weasel, and suddenly, our porn consumption goes up.

instead of tossing around story ideas, we're all online, downloading triple-X shit, swapping free sites like there's no tomorrow. yesterday, after many many notes from the LEEP (least experienced EP) and the Weasel, i arrived at work today to find one of the other writers had five hours of hentei porn downloaded onto a DVD for me.

i don't know why this is how we react. maybe because digging in our heels or yelling or screaming isn't going to accomplish anything.

at least this way, we convince ourselves we're bad-asses. and we get our rocks off. and nobody gets hurt.

kinda like the scripts.

i've worked in TV drama for a few years now (eight), and i've got a coupla few hours (100+) under my belt. so i figured i'd turned pro. understood the beast. maybe couldn't be surprised.

Wrong.

because these days i find myself working on a show that has a vampire, but can't show blood. Features an adult love triangle, where no one has sex. Hires actors where a "real WB vibe" is a good, rather than a bad, thing.

in other words, i'm writing genre for the first time in my life.

and you know what? it's fucking hard.