Why So Serious?

“You’re a lot nicer than the last person that was here.” The Coordinator says.  “He was just mean.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” I say and smile.

I’m a lot more laid back than I used to be.  When you get nothing but Bad Shoots, there’s very little pressure to succeed and very little reason to care what the people at the Shoot are doing.  So instead of focusing on the Nonbuyers and the people who want three Freebies instead of one, I try to keep smiling and get caught up on my reading.

The new Appointment times mean that I have about two hours worth of work and about six hours to do it in.  This leaves a lot of free time for reading, writing, and pondering the general direction that I have drifted over the course of the past few years.

I have a lot of books in Kindle format, which means I have a lot of catching up to do.  It’s not easy to carry around twenty or thirty real world paper books, but I can lug around hundreds of digital books-and I pretty much would like to read all of them.  As it is I have now managed to start a half dozen good books and somehow not get around to finishing any of them.

On the writing front I am playing around with a couple of screenplays, I am greatly inspired after reading most of Save The Cat, a brilliant book on the art of writing the screenplay.  I am, of course, far too old to be starting a  career as a screenwriter, but it seems like a good idea to finish the ones I am working on.  I have a couple of half finished short stories and my Magnum Opus has fallen into rewriting hell where I feel like constantly shifting this bit and that bit and I think I should write a couple of new sections-and so on and so forth.

On the blogging front I no longer seem to have the need to share my opinion on every book, movie, and TV Show I run across.  I have told all the good stories about The Company and taking Portraits and I tend to start a post, get about halfway through, and decided I have either already said something very similar, or I have no wish to finish it.  I have a few of these half written posts lying around, I may wrap them up and post them one of these days.

I used to work with Two Passers, and now work with only One.  For the most part, this means that they are working all day, and no longer have the time to sit around and chew the fat with me.  Which also means I have fewer chances to refine my stories or to hear newer interesting stories from them that I have not heard before.  The Company was a great place for gossip when there were three of us at a Shoot.  Now, it’s a hell of a lot more like Work.

The Job used to be fun and we used to make a good living doing it.  But The Company has done everything they can to remove all the elements that make it worth working for them.  The sad part is that they seriously think they have made things better.  They have not.

It’s that time of year when a number of people quit and as a result I get to work a bit more.  These are still not Good Shoots, for the most part, but they are often trips to places I like.  This is something else the Bosses find impossible to comprehend.  I like to go to Houston, or Tulsa, or Kansas City-so that I can take in the sights, eat the local foods, and have a bit of fun.  The new Shoot times have pretty much ruined this, but I can still squeeze in a few things in the mornings and on my days off-if they give me a day off.

Case in point.  I was shooting in Houston.  My schedule read Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday off, with Shoot Days Wednesday-Saturday.  Just eyeballing it, this meant that I would have three days that I could spend in Galveston, plus the following Sunday if I decided to hang around another day after the Shoot.  As it turned out, I had to work Monday, travel three hours and work Tuesday, and then work out the rest of the week in Houston-and I needed to be back home-five hours away, on Monday.  So I ended up only getting one morning Galveston and spent most of what little free time I had at the motel.  That sucks.

In all fairness, I suppose I could have refused to work on Monday and Tuesday, but I very seldom refuse to work.  And I did get to eat some red snapper and had a couple of hot dogs at James Coney Island-I was a bit disappointed that they had kicked so many hotdogs off the menu.  Seems James Coney Island wants to be Sonic instead of James Coney Island.  Pity.

The Boss did try to give me a better Shoot, but I had already paid for the room in Houston and it was nonrefundable.  So the shoot I ended up with was kind of odd.  No Passer, just took the portraits and sent them on their way.  Odd that.

I’ve had a lot of One Day Shoots the past few weeks, so I am a bit tired.  What with the driving, setting up, working all day, tearing down, and heading off somewhere else-it takes its toll.  I also find it hard to sleep sometimes when I am on the road, too many channels to flip through and too many websites to checkout and too many tweets to update and so on and so forth.

I keep reading books on how to get your business going or sell info products or get rich on Twitter and facebook-but so far, reading is all I have done.  When it comes to taking the required actions, I always fall a little short.  But they are fun to read-now all I need to do is get around to the other 1, 783 Kindle books sitting on my hard drive.