Jordan, ‘10

All right. I’ve been told by the powers that be that I should begin communicating through my spider diary blogs again. And I am thrilled to do so. Right now, I have about a million things trying to scramble my mind and a million exciting possibilities awaiting yours truly.

This fall, I will be staying in the Outdoor House—formally known as the Pacific House, located on Frat Row. The Outdoor House program is usually open to about twenty-thirty students. It is co-ed and focuses mainly on identifying with nature. Participants are expected to take an English course with Lee Carleton, a nature and literature enthusiast (as far as I have deduced so far!). I’m already half-way through the first course book—Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. It’s really interesting—probably more so because I can look back at how outdated I feel the 70s were (when it was published) and how far I feel we’ve come in improving. I also like a number of the ideas introduced for the ecologically sound country. All participants in the House also live in single occupancy rooms, so it should be pretty fun.

Also, over the summer I did a good deal of traveling, but I won’t bore you with any of that information. All I’ll say is that we traveled to Florida, Spain, and Greece. I enjoyed every minute and learned quite a bit.

In May of this year, I entered my 120 page screenplay into an international screenwriting competition based in Los Angeles. One of the main reasons I was drawn to this particular contest was because of the option to receive feedback from an official reader (the people who are paid to read scripts for a living…in addition to whatever other jobs they have, that is). I received the feedback and was thoroughly pleased with the results. Most scripts, 95% of them, receive an automatic PASS meaning Uh-uh, no way, this is an absolutely ridiculous premise. About 5% of them receive a CONSIDER, which is a good pass of faith in work from reader to writer. And less than 1% receive a RECOMMEND. The reason between so few recommended scripts is the fact that a reader’s job is literally on the line whenever a script is recommended to a company. If the movie flops, they’re easily expendable (but it also means a better reward if they’re successful). Well, I was very excited when I saw that not only had the woman given my little ditty of a script a CONSIDER (!!!!) but concluded by stating that if I edited and rewrote the parts of the script she wanted to see fixed that she could RECOMMEND it to her company. I’m am officially living on cloud-9.

Sorry to toot my own horn, but I’m thrilled.

This is my friend Jeremiah. Just one of the many crazy characters to be found on the UR campus!