Things are moving fast out here in Denver, so I’ll make bullets of the current.

• We’ll be moving to South Korea by the end of this or early next month to teach English to children.  We’re both really excited as this means we’ll be able to teach, save some money, and attempt to ride out the “recession” that has prevented us from finding any meaningful jobs.  The problem is that I won’t be able to use my iPhone…which is depressing.
• I’m working on a Features comic strip for SoulPancake.  Although I’ve finished the first script and have had good conversations about the jump and jive of the strip we won’t know for certain what changes are necessary/will occur for another couple weeks.  I’ll keep you posted.
• Be on the look out over the next few months for a new section to be added in ‘Short-reaching tentacles’.  It’s a project I’ve been working on for the last two years and might actually come to being.  We’ll see.
• …that wasn’t as many items as I thought.  Meh.

Take care, folks!

My good friend Shannon (AKA Plot Twist) has posted up some demos of his beats.  The full songs are solid, but you get a taste.

Plot twist – demo teaser by PLOT TWIST

Enjoy!

Then what does Colorado have?  …mountains?  Let me see them…all right, you win this round.  Keep tuned to the Now? section for pictures of our many adventures!

We’re in the Denver area, hanging out, attempting to not count our chickens before they’ve hatched, and look for work.  As it stands we haven’t found much on this continent aside from one offer for Lindsay that she’s not keen on but will probably take on the short term.  This has forced us to think “outside the box” and really “utilize other corporate speak” to “maximize our creativity” or something.  I don’t know.

On the writing front, now that I have time, I’ll be focusing more on some comic book projects.  My goal is to have at least a single-shot book done by the time we leave here, perhaps a week or two, and ready to send to an artist.  At least then I’ll feel as though I’ve done something creative.

On that same front, however, I finished up a spec script for “The Office” and am attempting to shop it around.  Problem is, I’ve never written a spec before and probably got a lot wrong.  Like, a lot.  Based on the response so far, it’s not bad but needs quite a bit of work; which is great.  I’m all about feedback.  And while comments from family and friends have been great, it helps to get some from people in the business or who might be more critical then those  with a vested interest in saying such glowingly wonderful things.  So, maybe I’ll work on another spec, an hour-long drama of my own devices or something already on air, and see what I can do with that.  It’ll be a back burner thing, so I don’t expect anything, if ever, to happen from it in the near future (this year).

Going in a direction that I haven’t gone in a while, SoulPancake.com has announced that they’ve signed a book deal and will be putting out their first tomb next fall.  Check out this Entertainment Weekly article for more information on the book to be written by Devon, Golriz, and Shabnam’s incredible minds; their fingers will remain attentive to the SoulPancake site.

With all those updates made, I wish to end this transmission with an awesome image Lindsay found earlier today.
There’s a lot of octopus art out there, including Henry Warren’s beautiful work on the header, but few are as epic as that black and white wall print.  Take care, y’all!

Well folks, the time is nigh.  A week from today we fly to Colorado to begin our eventual move to Pasadena.  It’s an exciting and extremely stressful moment in our lives as we’ve only been married two weeks now and started to get a handle on life as a couple.  Now its time to throw a wrench in there and really disrupt everything.  Ugh.  But them the breaks.

Anyway, I haven’t been able to do much over the last two weeks as we’ve been in “figure things out” and “focus on ourselves/each other” mode.  I have, however, finished the first draft of my first spec script and will begin on the second spec when we arrive in Colorado.  It’s a good feeling, having this written and finished something like this.  And soon I’ll be emailing it out to a friend to see about possible jobs.

There’s not much else I can talk about as I certainly don’t want to get my or anyone else’s hopes up.  I’d rather make announcements when things have been finalized.

In other news, SoulPancake continues to roll on.  Lindsay is now nearly three weeks ahead in her features and I’ve been developing some ideas about marriage for a segment of my own.  I’ll keep you informed as we see what happens.

That’s that.  I’m now off to further pack our studio apartment’s worth of stuff into boxes in preparation for the move.  A maneuver that will no doubt make these knotty, painy feelings in my stomach much, much worse, but the overall feeling of accomplishing something and moving on to a new stage of life drowns those feelings out.  So, I’m back to balancing.  And isn’t that what life’s all about?  …what did I just type?  I think I’ve lost it.

Bye!

Its been some time since I’ve posted but I can’t apologize for that. Things have been crazy. Planning, the trying on of clothing, and writing of sizable, novelty checks that turn out to actually be worth what is printed on them have all come and gone. Today is the day.

As it stands, my soon-to-be wife and I fly to L.A. for a week of “relaxation” and “fun in the sun”. Or, as I like to call it, not missing a beat. We’ll be looking for apartments in the Pasadena area, checking out the senior student shows at Art Center and Otis, and convincing Hollywood’s peoples that I am not the bad kind of fool. It’ll be a difficult time for a new couple, yes, but its something that needs to happen. We’re ready to move on. To start that next chapter in life. And this reporter thinks its about @%^#ing time.

After all that rambling, I’m off. To get married. To a wonderful lady. And then we’ll move. To California. If you don’t wish us luck my agents will find you.

Take care, folks!

Taking a break now, I’d like to tell you all what is and has been going on in the world of David and the great balloon heist…err, the move to L.A.

There have been many conversations and folks sent my way by way of conversations with folks that have lead me to understand, a bit, of what I’ll need to do in order to present myself before Hollywood. In case there’s confusion, I’ll get you up to speed. I am getting married. Then, we will be moving to L.A. While there, I will need to support my new wife, so I’m looking to accelerate my career path instead of working my tail off on comic books, in hopes that I will eventually be able to break into television. (I liked my approach, but what are you going to do; life makes changes for us, doesn’t it)

With that gobbledegook of a paragraph out of me I’ll give you the plan. Right now, I’m writing a half-hour comedy script. When I’m done with that, I’ll need to write a half-hour cartoon and hour long drama script. Once I’m done with that, I’ll need to purchase what a friend of mine has called “balls” and present said scripts in meetings where I’ll need to use the twin guns of life: confidence (boarding on cockiness) and humility.

At this point, I feel like I have humility. I don’t know what I’m doing and am willing to do anything and ask anyone a plethora of questions to help me along the way. And as far as confidence, well, I can fake it!

Hooray! Give me a job, please.

I wouldn’t call myself a children’s book writer, but I have been writing stories for tweens for the last two years (only one of the five have been published…ugh) and I’ve learned something that needs to be addressed: kids are smart.

My editors, who I value as friends and bosses, and the higher-ups have made several comments on script drafts that left me baffled. The first of these comments was “a 12- to 15- year-old isn’t going to know the word ‘tithing’”. Well sure they don’t. They don’t because no one has presented that word to them, but if we do, right now, they’re going to figure it out.

Tweens and children today are more resourceful than I ever was growing up. I say that because of ease of access to knowledge. When I was 13, I’d have to grab the encyclopedia or have my parents drop me off at the library, I was that kid, to learn about Iran’s history and cultural significance or to look at art from Japan. Today, kids can sit down at a computer, or their iPhones, and look things up on Wikipedia. Information is so easy to access that new laws are being created every day to prevent our children from accessing the vast amounts of smut on the net. V-chips and parental controls and…well, I’ve gone off topic.

The point here is that if you present a word like “tithing” and offer a short explanation or implied meaning, kids are going to figure it out. And if they don’t figure it out, they’ll go to dictionary.com and look it up; or, they’ll ask their parents; which should happen a lot more, in my opinion, than occurs right now.

Another example is that an editor told me tweens wouldn’t understand the concept of guilt in relation to giving to the poor. But I submit that they do. Unless these children are living in an area with no poverty (I don’t know that such a place exists) or homeless, they’re going to see beggars. And what’s more, seeing beggars allows parents to explain a myriad of things to their children. Off the top of my head: guilt, pity, compassion, love, generosity, several religious stories (if you go that route), and mental illness – ignoring, one would hope, the need for “lessons” on how not to become poor or using them as an example of who is “worthless” as one parent I walked by yesterday put it. Those are important things to learn if you’re growing up. (Truthfully, it wasn’t until I was around 10 or so that I saw my first beggar and I felt awful. It took a conversation with my dad about love and compassion on how to sort out the heft of the emotions I was feeling.)

These kids understand these experiences, they’ve had them. Sure, it might be more simplistic than we might look at it and their sphere of experience is vastly smaller, but they understand the concept. Sociologists have been studying the pit-of-the-stomach feeling children have when they see a homeless person for years and they seem to come to the same conclusion, those children feel terrible. They feel as though they should do something to help that homeless person and that turning away feels even worse. Its important for someone, us if parents don’t, to address these emotions. If we or parents don’t, this leaves our children stunted and confused as to what they should do the next time they see a homeless or downtrodden person. These are things that are imperative for everyone to learn and understand as early in their progression as possible.

My little sister isn’t so little anymore. At 15 she’s learning to drive, enjoying her first summer after her freshman year of high school, and feeling the pull of adulthood. Sure, she might be a tad more mature than some of the other girl’s her age and she may have read more complex books at an early age than other kids her age but that’s because we, and she, pushed her(self). We suggested books that I read in high school and she read them in junior high, books I read in college and she’s reading them right now.

Perhaps this is a direct result of seeing what her older brother and sister are reading or talking about and wanting to be part of that world but I think the real reason is her desire to understand things more quickly than we do right now. We’re growing a generation of incredibly quick kids. They understand concepts faster and with more ease than any generation before them and that must be fostered. If not, they’ll hit a wall and delve into a world of confusing concepts that they may actually not be ready for like sex, drugs, adultery, and that gnashing sound of bills and a lack of funds and concern about pay. These are subjects that they may not, or may I don’t know, be ready for, and that’s where we should draw the line.

I’m not sure how many of you have been following the story of Governor Sanford from South Carolina, but you should be. For those not, he disappeared over the weekend.

Yeah, disappeared. When the media and his staff asked his wife if they had seen him, she told them that “he was writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids.” All right. Fair enough. Why didn’t he (the governor) or she (his wife) alert his staff to this when he made this decision to bound through the Appalachian Mountains?

So, then the police find the governor’s car, abandoned in an airport parking lot and the insanity gets more insanitier. Check out the timeline here to ensure your head gets thoroughly exploded.

Then, he issues a press conference to tell us “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife…with a dear, dear friend from Argentina.” …yeah. He explains how they met at the bottom of the above linked page.

Be sure to watch these videos as well. He’s like a confused puppy. A confused, stupid puppy that was having an affair with a woman in Argentina and doesn’t know what a segue is.

Honestly, the best part is watching the faces of the people behind him during his press release.

There are a lot of places to get news on the events unfolding in Iran, but I wanted to supply a couple that I’ve found the most forthcoming.

Obviously, twitter has been incredible. I’m following some tapped in folks, all relaying information the second they receive it; I’ll usually retweet was fascinates me.
Aside from using the twitter hash-tag search, twazzup does a fantastic job of aggregating all the pertinent tweets, minute-by-minute.
Another great aggregated source is The Lede from the New York Times. They’ve updating their feed every few minutes with comments, quotes, and information. An excerpt:

As we noted on The Lede last week, a source in Tehran told us that of 20 people surveyed at a large opposition rally in south Tehran last Thursday, not one of them said they had heard about it through Twitter. For all the discussion by bloggers and journalists outside Iran of the way the micro-blogging service has helped to inform the rest of the world about opposition protests over the past two weeks, the tool seems to have been less important inside Iran, where many people have heard about rallies through text messaging on cellphones or simple word of mouth.

Still, since so many bloggers and journalists have been glued to Twitter feeds that appear to be coming from inside Iran, it is interesting to read this analysis by a company called Sysomos, which concluded that, of Iran’s 65 million citizens, “there are now 19,235 Twitter users in Iran, compared with 8,654 in mid-May.”

If you’re looking for some interesting reads from various sites, I’ve been adding links to my del.icio.us stream (found on the bottom right of this page), so watch that as well.

As I sat on the couch putting return address stickers and stamps on RSVP reminders/change of reception venue envelopes and watching the Daily Show’s dissection of the current situation in Iran I was reminded, loudly, that I don’t know my own language. That is to say, the language of my people, Farsi. Seeing as how my mother is from Tehran, Iran I should have some basis of knowledge for the language but I don’t and I’ve begun wondering why that is. Perhaps this pondering is a result of time, that I’m now ready to define the culture of my choosing as I prepare to get married. Before such momentous and life changing events its perfectly natural, the television tells me, for one to reassess where they are in this world and who they are. Here’s what I’ve figured out:

When I was young enough to understand and my mother was tired of listen to me asking questions I was told about Iran. My mother told me stories about living in the city and riding on the handle bars of her friend’s bikes, quickly adding “but don’t do that because a friend of mine got killed doing that”. She told me that she would have to go up to the roof and shovel snow as we drove home from the park one summer in her 1985 Dodge Wagon, saying that they worried the weight would be too much and the snow might crash through, damaging those below. (Aside: I just realized I never asked her if they lived in a house or flat.)

After one of these enchanting stories of the old country I told her I wanted to go there and see where she lived. Now, my mother isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t tell lies for the sake of lying or deceive her children on principal. Its clear now what her intentions were and why she responded the way she did but back then it didn’t make much sense. She responded by tell me that we wouldn’t be going back. She told me that because we are Baha’is the government didn’t like us very much, a fact I had learned years before in a newsreel or conversation I had with someone somewhere, and would not be happy if we arrived in their country. That was why they had to flee, my mother and her family, Tehran and move to Texas. The Revolution taking its firm hold on the country, my grandfather recognized it was time to leave so he packed up my uncle, aunt, and grandmother to meet my mother and other aunt in Arlington, Texas. Of course, the trip wasn’t that simple; there are stories I’ve been told about Turkey and various countries in Europe and Asia they had to stay in for a few months before being granted immigrant status in the US, but that’s a story for a different time. She then told me something that shaped my future view of the country of her birth, that if she returned the government would consider her a whore.

In Iran, a Baha’i marriage is meaningless and “married women” are labeled as whores because they and their “husbands” refused a Muslim marriage, the most prominent of a handful of recognized marriages in a country ruled by and designed around Islam. This became doubly worse as she had “married” an American man. She told me my father might be killed and her imprisoned (I realize now that my father wouldn’t be killed but simply imprisoned also) and possibly forced to marry a Muslim man. That my sister and I (my youngest sister wouldn’t be born for another six years) might be given to a Muslim family and that I would, more than likely, be sent to serve in the military.

This, obviously, scared the shit out of me. “My mom’s not a whore, you ‘mother’s of dogs,’” (translated from Farsi; swears being the only Farsi words I can still recall) I thought aloud, my mother responding nonverbally in a way I now understand as being lost in her own fear. It was that fear that drove the car now and steered the conversation to something, in her mind, more productive like soccer or math, things she loved as a child growing up in Tehran and still clung to. The things that weren’t ruined by the Revolution and her fleeing the country of her birth to live, by her self, and attend college at UT Arlington.

Its a bizarre twist that she will now root for the Iranian soccer team at the World Cup in South Africa. That she will question why I’m booing and cheering on their opposition. It makes perfect sense to me. They and that flag represents the moment in history when my mother instilled fear and loathing for a country based on her own experience.

So that leads us to today where rioters and protesters are using facebook and other social networking sites to coordinate their marches in direct opposition to the edict the government created years ago, under the guise of Islam, to quell unrest. Where a people who love their country so much that they must lash out against the government and policies that have consumed and perverted their culture. And I shouldn’t support violence, I know. I shouldn’t support these or any other actions against a government as their are better, less violent, and more unifying ways of resolving the problems that currently plague Iran, but I can’t help it. I want Iran to be a country I can be proud of. The country of my mother’s birth. The country of my Faith’s birth. I just keep hoping that these protesters can revitalize Iran and return it to its rightful place as a powerhouse of invention and peace instead of oppression and degradation. And if these chants are any indication, my childhood dream of going to Tehran to see where my mother was raised may come true sooner than I thought.

Esm e man, Faroz. Man az Iran hastam.