Easy research

I like hanging out with new people because when you hang out with new people you learn new things. Everybody's an expert on something.

I've dated a geologist and a rock musician and a welder and an aspiring stunt man and a guy who didn't have any hobbies at all, but for most of those people I was able to learn lots of interesting things. I saw Dante's Peak and a bunch of shitty emo bands I had to pretend I liked and did not weld anything but I zapped myself in the leg with a stun gun and sat around and did nothing.

And now Beefcake has the most interesting hobby so far. I don't have to fake interest like I did with the emo bands.

Beefcake is into a particular type of contest I didn't really know anything about before I met him, but now he's exposing me to it on a regular basis and I am fascinated.

But the coolest thing about this is that NOBODY has mined this area for stories. Before Christmas I looked all over for a movie or book on these contests to give him and I came up with a big goose egg. Actually that's not true. There's one ghost written autobiography nobody's ever heard of and one shitty looking amateur documentary.

The field is wide open, my friends. Wide fucking open.

The problem when you write about contests, though, is avoiding the obvious story cliches: the big come-from-behind victory or the Rocky I-just-proved-I-could ending. Redbelt managed to get around that by being a story about a man whose mission was to avoid the ring entirely. I need to find something like that, something that makes this unlike other movies about a competition.

My plan is to let it come to me. I'm still fixing Not Dead Yet and after that I'll be fixing Fear of Clowns so I have some time before I can start working on this. (I'm putting the vampires away indefinitely because I have a feeling we are about to be inundated with vampire scripts.)

In the meantime, I'm going to go to at least two more contests and visit the players while they train and listen and learn. And I'm hoping something will click and suddenly there it will be: THE STORY.

See, this is how you do it. Write about a topic on which your boyfriend is an expert and the research comes to you.