Usually I have a small notebook with me and scribble down notes for photos or stories or business plans. Sometimes I take a sketchbook and draw abstractly with 20 year old colored pencils. I did it with chalk for a while but that was too messy. I drink hot chocolate or hibiscus tea, sometimes a Peroni but not often.

Last night I took a stack of blank 3″x5″ note cards with me and wrote the outline for a screenplay on 35 cards. I read a history book several years ago and the story has been bouncing around in my head ever since. I’m not sure I want to do the screenplay as historical, but maybe a fantasy. Not a direct translation, but something filtered through a lot of the other concepts in my head. I don’t know when I’ll find time to write it all out though. Maybe I will stick all the cards on a bulletin board so I can keep looking at it. The great thing about note cards is that the story becomes very modular. Typing the outline on a computer or writing it out by hand tends to lock scenes into a set sequence. With note cards you can shuffle the story a lot more easily, insert bits more easily. You can really work on it in a far more non-linear way. There is a note cards function built into Celtx, but it’s just not the same.

So much going on with the online fashion magazine I’ve been editing, I don’t even have time to take pictures. In a way I’m glad because I needed to take a break and reevaluate my approach to fashion photography. I feel like a lot of what I was doing a year and a half ago was less than satisfactory for demonstrating my real intentions. I was shooting a lot of tests with available environments, when my real passion is creating total environments within an image. I want to be rendering idealized environments. THe guerilla photography thing just doesn’t do it for me. I’m thinking about building a standing set from theater flats in the middle of my studio that I can change easily, but it will mean devoting less time to modaCYCLE to get that accomplished.

My favorite modaCYCLE article so far was published last week, an interview I did via email with an artist named Ari Fish, who was a contestant on Project Runway. It’s unusual to see someone that interesting on television.