Inside the Brain of E.C. Henry

Finding Your Moments

Life is filled with moments.  Moments that you look forward too.  Moments that you cherish.  Moments that stick in your head for the rest of your life.  The image that I'm opening this post with is that of my family from November of 2015.  Denny, my mom's fraternal twin (the lady wearing the scarf) has gone on to be in Heaven with the Lord, where she belongs.  She died at the end of March in 2016.  E.C. cries... 

But remembering past losses isn't what this post is about.  No, it's about something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and that's moments. 

Now I am a pre-pro novelist and screenwriter.   The world maybe going through a pandemic right now, but that's not really where my head has been at for the past week.  This past week I wrote a new screenplay.  Was at the later stages of editing, LOVE AT GREAT COST: the 3rd manuscript in THE LEGEND IN THARS series when Carson Reeves over at -- Scriptshadow challenged the writers who frequent his site to try to write a screenplay in two weeks.   Always game to play along I acted on this.  Posted 5 loglines for stories I'd been mulling over before I decided to go back to my favorite genre of them all; the romantic comedy.

Now on the surface, if you were to know me, look at my life, and do an assessment; I think you would come to the conclusion that I'm not really a rom-com guy.  Not that funny.  I'm 50 years old and single.   Work a crappy job in construction.  Not you atypical romantic/funny person.  But since I've never let that stop me before I took the challenge up, and set out to write a romantic comedy entitled, SO GO BACK & GET HER, and too my great surprise I was able to finish a first draft of it in record time.  Got it registered with the WGAw and even filed for U.S. Copyright protection last night.  

BOOM!  Yeah, BOOM, baby yeah!

Last night was a "moment" for yours truly because he just accomplished the hardest feat a writer ever undertakes: going from a blank page to a COMPLETED draft! 

So is it perfect?  Far from.  I just started re-listening to it in Final Draft and was making some corrections.  But not as many as you might think.  I'm getting better at this over time.

What was so fun about writing this script was really how EASY it was to write.  One, if not the easiest, I've ever written.  Following Carson's advice I made some a series of checkpoints to reach.  He gave  a days to do an outline and flesh out some beat, and I did.  Still, when you're coming up with plot points that fast, those aren't usually the best ideas.  I knew that going in.  But I made a bio folder for my key characters and that really helped.  I had an idea of where the story would go and the bare-bones goal of where several key scenes should go, but when Carson said, "Go, now start writing your 1st draft" of course I wanted more time to flesh out scenes and characters.  Normally I'd do an outline over a month to three months.  Adding things, testing how it all fits together.  I basicially like the whole damn thing written before I've typed in my first word into Final Draft (the screenwriting solftware that I use). 

Working off my outline, what I had in my character bios and notes got me to about page 76, and that's when I took a walk, came back and wrote the rest of the 1st draft pretty much by "inspiration" alone.  The dialog and what the characters were feeling and wanted to do was ALIVE to me.  At times it didn't even feel that I was in the room.  All I did was decide when the scene was over, and where the action picked up.  My characters told their story.  The big 4 as I like to call them.  Okay, so Edward Norton, Amy Schumer, John Ham, and Taylor Swift helped.  They are the big 4.  I wrote what they were doing in the film that was being shot in my mind.

I wrote this script to hit my characters moments.  Were they were acting in revenge, where they were bearing the hopes that they had in their hearts, where they were acting foolish, where they were learning their life lessons.  YES, there was a lot of comedy involved.  But it came from them being them, not me being me.

So it's kind of a surreal feeling when you're writing a story that is really about someone else.  The character arcs in SO GO BACK & GET HER are NOT a reflection of who I am, its a reflection of who they are.

Story world.

Sometimes story world can carry you through a "bleak week" of self-isolation.  See I started feeling sick on Monday night.  After calling the doctor, he told me to stay away from work for a week.  So now here I am, coming out of that, poised to go back tomorrow--with a new, completed screenplay under my belt!

So is it any good?  Dude, its great!  I laughed my ass off writing it.  Writing this one was really not a chore at all.  From about page 76 on everything flowed without much of a hiccup. 

Moments.  Gotta enjoy them when they're there.  Like getting an Oscar.  What do you say when the lights are on you, and you're the toast of the town for ONCE in your life--unless your name happens to be Merryl Streep who is up getting a golden boy seemingly every year. 

Now it's onto the drafting process.  Sigh...  But that's what's expected of writers; they work on their stories and make them better.  After SO GO BACK & GET HER is done I'm heading back to Thars to finish the 3rd manuscript. 

Moments, fleeting.  Yet memories remain.     

Corona on St. Patrick's Day?

Life has been so chaotic this is the FIRST YEAR I haven't anything about the FACT that today is a holiday, albeit an Irish one.

So hoist 'em if you got 'em.  I'm drinking a Budweiser tall-boy as I type this.  Probably doesn't get me full St. Patrick's Day credit.  But, hey, with how sensitive everyone is right now, who's going to pinch me?

Well Hell

This is from Monday when we started to pull the pump: my dad's truck--to rope--to pump line.

Starting last Friday night, I went on to experience a totally grueling 4 1/2 days.  Reason for ol' E.C.'s anxiety--our family well went out!   So for 4 1/2 days the two households that submersible well provided water to was out.  Had to take two days off work: one to pull the pump, next day to re-install the new one.  So today's post will be a little different than most of the rest I try to post here which center around: novel writing, screenwriting, romantic comedies, movies in general, and moaning about the Entertainment Industry because to date I'm an outsider looking in.  But I digress.  On to the crux of this post...

 

WELL HELL

 

I didn't find out our water went out until about 8 p.m. on Friday night.  Turned the bathroom faucet on, had very little pressure.  Then found out all the rest of the water outlets in our house, and my brother's place (which this well also serves) was low.  Began the troubleshooting process in earnest on Saturday morning.  And upon opening the control box found this:

No shit: a mouse! 

AND when I opened the control box this little mouse popped his head out of its nest debris looked at me, then went back in his nest.  I went back to my room got my cellphone and took this picture AFTER I roused this mouse out of its nest with a pen.  Can you believe that?!  But that's the truth.

Okay, so after I kicked the mouse out I set out to find a replacement box.  That took ALL DAY because it was a Saturday and most home stores didn't carry a submersible well pump control box.  I finally found one late in the afternoon at a country store in Enumclaw.  Installed it..  Tested it...  Still no water.  So next I went out and bought a new pressure switch because the contacts were pitted.  And that didn't solve the problem either!  Tested the storage tank by pressing a tire pressure fitting at the top of it -- and found WATER came out of the top of it.  Had to look this up on-line, but found this means your air seal has broken and the tank is Waterlogged (this was the best Do-it-yourself self-help site with videos I found on troubleshooting a --

Okay so now we're at Sunday morning.  I skip church, go out and by a replacement pressure tank around $300, then proceed to remove the old one.  Since my dad totally chinsed and ONLY had a straight pipe going from the storage tank to the pressure switch that meant I would need to re-plum that line so the new tank had a way to drain it, had a pressure valve in it, and a later tap for a garden spigot which my dad wanted to add for watering my mom's garden.  

Since their was no drain for the tank I had to DRILL a series of holes in the water storage tank to drain it by a series of water leak holes.  This took about 2 hours to do.  Going into this I didn't know what to expect so I started high on the tank and drilled holes there, then worked down.  In retrospect I should have JUST drilled the water relief holes low.  

I didn't go cheap on the pluming either, guestimated a slew of fittings and galvanized fittings needed.  Had to go back to Lowes to get all I needed by by 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoon I had this:

Now with this set-up I tried to manually to fill the new supply tank up by forcing the pump open by holding down the lever on the pressure switch.  Found this did supply water to the service tank.  Knew this to be true because when I opened the new drain lever I installed for the storage tank there was water.  BUT though their was water the new gauge I installed wasn't reading pressure even after I manually held the lever down for HOURS!  No shit.  My brother brought me in a pizza that night so I could sit in a mouse-shit infested area and try to re-water the pump.  By 9:30 p.m. everyone was scratching their heads wondering why the gauge I installed wasn't registering pressure yet...

I continued TRY to recharge the tank by doing this:

Yep!  I implored this "lazy-man's" trick.  But after a couple of hours my parents called in the pros: a couple neighbors who had been trough many submersible well not working issues before.  Enter Stan DeWitt and Dave Defigio!

The crazy thing is they confirmed what I already knew: my additions were okay, the true error was with the pump!  But what they noticed that I never would was that our pump was UNDER-PERFORMING: it just wasn't kicking out the water at high pressure.  Yes, water was coming out, but not enough...  Time to pull the pump.

So Stan DeWitt provides a structure to pull the pump up.  My dad's truck ends up being "the muscle" that pulls the pump up.  But seconds into the pull the rope that was attached to the pump at the bottom of the well breaks!  Seems my dad used a cheap clip, it broke, and now we're screwed.  Loose rope came right up with no pump.  Thankfully Stan DeWitt is a GENIUS!  He came up with a way to pull our pump without a rope.  This was real slow.  And involved a couple come-a-long winches.  We pulled up pump piping and electrical lines in 15' increments.  By the time we got the pump out it was about 2 p.m.  Now outside the well we tested the pump and Stan informed me that its bearings were bad.  Hence, the poor pressure.  Time for a new pump.  So off I went with my credit card to get one...

Found a replacement pump relatively quick, but still by the time I got home the sun was going down and this project bled into Tuesday.  Or, in my case, another day calling-in off a paying job of work.  

Along the pull we "kinked" the black PVC water line a couple times.  It was a case of twisting and weight of it all. No one's fault really but it freaked the shit out of me as I feared we'd have to replace 300' of well piping:

See that snarf?  It can actually be repaired by use of a hair dryer!  

Thankfully, Dave Defagio new the trick to take the "kinks" out.  True, I was skeptical, but he and Stan assured me it would work.  I let the "pros" do that.

We put the new well down in on Tuesday, and even that was a bear: the pump line kept getting hung up in the cast iron well.  Stan and Dave had to "jig" the line to get it to drop.  Think it was the weld beads in the pipe that we were getting caught on.  

New pump in, it was time to test everything...

... and everything went OKAY!  Fuckin' a!  What a relief!!  Still have a few minor drips on the fittings I screwed together, BUT now the in-line pressure gauge was reading +40 PSI pressure, the control box was controlling the pressure switch, and BOTH houses had water.  VICTORY!!    

Still have a couple issue to resolve.  The window that the pressure switch is working in is too narrow: about 42 PSI to 50 PSI (should be 40-60), the pipes need to be re-wrapped for cold weather, and I may have to turn a wrench or two to eliminate the minor leaks. but the worst is over.  

Now comes the shitty part of waiting for my credit card bill.  Think my on social security father, or my brother is going to pay for this!!  Hardly.  Thinking my bill for this is going to come in around $1,300: $100 for the control box, $300 for the storage tank, $600 for the pump, another $300 for the fittings.   My dad flipped for the pressure switch that costs about $30.  

 

This project really took a lot out of me.  I was so filthy on Monday night that when I went to a prayer partner's house for a shower that just laying my hand on the wall resulted in a downward slime of grime running down the wall.  Seriously, it was gross; and it had been on me as a product of marinating in the mouse shit in the pump house.  At Wednesday at work I was so drained.  Had a hard time making through it.

Now, I'm several days removed from that AWFUL experience.  Trying to get back in the rhythm of rewriting the 3rd novel in the Thars series.  Hopefully next week will bring a return to normalcy.  

JUST beat the deadline to get THIS post to count for February.  Almost got a 2nd post ready to share that will be about politics.  Until then...  See ya later kid!  Hopefully under better circumstances.