Karen Sandler

Category: Unusual Hobbies

  • Fake Blood and Shooting After Dark–the Making of a Vampire Flick

    Poster 2At this point in my career, I’m a dedicated novelist. I’m sticking to writing and promoting my traditionally published books like the Tankborn Trilogy and the upcoming Janelle Watkins mysteries, as well as my indie published romances.

    But there was a time when I would fill in the gaps waiting for an editor’s notes or when I was between book contracts by writing screenplays. I’d work on my own or with a producer to write feature length scripts. I was a member of the Writers Guild of America and made a little bit of money as a screenwriter.

    I’d also play around with short films. I’d write a short script (ten or so pages, which translated into about 10 minutes of film), then find ways to produce that script. It helped having a friend with a production studio (The Studio Center) complete with cameras, sound equipment, a green screen, and editing bay. Frank would charge me bargain rates in exchange for directing credit.

    Sweet Tooth was one such project. I’d gotten the idea years before and had intended to write it as a short story. I ended up writing it as a short script instead. Here’s the logline for Sweet Tooth: It’s Trish’s last chance–she either makes big sales at her next WundaWare party, or she’s history.  Trish does her best, but she can’t seem to overcome an irresistible temptation that ruins everything.

    Linda-Karen-Frank Since this was a super-low-budget film, I had to make some choices in the writing of it. I had to be able to shoot the whole film in one location–my house. Since it was a vampire movie and shooting “day for night” wasn’t practical, it all had to be shot after dark. Other than the camera and sound work (and the editing later), I did pretty much everything. I was writer, producer, set decorator, propmaster, continuity, and craft services. All the props came from either my own kitchen or the dollar store. The actors all worked for credit only.

    We shot over two weekends, Friday and Saturday nights. There were a few pitfall in our choice of a production window. First, we started on the night of the summer solstice, which meant it was the longest day of the year. Waiting for “dark” made for a very late start each night.

    Myrtle-deadThe other issue was that the first couple days of shooting were hot-hot-hot (we can get over 100 degrees here) and my AC wasn’t working right. So it was sweltering in the house.

    We were all troopers, though. I got to make some fake blood on the fly (corn syrup with red dye and a touch of chocolate syrup for color). I’d sold Tupperware for 15 months back in my 20s, so I had a lot of fun setting up a display of the faux plasticware, WundaWare. I also enjoyed getting inventive with the various rooms of my house, transforming them into the sets we needed.

    Trish-vanityMy takeaway from the experience is that filmmaking is an entirely different animal than publishing. The biggest difference is how many people are involved. Yes, when you’re publishing a book, you rarely do everything yourself, even if you go indie. There will be an editor, a cover designer, marketing folks, and if it’s print, someone to manufacture the book.

    But imagine if books were written like films are made. You’d have to hire people to act out your characters. You’d have to bring in a propmaster to acquire every single item you’ve described in your scenes, plus a set decorator to lay everything out. A sound crew would have to record the sound or you wouldn’t have any dialogue. A gaffer would have to make sure the lighting is just right, or your reader wouldn’t be able to see who or what is in that scene. And craft services had better feed everyone, or your characters would be getting mighty cranky.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g9lU5MVM-k]

    That would certainly make things a lot livelier for the novelist–and a lot more expensive and time consuming to write a book. I think I prefer the thinking-it-all-out-in-my-head-and-typing-it-on-my-computer way of doing things. That way, the only one filching out of my refrigerator is me. My characters can just eat air.

    How about you? Have you ever been involved in a film production? I’d love to hear your experience.

  • RTW – Summer After Graduation

    For Road Trip Wednesday this week, YA Highway asks How did you spend/how will you spend the summer after graduation? First of all, my high school graduation was so long ago, I spent it TPing dinosaurs and riding saber-toothed tigers. It was tricky climbing on those big cats without getting bitten, but pre-historic catnip usually did the trick to lure the beasts into submission. We’d also grab fronds off the tree ferns to use as shade since air-conditioning hadn’t yet been invented.

    This summer, it’s my son and daughter-in-law who have graduated (PhDs in economics) and part of my summer will be involved in helping them move from the West Coast to the East Coast. We have a regular translocation conga line planned, with my son and husband flying out one day with the two cats, and my daughter-and-law and me flying with my beautiful toddler granddaughter the next. Those two days should be quite the adventure.

    I hope you all have a fabulous summer.

  • Temptation: 1, Me: 0

    Generally speaking, I should not stop for yard sales. If I do, there’s a .999 probability that I will spend money. Usually it will be some small knickknack that only costs a couple dollars. But sometimes (like today), it requires pulling out my mad money to lay down some semi-serious cash.

    I could blame it on my husband. I certainly blamed him that time I was admiring a kitten at an adoption clinic and begged him to let me take her home. We already had three cats, and I counted on him to tell me, in a reasonable tone of voice, “No, Karen, we already have enough cats.” He did not. Instead, he said, “Sure, let’s adopt her.”

    Cosette turned out to be a wonderful cat who spent most of her waking hours snuggled up to me. Sadly, a heart condition cut short her life at a young age.

    In any case, you can see that my husband is supposed to be the safety brake to my acquisitive nature. So when we stopped at a yard sale to check out a dining room set (we actually do need a dining room set), I counted on him to temper my temptations. But I’d already seen the school desk/chair when we were scanning the offerings from our car. Close up, I liked it even more. It turned out the price was kind of reasonable and when I made an offer, the counter was exactly what I’d expected and was willing to pay.

    So, I said, “I want this.” Hubby’s response…crickets. Other than opining that he had no idea where in the house we would put it (I said I’d jam it into my office if I had to), he just let me go on my merry way.

    I did pay for it with my aforementioned “mad money,” cash I receive from book sales that I happened to have tucked away. So the purchase didn’t impact our household finances at all. But hubby didn’t exactly live up to his side of the bargain by saving me from myself.

    But why did I want it, from the moment I spotted it at the yard sale? Because (A) I love old furniture. I love that it’s made from solid wood, that it’s well put together. It’s something I inherited from my dad, I guess. He loved to work with his hands and was an amazing woodworker. (B) I’ve always thought purpose-built furniture is particularly cool. The fact that this is a combo desk-chair is so neat. (C) I love its connection with the past. As I was carrying it into the house, it occurred to me that my mom likely sat at a desk just like it when she was in school in the 30s and 40s.

    There’s a divot carved out of the desktop and I can imagine a restless boy like my father carefully drilling out that hole with his pen knife to while away the slow moving hours in the classroom. There’s a big X scrawled across the desk top too, maybe made by some frustrated student who just had enough of the times tables when a beautiful spring day awaited him or her just outside the schoolhouse windows.

    What am I going to do with this desk-chair? No idea. For now, I piled a few of my granddaughter’s books in the storage area under the seat. She’s a toddler and a little too small to use the chair, but I bet she’ll be intrigued by it next time she comes over.

    And maybe I’ll just sit in the chair myself, write out a few times tables and think about the students who once used it. Girls like my mom, who won a contest in high school with the slogan “Don’t be square, the cafeteria’s not the place to brush your hair.” And boys like my dad, who would sit in old stuffy classrooms dreaming about how he would have much rather be running in an open field with a kite, or riding his bike to the ocean.

  • A Girl in Shop Class

    The other day, I was listening to an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on NPR’s Science Friday. (side note: I am madly in love with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If I wasn’t already married, I would woo Neil).

    Anyway, he got to talking about his childhood, how as a black kid he had to be an athlete in high school to fit in (he wrestled). When he told people he wanted to be an astrophysicist (which he knew from age 11), they told him oh, no, you should be an athlete. Neil said it wasn’t so much racism but the fact that that in those days (late ’60s, early ’70s, based on his age), athletics seemed to be the pathway for someone with his skin color.

    When asked what had kept him going despite society’s skepticism (although his parents did fully support his dreams) he mentioned he had/has a tremendous reserve of strength and self-motivation inside him. When he faced opposition or lack of faith from others, he would draw on his reserve to keep going. Sometimes his reserve got low, but he still kept going until he achieved his goals.

    One funny story he told was of being in shop class in junior high. All the students were to build a desk lamp. It was a simple design, with very clear instructions. But Neil didn’t want to build that desk lamp. He had a particular love of Saturn. He convinced the shop teacher to let him build a Saturn lamp. Neil glued together several blocks of wood, carved out a globe for the planet and a circular piece for the rings. He drilled a hole through the globe to run the cord through and rigged the ring to swivel so that the lamp would turn on when the ring was pressed. He still has that lamp on his desk at the Museum of Natural History. Here’s a video that includes a demonstration of his lamp. It’s at about the 1:10 mark.

    As he was talking about his shop class, he mentioned a reality at that time–that only boys were allowed to take shop. Girls were relegated to cooking and sewing classes. That brought back a memory for me.

    Somehow, when I was in junior high, I was allowed into a shop class. I was the only girl. I loved it. Our project was to design a floor plan for a house. Once we had our design, we were to use balsa wood to build walls. I created a house with a large courtyard in the middle and the rooms ringing the courtyard. I thought it would be cool to have a very private yard like that.

    I was able to draw the floor plan, and got two or three runs of balsa wood glued on. But then came the semester break. I was moved out of shop class (despite my objections) and moved into sewing/cooking class for the second semester. Although it turned out I also enjoyed cooking and sewing, the injustice of being booted out of shop class still stings.

    (Another side note: There was one boy in cooking class. I suspect he was ridiculed by his peers and looked upon with suspicion, just as I had been in shop class).

    I’m assuming that these days if a girl wants to do shop class, she can do it. I know boys take cooking class now in high school. They might still get razzed about it, but they at least have choices.

    So how about it? Anyone have an experience like mine? Or were you allowed to finish that cool project in shop class and you skipped learning how to cook and sew? Let me know in the comments.

  • The Mystery of Where We Come From

    My husband and I do genealogy as a hobby. My husband more than me because his relatives are much more organized. He got a head start with a cousin who’d explored that particular branch of the family in great detail. Then there’s the fact that there are so many cousins that make it easy to stumble across a Sandler or other relation in the census or birth records.

    My ancestors are much more evasive. There’s my father’s father’s family, the Stiers, who were Austrian (Hungarian?) Jews. They came here sometime in the mid to late 1800s, had a few children, which might have involved more than one marriage. They then conveniently scooted off to Britain for a few years in such a way that they avoided the census, so I have no idea where they were when. My grandfather was born in the UK (supposedly in Greenwich–no idea for sure since I can’t find the records), then the whole family returned to the U.S.

    Problem #1 with the Stiers is that this seems to be a common name among German Christians. While I do have another relation of German ancestry (don’t get me started on the Satenburgs), I know my Stiers were not German, nor Christian. But was Samuel married to another wife before Fanny? Is that why his oldest daughter is so much older than her brothers? No clue.

    Ida (Chave), Louis & Harry (Aaron) Beckenstein

    The Beckensteins, my father’s mother’s side, are much more orderly. That’s them to the left. Because of their somewhat unusual names, I found them fairly easily in a ship manifest. The person transcribing the manifest had made a bit of a hash of their names, but still, my Ellis Island search led me to a record with Aaron and Chave Beckenstein. Aaron later changed his name to Harry and Chave to Ida.

    What’s kind of cool is that there is a definite family resemblence between Ida and my niece (my niece would be Ida’s great-great-granddaughter). Aaron even looks quite a bit like my niece’s brother.

    A few others who are hanging out in my family tree–the great-grandfather who was a stowaway coming over from Italy, the grandfather who changed his name from the unusual (Fratantonio) to the common (Russo), perhaps because he was into some shady dealings and wanted to stay on the down-low. That grandfather, Domenic Russo, died in prison when I was an infant.

    Then there’s this mystery man who’s not even related to me. He was apparently the friend of my great-uncle Sam Beckenstein. Uncle Sam saved a ton of pictures from the 40s, mostly photos of his girlfriends of which there were many (he never married). I came across the photo to the left amongst his other pictures, which I’m guessing was taken during WW2. Uncle Sam had written on the back Lew Gill standing in front of our tent.

    Since I have no idea who Lew Gill is, I posted the photo on Facebook and Twitter in hopes someone would jump out of the blue and e-mail me to say, “That’s my dad/grandfather/uncle!” It would be very cool if that happened, but so far, no luck.

    As a writer, I can’t resist wondering. Where exactly was the picture taken? Here in the States, or overseas? Did Lew survive the war? Was he married before he headed off to the army, or did he marry when he got home? What kind of life did he have? Did he raise a family? Could his children/grandchildren be out there somewhere?

    It would be lovely to have those questions answered, to solve the mystery. In the meantime, my imagination will just have to fill in the blanks.