Aaron Denius's Blog, page 4

Free Form Friday: Some Poetry

Today for Free Form Friday I feel like sharing a couple of poems from my poetry book “A Collection of Clarity & Insanity”. These were poems written while I was in High School and College.

YOU

So tired

Running

Thinking

Dreaming

Lost minds

Tossed aside

Into the grave

No fear of danger

While facing all directions

North sees west

South drowns east

Lost direction

No senses

Floating

Into Nederland

Forever and

As you clear your thoughts

You misplaced them

Into someone else’s heart

Broken commitments

Fading away

Endless patterns of love

You are forever searching

Under bells

Not tolling

Under rocks

Not rolling

Tears

Sweat

Blood

Filling the wounds

Dripping

Onto the paper

Beauty created

Beauty dead

Love is tired

NO LONGER

A tear of mine

A tear mine no longer

Has fallen on my angel

As I embrace her

Not wanting her to go

Holding her forever

Forever no longer

The sorrows I hold

Of the coming of tomorrow

When my angel has flown

She takes this tear of mine

A tear mine no longer

With her

One lonely tear

A tear heavy enough

To collapse a world

My world

To collapse a heart

My heart

A tear filled

With a piece of my heart

A part of me

A part of me no longer

My angel

My tear

My heart

My world

Gone

No longer

I long for

One to match her

But none come close to her

She left me

My love

My love no longer

Work It Wednesday: Jan 21, 2015

The first part of this last week was spend on a mini vacation getaway that I desperately needed to be able to reset my creativity and dispel my procrastination. It always amazes me how when I get back from these trips I always feel ready to take over the world. 

Some of the things I have been working on:

A big promotional discount deal for my book “Gene. Sys.” Starting on Tuesday January 27th, the ebook will be $0.99 in the US and £0.99 in the UK. That’s a 75% discount in the US and g discount in the UK. This will coincide with a local Los Angeles scavenger hunt, where I will be secretly signing 2 copies of my book in 5 different Barnes & Noble book stores. 

Another thing I have been working on is a wattpad story. It’s a sci-fi comedy about a guy who wins a ticket on a rocket to escape earth before it’s destroyed. Before he get’s there, he needs to find his lost love. What makes the story unique is that it was written on Twitter, one tweet at a time. There are currently 4 parts up. Check it out:

The End of the World and Other Small Problems

Lastly, I’ve been in contact with a major writer and director in Hollywood about a possible job opportunity. More details on this to come as they arrive.

Motivation Monday: Love

I have been looking forward to writing this post for a while. I am someone who is typically skeptical about love. One of my favorite things to say is, “Life is a joke, love is the punchline”.

Today, however, is my grandparent’s 70th Anniversary. This just blows my mind. I mean, I don’t even think I can love pizza for 70 years. Let’s put the 70 years into perspective:

Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states.

The first Super Bowl was still 22 years away. 

Their marriage is older than 94% of the world’s population. 

Their marriage is longer than the life expectancy of over 80 countries.

There are so many more fun facts that I could throw out there, there is one sad fact though. This could possibly be one of the last marriages to last 70 years in the world. My grandpa is 92 and my grandma is 87. The chances of both of them being around I realize are incredibly slim. I am blessed. Add the fact that most people these days don’t marry until their late 20’s/early 30’s, the chances of anyone in my generation or younger being married for that long are improbable.

This however does not mean you can’t love as hard or as passionately as they do. The quantity is great, but it’s the quality that truly matters. What Pansy and Forrest have is lightyears beyond anything that has ever been written. These two respect each other, they listen to each other, they share in heartache and joy. Every time I see them I see a love that is just as strong, if not stronger than when they first met. 

So when you love. No matter who you love. Love hard and passionately. Even if it’s pizza.

I love these two.

Movie Review: Selma

I will say that I was originally a bit hesitant on seeing this movie. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is ridiculously inspiring and one that has been documented many times in film. I was naive to think that this film was just going to be another life story from beginning to end. To my surprise, the movie focused solely on one small period in time of this man’s amazing life. It was my own ignorance and lack of knowledge that didn’t recognize what the title “Selma” meant.

So many people, myself included, have lumped Martin Luther King Jr.’s achievements under one giant umbrella of civil rights. This movie however sheds a light on one of the many incredible things MLK did. Namely, getting Lyndon Johnson to pass a law making it just as easy for blacks to vote as it was for whites. Prior to this, if you were black, there were many hoops you had to jump through just to register, let alone vote.

It was also very interesting seeing this movie with my mom, who later recalled how she remembered the events and how she remembered seeing them happen on TV.

The acting in this film was phenomenal! The directing was pretty straight forward, but it really didn’t need to be anything flashy. This movie needed to focus more on the story and less on the art. I left this movie feeling insanely inspired and I highly recommend it!

* * * * *  5 out of 5 Stars

Free Form Friday: Off the Grid Solo Trip

First Free Form Friday blog post and it’s late. Don’t blame me. Blame Vegas.

So I just got back from one of my “Off The Grid Solo Trips” that I take every few months. It’s usually just a local road trip, but this time I decided to go to Vegas. I had never done Vegas alone and I was curious. Plus, I knew that there was a couple of National Parks right around there. Red Rock and Valley of Fire:

Now the reason I take these trips is to reset my mind, body and soul. As is the case with most industries, I am assuming, the daily grind can wear on you. For me it drains me of my creativity. So every time I find myself falling into the abyss of procrastination, I shut myself off from contact and social media, and I get away. 

It’s amazing how your peripheral vision opens up when you travel alone. You see and appreciate more. You don’t miss the small things. Best of all, you get to do whatever the hell you want without giving a single fuck!

Work It Wednesday Jan. 14, 2015

 So this is my first post in a new weekly segment dubbed Work It Wednesday, where I will run down what I have been working on over the last week or so.

As I progress in my journey towards becoming a working writer, there are certainly many obstacles and challenges that I will face along the way, so I will be sure to pay special attention to those.

To begin, I will start with a brief rundown of the last couple of months. Since releasing my book “Gene. Sys.” on October 21, 2014, I have been focused almost entirely on promoting and marketing my book. The idea was to also be working on my next television pilot as well. What I did not anticipate was the tsunami of emotions that would come rushing after having accomplished such a major goal in my life. The biggest feeling I remember is one that I can only assume was an empty nest feeling. I had just created something, nurtured it, and then set it off into the world. This seemingly paralyzed my creativity, so I have struggled over the last couple of months to work on anything new and creative.

This however has allowed me to stay focused on raising the awareness of my book. I have shoved it in the faces of the twitterverse and have actually been overwhelmed by positive response. It hasn’t however turned into many sales. A friend told me that the reason for this is that the target audience for my book are not yet at the age where they can just click and buy, they still must ask their parents. It has however been a great way to connect to people who would be fans of my books.

My most recent attempt to spread the word of my book was to hire a PR firm. They will be sending a press release, which I read and thought was wonderful, to over 20,000 publications in the next week. I’m anxious to see how this affects the sales of the book. I will also be doing a couple of interviews for some blogs, so keep an eye out for those.

Now that the new year has started, I finally feel ready to be creative again. I will be jumping into my pilot full force. I’m not quite sure yet how much I want to divulge on what the pilot is about, but it is a drama. I’m actually heading to Vegas today to get away from Hollywood for a couple of days and clear my mind. I know Vegas doesn’t seem like the best place for that, but I wanted to try something different than my typical Palm Springs.

So eyes looking forward. Next goal, here I come!

Motivation Monday: Validation

“If you are looking for validation, you have lost sight of your goal.”

  

With the Hollywood Awards Season kicking off last night with The Golden Globes, we are exposed again to this industries need for validation. It seems like in entertainment you are nobody until someone says you are somebody.

I get it. In this industry, “NO”, is the most commonly used term. In my short career I have probably heard no 10,000+ times. It’s a crazy industry, but it doesn’t mean that all the other industries are immune. We all have goals. Maybe you want to be the CEO of a company. Do you not seek out the approval of your peers or superiors? Do you not live for those moments that someone says, “Good Job!”?

Regardless of what industry you are in, we all seek those moments where someone acknowledges our work in order to feel that we matter. Is it not enough that we matter to ourselves?  Remember why you first set out to achieve your dreams, your goals. Keep that in mind and stay focused on them. If along the way people acknowledge you, it’s because you are impressing them with your progress. Don’t rely on those moments of validation to keep you moving forward.

Trust me, when you reach a particular goal, the validation will come, but it also wont matter as much as you think it does, because you achieved your goal! 

New Blog Schedule and Format

I have decided to try to add a little more structure and consistency to my blog, so I am creating a blogging schedule to help keep me honest. The blog will still continue to feature different aspects of my life in Hollywood and my pursuit of a successful career as a writer. 

Here is the new blogging schedule:

Motivation Monday

The hardest day of the week can be a little easier with some motivation. So I will be posting some of my favorite quotes, some of my own quotes and other motivational pieces.

Work It Wednesday

Every Wednesday I will give updates on my current projects and answer questions people might have about the entertainment industry or the book world. 

Free Form Friday

Fridays will be a hodge podge of things. Anywhere from funny stories to random blog posts. Anything really. I might just put up a poem.

—

Of course I will continue to post Movie Reviews and TV Reviews whenever I feel like, and if something tickles my fancy I will post whenever.

See you Monday!

Quotes From My Favorite Book

As I was battling insomnia last night, my internet search took me to quotes from one of my favorite books, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. 

If you have not read it, I highly recommend it!

The Quotes:

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.” 

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”

“In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

“All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”
"No," said the old man, "that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.” 

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.”

TV Review: Empire

Empire

Not since “The Americans” has a show left me with a smiling and say ‘fuck!’ (but in a good way).

Starring Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson, Trai Byers, Jussie Smollett, & Bryshere Gray: The show centers around Hip Hop Tycoon Lucious Lyon (Howard) and the three sons that are vying to be next in line for the company; Andre (Byers), Jamal (Smollett) & Hakeem (Gray). Things get turned on their head when the mother of the three boys, Cookie (Henson) is released from jail and wants her share of the Empire.

This show had me enthralled from the opening scene. The writers did a wonderful job of weaving the multiple storilines seamlessly, so I not once felt lost as we learned how each of the 5 main characters live and what their goals are. The actors were fantastic. The chemistry between Howard and Henson picked up right where it left off on “Hustle & Flow”.  The added bonus to this show was that the music was pretty damn good.

“Empire” airs on Wednesdays at 9pm on FOX.

My Rating:  Must Watch