Now, I figured that if this site was going to be of interest to anyone other than me, it would have to include something other than movies and pictures of Chinese people. So I decided to include some of my writing.

Don't worry, this page will look good, or at least better, soon. (HA!!) But for right now, all I have time to do is put up some links to my writing. Here is a play that I wrote my at the end of my sophomore year. It's was written essentially for me and a few of my friends, and no one but me (and sometimes I wonder about me) understands all of it. It's surrealist, absurdist, existentialist, and satirical. And it contains a ton of IMSA and movie references. It makes slightly more sense if you read it after reading this short story. "Dr. Sinnerlove" was written by me and my friends Nick Rupprecht, Matt Husky, and Charles Wang in order to fulfill an assignment for Charles's English class. Charles was rather frightened by the final result, but he turned it in anyway. Then, because of historical circumstances beyond our control, his English teacher refused to accept it on the grounds that it was too violent. (Obviously, this was the result of the oversensitive atmosphere that existed in high schools at the time; the actual violence in the story is minimal, not meant to be taken seriously, and not the slightest bit gratuitous in context.) Charles then turned in a censored version, which I completely disown. What you're reading is the reconstructed "uncensored" version.

This play was written by me the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. It was produced onstage by the IMSA Drama Club my junior year. I did not have any input in this production, and I disowned it and had my name removed from it. Nevertheless, I still view the actual script as my accomplishment, and thus here it is.

This is a list I wrote up a long time ago of "Movie Sequels or Remakes I Would Like to See". Since neither I nor the friends of mine who made some contributions self-censored as we thought these up, some of them are pretty stupid, or else pretty obvious, or else not funny. But some of them must be worthwhile, or else they wouldn't be up here, right?

This is a story that Dan Urman and I wrote sophomore year for an assignment in Spanish class. Actually, I was the one who wrote it. Dan and I came up with the conception in class (based on a legend about an electric guitar I had written in eighth grade), and Dan came up with the main character's name, inspired by "Juan Bobo," the hero of a story we were reading in class at about that time. Of course, being Dan, he was nowhere to be found when it came time to actually write the story, so I wrote it myself, taking about half an hour and finishing five minutes before the start of class. If you don't know Spanish, it's meaningless, but if you do, it's hilarious. Note: I submitted this story, with grammatical revisions, for a college Spanish class my sophomore year. It got a B+; my professor liked it, but it was too short for the requirements of the assignment.

I wrote this story at the same Creative Writing class at Northwestern University where I wrote Let the Wires Show. It was meant to express my bitterness at IMSA, specifically the fact that, due to beauracratic bungling, I was not allowed to take the Spanish 4 class that my teacher had recommended me for. (This was just the last in a series of events that had caused me to become fed up with my school.) My bitterness has since diminshed (I did in fact end up in that Spanish 4 class), but I find it rather ironic that even though, looking at from my current perspective, I find the story to be rather extreme, the fact is that most of the events in it were based on things that truly did happen to me during my scholastic career. As a result, I do think that many of the points it makes are still valid.

For those of you who are interested in my writing but not my movies, here are two LONG essays I wrote about movies. The first is about five overlooked directors whom I happen to like. The second is about five great British actors (all now passed away) who I happen to admire greatly. I haven't written any new full-length movie reviews yet, but when I do, you'll be the first to know.

Here are links to the two professional newspapers which I have written for: The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Illinois, and the Aurora Beacon-News of Aurora, Illinois. Update: Because of new court rulings regarding copyright law as it applies to the work of freelancers, my articles are no longer available on these websites. Sorry! There are also several articles about me available at the SJ-R website, but you have to pay to see them, and I doubt you want to do that. The Stanford Daily, on the other hand, does have an article I wrote for them available online. Here it is.

Another thing I have written at Stanford is this reminiscence of my first year of College Bowl. (You have to scroll down to page 11 to read it.)

Then there is this adaptation of one act of the play Mandragola by Nicolo Machiavelli (of The Prince fame). We performed this play winter quarter in SLE and the disorganized director, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, decided that the script needed to be condensed and "updated." He assigned each act to be adapted by a different writer; I got Act 4. After completing and turning in this adaptation, I auditioned for the play and, through some fluke, was cast in a role (I won't say which one). Meanwhile, Fetter-Vorm apparently forgot about the play until he suddenly remembered a week before it was due to be performed. He cobbled together the five scripts in a haphazard manner to form a script that lacked both grammatical sense and continuity. My act was completely mangled, with the set-ups for jokes left in and the punch lines taken out, or the punch lines taken in and the set-ups taken out, and in general the show (which lasted only twenty minutes, and which we performed with scripts [and I use the term loosely] in our hands) was a very sloppy affair. Nevertheless, it went over rather well with our undiscriminating audience of fellow SLE students and instructors. Though the finished production featured almost none of my jokes, I present to you here my original version. If there's anything you don't like, blame Machiavelli.

Finally, here is my most ambitious work to date, a full-length play entitled Truth Is a 4-Letter Word and adapted from the short story "No Motive" by the great Daphne du Maurier. I came across the story in a mystery anthology called Ten Great Mysteries (edited by Howard Haycraft and John Beecroft) which I found while browsing in Green Library. The play was written as an homage, and is not intended for any commercial application or profit.