After getting fed up with publishers and unreliable collaborators I decided to turn my unpublished manuscripts into self-created, self-published video books. The first project I started to work on is the first volume of my 'Southern Cross Trilogy', my Caribbean travel journal, titled 'Carib Book'. The manuscript is about 300 pages long, so it is a huge undertaking, which will take at least 2 years to complete. The full video book is going to be about 15-20 hours in length, will fit on about 8-10 DVDs. I started to work on the prewords of the book at the beginning of June and completed the 45 minutes long video (partly animated) by mid-July.
I've spent the past 2 weeks writing stories on famous people from the past. I was commissioned to write them for a portal, which was especially created to attract young women. I was given a list of about 250 past celebs and another list of search words, which had to be matched. The problem was that the selected celebs were mostly males, writers, artists, philosophers, kings, dictators, generals, etc., while the search words were compiled by a young valley girl type bimbo. It was hard to match search words like 'menstruation', 'yeast infection', 'bulemia', etc. with the nearly all male cast of long dead celebs. There were two other writers also working on the same project, but they did it in the Hungarian way: while I wrote 110 stories in two weeks, the two young guys wrote altogether 5 of them during the same period.
Commissioned by the House of Terror Museum (Budapest, Hungary) I'll be giving a lecture on the '60s sexual revolution, on the 16th of August, 2008, at the Island Festival. Another commission also came in: in October I will give a theremin concert and a lecture on the life of Leon Theremin, at the Hamvas Béla Library, in Százhalombatta, a small town about 30 miles South of Budapest. They've offered me a decent fee and transportation back and fro. I will make a new video presentation for the show, using the great vintage theremin footage I recently collected from the Net.
