PORTFOLIO — WRITING SAMPLE
@fkafrancis
My mother always said that I had a way with words. For love and hobbies I have always gravitated toward writing prose, scripts, and poetry. In my professional life I have learned how to get the most out of words in order to tell the stories of other people and brands. It is no secret that in order for language to work effectively it must know who it is, what it wants, and who it is talking to — the rest is just puns and thesaurus words.
hold me like i’m someone worth naming a river after
script samples
Sweet Friends - Chapter One (First 10 Pages)
animated series concept
The Stages (First 10 Pages)
feature length
In the Shadow of the Pale Flamingo (First 10 Pages)
feature length
Humble Bear, Hungry Bear
The bear emerges from his slumber.
The lips of his eyelids peel away from each other like the birth of two black holes. Light floods across his pupils the same way a sunrise — imagine every sunrise all at once pouring every light particle into the darkest dark; every flashlight shining into a single well. His eyes are metaphors for the cave he stands to leave, the sun is a metaphor for the sun — every color in the spectrum of light all at once. His eyelids give his eyes to this luminous glowing ocean of fiery neon white.
It’s like this for all of his senses. All at once.
The wet leather of his tongue tours around the smooth snare of his teeth, sweeps across the pearl bone of his bite through the remnant river flavors that slept in the damp hollow architecture of his jaw. His mouth tastes like charred rock and salmon. His breath tastes like the breath of a bear; spicy with a trace of sweet oak. The malt of his saliva, the copper of his gums, the balmy billow of his breath. His yawn propels his tongue outward where he tastes the brisk salt musk of a seasoned breeze.
The air rushes to his throat through his nose — carrying with it the scent of cinnamon floral tree bark, orange peel pine, lingering hints of maple and ash with a light honey finish.
His paws adjust to the powder hard dirt beneath him. Jagged, soft, and solid the weight of the earth pushes back against his own. He feels his mass distributed across the stretch of his bulky legs. His bear claws press into sharp crusts of branch and dry remains left by the stale end of a winter he only remembers in the temperate sound of cave echoes and sleep. His nails, pointed and acute, comb through his fur, tickle his skin, rip through snarls of tangled hair. His body throws itself forward through the anvil-shaped rock mouth; his silhouette is a monster.
He stumbles to a standstill. His attention caught by the shuffle of branches in the acres of wilderness that spread out before him. The rumble of his stomach echoes back into the cave den. He lifts a paw past his ear toward a tiny distinct buzzing — a sound with no visible source. He swats, loses balance, and rolls further out of the cave and onto his back. He jostles his body from side to side until his paws catch traction and he is able to pull himself upright again. He adjusts his posture, shakes his fur, and shifts his body weight. He comes unknowingly close to the rock ledge, knocking an oblong stone loose. The bear is startled backward by the instability of the ground. He watches the stone tumble down the full length of the mountainside; shaking up dirt and crashing through brush.
The overwhelming sensation of all of this — the sight and taste and scent and touch and sound — excites the bear up onto his hind legs stretching his body toward the cedar sky; the vanilla air; the burnt sherry sunlight pouring down across his senses. He opens his mouth wide as his lungs push air through his throat in the shape of a momentous roar; a buoyant growl that swims through the canyon and echoes back.
At the sound of hearing his weighted cry howl back at him, the bear recoils the fluffy weight of his body back down to earth. Humbled and hungry, he is alone with his thoughts.
He blinks, his eyes are two black holes swallowing light.
The bear’s Hunger is a proper noun. The bear will follow his instincts. The bear is awake now and the only language he knows is survival.
There is a Praying Mantis in the House
At once I proclaimed myself a well-versed killer of flies. I had at some point developed a method — knowing that attacking a fly from left, right, or above was not good enough. The fly was always too fast, nearly a step ahead, in flight before my shoe could land any possible demise. The method — because they move with the sudden motion of air — use two shoes, come at the fly from above, from both left and right. The shoes will meet in a thunderous clap, hopefully with the fly trapped between them.
As this summer ramped up I found myself delivering executions to many bugs in our house, including a vast genus of spiders. Except one spider. We will call him, Abraham.
Abraham lived in the second windowsill in my bedroom. The tiny corpses in his web were visible before he allowed himself to became noticed. He tucked himself under his web, in the bed of the windowsill. I watched him for days. I let him live. I know, that sounds like a line delivered by a man with a god complex, but I'm fairly certain that Abraham was poisonous. I'm certain we were both born with the ability to destroy that which we assumed to be worthy of death.
I became fascinated with watching Abraham at midday when the sun beat furiously down on my bedroom window. I would watch him climb out from under his web, out from the sill, and rest instead on the wall beside the window — in the shade, out of the heat. I would watch Abraham do this as an act of self preservation. While resting on the wall, in my room, he would be noticeably anxious, almost too aware that his placement next to the window put him in danger. Any sudden movement on my part sent Abraham sprinting frantically through the web tunnel of his making back into the metal heat of the windowsill.
I watched this occur regularly — the web thickening with silk, ornamented with small additions to his collection of tiny corpses.
Without much adieu though, Abraham disappeared. I have yet to clean up his web knowing it might reveal his corpse in the belly of the windowsill, perhaps a victim of starvation or worse. Perhaps he was cooked to death by a sun that he undoubtedly could not comprehend more than it being a regular occurrence of perplexing light and heat that he needed to avoid.
But this story is actually not about him. This is about the appearance of Winston.
Winston arrived in the midst of the latest heat wave in Los Angeles. Shortly after 8 p.m. on a Thursday I arrived home to find Winston perched near the top of the wall in our dining room, just a couple of feet away from an open window — left ajar I assume to combat that heat of a house that in the dead of summer functions more like an oven, designed to bake its contents.
At first glimpse I judged Winston as an unsightly insect. A large branch-like creature with obvious unholy intent; set to invade our household with his bug-ness and feast on our human weaknesses. I filmed his presence, broadcast his ugly existence on Snapchat and began planning his removal from our house. Hopefully without killing him.
I paused long enough to do a quick internet search. I needed to assure myself that the branch-like being that was occupying my dining room was not in fact a poisonous alien overlord readying his venom and plotting my demise.
Winston, as it turns out, is an albino praying mantis.
I see it now, what with his claw-like arms in prayer.
As I write this, Winston is suspended from the ceiling not far from where I found him. He is upside down. He is praying. And when I stand beneath him his tiny head and his tiny big eyes follow me. Winston knows I exist. As much as Winston can know anything. Winston might be terrified that I am an overlord alien species plotting his demise.
Knowing that Winston is not here to harm me led me to the next obvious question. What does his presence in our house mean? Short of just being an insect in a house, he is a praying mantis and surely that has to mean something — as desperately as humans need things to have meaning beyond just being exactly what they are. So, I turned again to the internet.
Thankfully, Laura did all my homework for me back in 2012. Everything I suspected and/or needed and/or wanted to believe was written in her blog post, titled "Praying Mantis Sends a Message?" I looked no further.
The presence of a praying mantis in one's home has spawned two opposing churches. Both churches are exactly what you would expect and exactly what you would want to find when you set out to find meaning behind such a prosaic occurrence.
Winston, buddy, if you are ever granted the wherewithal and the conscious ability to read these speculations, I hope you can understand what I wanted you to mean to me. That I sought meaning in our paths crossing. That I wanted to communicate to you that neither me or my roommates were set on harming you. That I ultimately sought to learn something from you. The specifics though, those are still very much unclear. Is my typing of this note keeping you awake? Am I distracting you from your meditation?
Right. The two churches. I'm getting to those.
First, a look at my favorite thing that Laura discovered about the praying mantis from another blogger named Claude: That time in the linear sense is irrelevant to the mantis.
Read that again. And then read it again. Because I just typed it moments ago and I've already re-read it ten times and my mind is blown every time.
According to legend — and well, Laura's blog — if a praying mantis comes to you in your house, it is a sign of good things to come. [Yay!] But that's the first church of thought. The second church views the presence of the mantis as a possible omen or an attempt to persuade you to re-evaluate your current life path. [Oh.] But honestly, who knows? This feels like it is simply a matter of perspective. If you saw a bug in your house and turned to the internet for a deeply satisfying meaning, then you will probably accept it for what it is — a sign. Albeit not an obvious one.
As Laura notes, Claude interprets this predicament as a wake-up call, “Patient, perceptive and focused this little totem holds a powerful message. When it appears in your life it is asking you to direct your energy, your thoughts, or your actions in a different way."
If only Winston could talk.