Tapping At My Door

Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore!"

Pessimism, depression, are rapping, tap-tap-tapping at my door. All because of stupid LiveMansion. Is there life outside of promoting for votes?? Is it really all that important to get to the Final Round, where I'll audition with the other finalists in a scene, and then have to do this all over, collecting votes again to be cast in the role? Is winning a role in a feature film that will most likely go directly to video (as the production company's other films have done) really worth all of this? Is it really helpful to my career to get a role in a movie that will be of equivalent quality to Beer League, TV the Movie, and National Lampoon starring Paris Hilton?? Ugh.

I'm up to 65 votes, with only 8 days left to get over 200 votes, and I'm not even sure that will be enough. The thing that really sucks is that the only reason I'm not getting more votes is becuase not enough of the people I am contacting are watching my video and voting for me. And I don't know where else to promote at this point. Yes, I could e-mail the other LiveMansion members that are not involved in the contest, but it seems they have already been bombarded by all the other contestants. I need something to help me stand out, catch their attention.

I had an idea to help me stand out. I caught a really funny outake on video while filming Sabrina's monologue. I had it saved to disk along with the final takes of the monologues I've used for my voting page. I've been thinking I could use it as a promotional tool: "Watch my outake, it's really funny! Please vote for me!"

But I think the outtake must have a curse on it or something. Because at first, when I was trying to save it from disk to the computer desktop, the computer decided that it didn't want to finish copying it, and came up with an error message. That was last Sunday. And then the computer refused to recognize the disk at all after that.

Until today. I decided to give the disk one more try, because it would be a huge help to have a fun outake to share as a way of promoting myself. And the computer actually recognized the disk and the files on it! WOO-HOO!! Immediately I dragged the file from the disk to the desktop and it copied!! WOO-HOO!! So I made my little movie out of it with Windows Movie Maker, and signed on to LiveMansion to upload it. The file is only 8.19 MB, I figured it would be a snap to upload, because it's smaller than my audition videos. But no. The Curse of the Outake struck again. At 8 MB, I get the message: "Upload stopped unexpectedly." So I try again. Same thing. I go back and remake the video with WinMovie Maker, fussing with it to make it just a titch smaller, so that it is about the same size as where the upload quits. I try the new file, same thing happens, it cuts out with less than a MB to upload. CURSE WORDS!!!!

I've also been trying to upload Mee-gan's monologue to MySpace so that my friends can view it before registering with LiveMansion, hopefully if they can see it first that will help motivate them to sign up and vote. But the same thing has been happening on MySpace, the file gets 99% uploaded, and then the upload times out.

I'm just about ready to quit. I'm sick of being on the computer from 8 am until 10 pm, cutting & pasting e-mails and messages, only to get 3 or 4 new votes. The first few days I was registered were awesome! I got 30 votes the first day, 20 votes the second, but the last 15 have trickled in over 3 days. I don't know where else to go or who else to ask to try and get votes for myself. I don't know what else to do if I can't get my outake video up.

Granted this pessimism may be due to the fact that I haven't eaten anything but pizza the last few days, not getting nearly enough of my vitamins, too much white bread, etc. it clouds the thinking, makes me tired and fuzzy. But I feel like I'm stuck.