I’ve been fighting myself these past few days. The past five, by my count.
I wrote 25 pages today.
I feel like I could have written 50 and been done with the damn thing…but I’m sitting here right now, 11:45 at night, staring at my Final Draft document, listening to some badass fucking music, and feeling a mite bit defeated.
This script is tough. As I’ve written before, I’m really having a tough time wrapping my head around everything…and everything I’m writing, I’m almost immediately thinking about how it needs to be re-written. Script writers who push out drafts in a matter of hours, I have enormous respect for you. And a bit of frustrated envy, because I’ve DONE that before. Written 45 pages in 6 hours straight.
I don’t have the energy for that tonight. I really REALLY wish I did. But this damn thing is going to take a lot more effort than I’ve given it. That’s really the reality. I’ve been making proclamations and not following through. I felt like I was in a bit of a rhythm for a couple hours today, and that pages came. Just now, in fact, for the last 40 minutes a great scene just happened. But it always comes back to the question of “what next?” each time I finish a sequence. My outline is woefully general, and don’t get me wrong, even if I’m not happy with what’s being SAID in the scenes coming from my fingers, I’m liking everything about the world that I’m creating. It’s cinematic. It’s exciting. Once I get it right, the action will really MOVE. A lot of STUFF happens…I like my plot, and my characters, even if I’m having a hard time wrangling them both at the same time.
And YES, it’s a first draft. I realize all these things are par for the course, I’m not pretending that I’m above all that. I just…want to be DONE with it. I feel like I’ve wasted time. And I HAVE wasted time. I wasted time today. I got interrupted with a fire alarm in the building, and then I took the Coops for a walk, came back and sat down to eat some food, and ended up watching the A’s lose to the Mariners. I also woke up later than I probably should have, and I took an hour nap in the middle of the day. I told myself that I was giving the writing enough time to get finished, but I really knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t stop watching the damn game.
And, here I sit. Frustrated.
Not what I wanted to write, believe me. But it’s the truth…
Believe it, or not, today is fairly easy to let go. I *did* spend most of writing. What’s giving me sweats is what to do tomorrow. See…I really had my heart set on sitting down and watching the A’s play their double header tomorrow, and taking the whole day off as kind of a prize for getting my script done today. And, now that I’ve failed, I’m left with the question of what I should rightly do. Will I feel better if I lock myself with my computer and get this thing written, or will I feel better if I take the day off like I wanted relax, and recharge for what’s going to be the final 3-day work binge (ya, I know I’ve said THAT before, but I’m not going to go second-guessing that shit too)? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t have an answer right now.
I need to talk to the Ho about it. There’s another wrinkle in all this…which is that we’re going downtown tomorrow to look at suits for the wedding, just to make sure that I’m not missing a suit just as baller as the one I’ve already found, for half the price. I’d much rather spend $400 over $800. So, we’ll see. It’s something I’ve put off for a few weeks now with my head buried in the editing world, and it needs to be done. Perhaps I just need to start with that.
Yes.
That’s what I’m going to do. Wake up tomorrow, go out with the Ho, look at the suit, come home, and then see where my head is at. The whole idea of these three days, after all, was to recharge. Re-find my focus and my drive. I haven’t found it yet. I need to let that happen.
Sorry, this was a bit of a puke tonight 😛 Thanks for reading; this is how I work shit out. Right here. Live stream. I need to chill the fuck out, right??? Right.
Tonight’s bloody mess is courtesy of the table-top wargame AT-43…of which I no admittedly nothing about, but the artwork was cool and pretty much summed up my brain 😛