22 April 2008

my calendar seems to be running fast...

It's late APRIL?

When the hell did this happen?

Criminy. It seems maybe two months ago that I was in Austin, giggling like a madman, and then next I was in LA, still giggling, then there's a vague memory of Christmas, some fuzzy recollection of a major strike, little league season started, and now it's suddenly 10 days til Nicholl deadline (more on that in a sec) and only six months til AFF '08.

And I feel like nothing substantial has happened on the writing front since... July?

This can't be good. And in point of fact I know for certain it's not even accurate -- I have been working on a variety of writing projects, and I was feeling happy about some progress as recently as just last week. But the sensation is real and accurate: these last 8 months or so have blown by at hurricane speed, and I'm suddenly starting to feel that not entirely useless itch of desperation -- the need to do something... accomplish something... claim something...

Like Auda Abu-Thai, "I must find something honorable..."

Tick tock, my pretties. Tick tock.

-=-=-

MEANWHILE... I am stunned to look up and realize that again the Nicholl deadline looms large and again I have no friggin clue how I might get the new thing done in time to be useful as an entry. There are those who claim to write scripts in 2 or 3 weeks, but (and I say this with all the respect I can feign halfheartedly) "I cannot fathom this." I accept that it is possible to put down enough words to fill pages such that the result looks (at a slight distance) like a script, but I cannot for the life of me accept that many people routinely sit down and crank out anything read-worthy in 14 or 21 days.

[And, please -- spare me any personal testimony of the time you claim you did this, as I really don't care and probably don;t believe you anyway.]

Part of me figures I'll just repeat my stunt from last year and defy the Nicholl folks to repeat THEIR errors and again bump me down the trail of advancement. If they dink me first round, I'll giggle and say 'TOLD ya so...!" " and feel vindicated in my amateurosity. If the cookie crumbles the other way, I'll (again) happily take whatever goodies they foolishly send me way.

Suckers.
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5 comments:

japhy99 said...

The script I just finished and am sending out too me three YEARS.

Next one will be quicker, but not three weeks. I mean, please, let's be serious.

Christina said...

I wrote my very first script in four weeks. And you can tell.

I'm onto my second, which really is a stronger version of one story told in the first. I have now worked on it three months, and it is nowhere near noteworthy... yet.

MoviePen said...

I know what you mean about the stall-like action of the writing career (as opposed to the writing craft). In some respects I feel like we're at a big pre-strike, wait-and-see pause (which may be what's happening, given the SAG negotiations), but still... it seems very, very, very calm on the career front.

We can only hope it's the calm before the storm.

MaryAn Batchellor said...

The Nicholl thing is really weird for me this year. I've obsessed over it for two years and this year it's like que sera sera.

aggiebrett said...

The strike has clearly been an 800-pound monkey wrench in the works this past year. The entire seasonal schedule of activity has been thrown out of whack, and there was a 3 month nightmare right in the middle of what is normally the "off" season where a lot of pre-pros are starting to ramp up thought and effort on Next Year's Hopes.

Meetings and marketing were basically non-existent from mid-October until mid-February, and things have hardly improved much since then as the SAG/AFTRA mess continues to fumble along much like the WGA negotiations did at the same stage of the game. We might yet see ANOTHER ugly nasty destructive strike this year as the actor's walk out over the craptacular offers from our friends and "partners" at the AMPTP.

I've got an agent (woohoo!) but there seems way less for them to **do** in 2008 compared to any comparable period in recent memory, so I sit here with (what every says are) a pair of cool marketable specs, and working on (what everyone says are) a trio of cool marketable new projects, and all I can think is "for someone who supposedly has enjoyed a year of great progress, I sure don;t feel like I've progressed in 9 months."

Odd. That's what it is. Odd.


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