The past week has been a bit of a blur.
I haven't gone outside much because of the cold.
My wife has been working relatively crazy hours, or at least days long enough that there's not much day left when she gets home. So if I haven't gone anywhere before she gets home, we're certainly not going anywhere afterwards.
I've been trying to finish up a draft of an Anonymous Lawyer screenplay and I think I've mostly succeeded. I have 117 pages that have been scrubbed a couple of times, the ending completely rewritten at least twice, and I think all I need to do before I send it to my manager is give it one more read tomorrow and make some tweaks to whatever isn't quite working yet.
I wrote about this a little bit last week, but I feel like I'm putting more weight on this piece of writing than I should, not necessarily in terms of what ends up happening to it in the world (if anything) but that at least it proves I'm working on something, and once finished at least it proves I've finished something recently. To myself as much as to anyone else. It's like I don't feel I've earned the right to do anything else until it's done-- I'm not allowed to return e-mails, to go have lunch, to do anything except the bare bones of what I have to do until it's finished. I want to have news to tell people. I'm tired of saying I'm working on stuff, I want to say I was working on something but I have finished and here is what is happening with it. I want a reason to e-mail people, with this piece of writing, to say, hey, I'm pretty pleased with it, take a look if you have a chance, would love your thoughts. I feel like I used to finish things more often than I do lately. Not that I was writing 117-page screenplays-- I wasn't. But shorter things, more of them, with speed that may or may not have been greater than current speed, but it felt like it was. Maybe because I was doing other things at the time, doing more, busier, I don't know.
But I think it's just about done, and then I can do something else and feel like at least this time has been accounted for and I produced something.
Also, I wish the Internet was never invented.
No internet=No Anonymous Lawyer.
Jeremy Blachman is working on the 31st floor 17 hours a day, seven days a week, and is totally going to take that public interest job in a few years, even if it's a 10% pay cut from the $350K he expects to be making (they'll pay better when the economy improves, for sure).
I'm sorry.... about the internet, again?
Posted by: JRM | January 20, 2010 at 05:19 PM