A very Trantor-esque piece tonight from Keiko Takemiya.
I did my hour of writing today. For the first time in a week. What a struggle it has been these past, oh, six weeks or so! Such a struggle to sit down for one measly hour a day and do what it is I profess to want to do.
I know that part of it is emotional: it’s me flying in the face of the fear of failing every time I sit down and put black marks to the white blank page. Part of it is also structural. What I am working on currently is not something I can put a page count to…or at least it’s something I *haven’t* put a page-count to. Maybe I should. I know I should, in fact. That’s the next strategy, then, isn’t it? Figure out how to put a *quantity* on what I should be able to get done in that hour a day.
Honestly, that’s what made the novel-writing so successful last year. I knew precisely how much work needed to be done. It was 3 pages a day. That simple. Pick up where I left off. Add three more. Then quit, and go about my business. It was cuttingly simple, in that it cut right through all of the insecure bullshit and all of the excuses. 3 pages. Just do it.
Well, that’s what I need to do for this tv script writing, isn’t it? Pages. Figure out my pages. As it is, the hour is spent maddeningly amorphous in regards to intent. I have no idea if that sentence I just wrote is grammatically correct, but hopefully it got across what I intended. It’s the the sheer all-encompassing size of everything I try to keep inside my head that overwhelms me. I need to figure out how to cut it up into little bite-sized pieces, and then rock the shit out of those little pieces.
I honestly hadn’t sat down to write that tonight 😛 I was content to write a blog about how happy I was that I *actually* got my writing hour logged and in the books today…but I realized that I wasn’t content just to have had that success today. I’ve had the successes intermittently this whole time. Work has been done in tiny little spurts…but that’s not enough, is it? Not for me. Not when I’ve seen just how much work I can actually get done with consistency.
How about this: I know there are several scenes that need top-to-bottom rewrites. I’m currently writing one of them. I think three pages a day till those scenes are rewritten is my ticket to happiness. Start with that shit. Then, I can move onto integrating them into the new draft, and cleaning up the notes from the couple people who’ve given them to me. Let’s start with that. I am SO CLOSE to closing the book on this Icarus pilot and moving onto the next project.
As I sit here tonight, I think I’m also making that call that my next novel project is starting next, as opposed to only focusing on my next pilot. I want to do both. At the same time. The pilot gets written on my non-editing days, and my prose novel writing carries me through every day. The prose is just so nice and easy to keep consistent. I think I can use that shit to buoy the TV writing. We’ll see. It may be a disaster, trying to do two projects at once. So be it. It will just help me figure out the next improvement on the formula.
What I do know is that I need concrete goals in order for me to have consistency. It’s just who I am. A page count to look at and be able to say definitively to myself that I am “done” for the day, I did the work I needed to do, and all I need to do is stick with that number day in and day out and I will finish everything I want to finish.
Whew!
After all that writer-talk, today was a wonderful day. Woke up realizing we’d forgot we’d commited to something in the morning, which Liz had to go off and do on her own because my brother was still here, and he needed seeing off in the morning. So, I did that before heading over the hill to get my hairs cut. Then, I had errands to run and some editing work to do when I got home, ate some food and the Ho came home…and we took a two hour nap that was SO necessary. Jesus. I was tiiiiirrrreeeeddddddd. So was Liz, apparently. We slept solid for two hours.
Then, we got up, and I started cleaning the house which took me into the evening times. Vacuumed, mopped, did some laundry, and then I sat down and did my writing hour. Or, the rest of it. I did some right in the middle of my cleaning actually, because an exchange of dialog popped into my head and I didn’t want to forget it.
After writing, I made some food – this prosciutto tortellini that I’ve been getting lately, soooo gooood – and I saw with the Ho and we watched an episode of TNG on Blu Ray. Then, we decided we were both pretty tired already, and we started getting ready for bed early. Good thing, because as I sit here now in bed, with both Coco and Coops twitching their little legs as they fall asleep, it’s already midnight. It took us a while longer to get to bed than normal, for whatever reason. But, here I sit, my loved ones around me, and my eyelids starting to droop with the weight of the day. It’s time for rest, and rest I shall.
Goodnight my fellow sleepyheads. May we all have pups to snuggle at our feet while we dream.