Week Three

Weekly update

Well, this week was tough. Tough with a capital T. In fact, TOUGH will all capitals. There, I said it. But I survived and I did everything on my dailly lists and weekly lists EXCEPT take photos. I'm reallly struggling with taking a photo every day.

The 'take a photo a day' thing came from the fact that I never owned a camera, HATED having my photo taken and generally broke out into hives whenever one came near me. I also developed this weird theory that if you spent all the time capturing the memory on film, then you wouldn't actully experience the memory. Or something like that. It sounded good when I was drunk. Then I went to New York last year and decided that I had to have a camera if I went to New York. What? I was going to come home and talk about how good Times Square was? I don't think so. Talk is cheap. A picture tells a thousand words. Pick your metaphor. Pictures are good. So I bought a camera and I took like a gazillion photos. I've barely looked at them since I got back but I like the fact that they are there. And more importantly, I liked taking photos. So I thought I would get back in the habit of taking photos. Maybe one a day was a bit ambitious. Are there really that many things I want to capture for posteriety? Maybe I need to change it to keep my camera with me at all times so that I can take a photo when I want to. A need to take photos would probably develop into an obsession and I really don't need another one of them. I remember thinking it was a really good idea when I put it on the list. Turns out it is not a good idea, and for the first couple of weeks, all I have done is take pictures of the birds in my backyard. BORING!

I'm going to have to rethink this one.

In brighter news, and trust me, there wasn't much of that this week, I did cross off my "get a play produced in another country" and I started a new day job which mean I will actually have money coming in while trying to pursue this dream of mine but the writing front hasn't exactly been lit by the muses so to speak. I played around with different times to work (early in the morning, at night) even though I know, I KNOW, that writing at night is a fool's errand and if I'm going to do this then I am going to have to get up at 4.00am every morning. EVERY MORNING! Except Sunday, because Dude, even God knew the effects of all work and no play.

I also started a short story which I thought would be a lot further on at this point than it is. But I started it. I wanted to stick it in a drawer and forget about it but I kept going. I'm experimenting with it. I'm putting words on paper. I coudl probably have put more words on the paper but there are words, and they are on paper. Are you getting my message about words and paper? I surely hope so.

So there was that.

I also started brainstorming a new short play that is due next Monday. It's on the theme of "Inns & Outs: Hotel Lobby" which gave me about 25,000 ideas of what to do with such an open theme and none of them came to anything. But I think I'm on the money now. I'm seem to be writing a lot of things where people aren't actually talking to each other. I don't know what that means.

I also 'finished' Act One of New Light Shine and when I say 'finished' I mean that I have put words on paper and they kind of, if you squint a lot and have no judgement, look like Act One of a play. It's going to need a lot of work when I put it together next month into something resembling a play. However, in the grand scheme of things, it actually is sounding a lot better than it did in any of the previous drafts, and there were a lot of previous drafts.

What else for this week?

I seemed to be constantly reading this week. I finished Shutter Island by Denis Lehane, who is surely the greatest crime writer we have. Surely! I don't even like crime fiction and I dig Denis Lehane. I also dig the movies made from his books and I'm sure I am going to love Shutter Island when it hits the big screen. I also read 7 plays and the highlight was rereading The Homecoming by Harold Pinter yesterday. I never used to like Pinter. He always seemed to leave me cold. HOW WRONG WAS I? The man was a genius. GENIUS. There is going to be a lot more Pinter on the menu this year. A lot more. I also read a great screenplay, Mixtape that is from this great website that talks about screenplays that are in development or in production or should be. I can't wait to see Mixtape. It's the kind of screenplay I am hoping to write this year.

That just about sums it up for this week just gone. It wasn't great but it wasn't terrible either. Baby steps, baby steps.