Day 28

18:15

Let me just start by saying how much I hate fucking computers.

I woke up positive today and rearing to go and now all I want to do is kill myself.

Along with the many other ways my Macbook Pro has, over the years, decided to fuck me, now it won't burn dvds.

And it's not even broken - it's just some bullshit software/firmware issue that apple have never got off their asses to fix.

And because I can't afford to buy a new one, I've spent literally four hours trying to install updates and then roll them back and hack firmware and all kinds of shit to no avail whatsoever.

All so I can burn out some dvds to give to people I'm not even on speaking terms with.

I would have made better use of my time repeatedly punching myself in the balls.

Man, fuck computers.

23:30

Watched a movie this evening called Sharkwater. Watching it reminds me why I consciously avoided An Inconvenient Truth. It's a depressing, depressing film. But you should really see it - it's very good, in a kind of, 'we're destroying the planet and we're totally fucked' kind of way,

Meanwhile, I've been working on plotting out the film, working out exactly when and where each event takes place, which is a difficult thing to do properly.

While I've spent at least three hours researching, I've only spent a further hour and a half actually writing, so I'm going to fall short on my word count again, most probably. But I know how fatal it is starting a screenplay without a detailed roadmap to the end, and even if I slip on the word count for the next couple of days, it's good to be getting away from the 'novelisation' - which I'm going to complete but that has really started to feel like hard work - and lay the groundwork to successfully completing a second screenplay next month.

So, here I go, back at it.

01:45

Done some successful thinking on this, worked out a little more of what is going on. I feel bad that my word count average is dropping massively, but good that I'm concentrating on what's important: the next script, the next outline, the next story.

As a result of sitting down and really looking at the maps, I've realised that, realistically, a lot more of this film will be in the Taurus Mountains than in the desert of Syria. And it won't be set in 1099, when the crusaders took Jerusalem: it'll probably be set two years later, with the kidnap of Bohemod of Taranto outside the Turkish stronghold of Malatya.

But I'm shattered now, so I'm going to go to bed.

word count: 633
hours writing: 3.5