Day 7

12:30

A second terrible night's sleep - going to bed too late, too much noise in the mornings.

I wasn't very happy with where I left off yesterday - I wrote fewer pages, and they felt more difficult. I've got to the part of my story where I have the least frame of reference: I'm worried it won't feel convincing enough.

I'm also amazed by how limited my vocabulary is. I have so few synonyms at hand for my characters' simplest tasks: looking, turning, running. It's also interesting to see how often certain synonyms come back to haunt you every time you try to find a word, and remind you of your shortcomings - for instance, I've tried to use 'barreling' for 'sprinting' at least four times in thirty pages. You end up cheating and looking in a thesaurus, and then every word you take from it - 'bolts', 'darts', 'hurtles', feels utterly false.

I'm going to have to deal with this over the coming weeks - in a lot of my screenplays, people are going to be running and looking at one another. It seems to be relatively easy to describe something exotic - much harder to write simple, universal actions in an unrepetitive way.

13:15

Going to start writing now. Wanted to sit down and start straight away, but a wren got trapped in the house. Clever little creature - didn't need much help to find his way back out.

02:30

Going to bed. Broke the 3,000 word mark for the first time, today. It felt good - I've got the feeling it won't be so easy from now. Tomorrow, I've got ACTUAL WORK to do, it's going to suck away a lot of this time. I might have to reduce my ideal word count and hours writing for the next nine days. But we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Also slightly concerned that I've done my level best to write lean and honed material, to not over-explain or write anything extraneous - yet I'm only just 25% through my plot outline, but have written 50 motherfucking pages.

If I don't start crushing stuff down, repurposing scenes to contain more, this script is going to run to over 200 pages. And a 200-word script hasn't really been 'saleable' since the mid-70's.

So. We'll see what happens next.

Also, I cracked my head on a rafter today. And managed to wake seriously ill woman, who's house I'm staying in - and who's going into hospital tomorrow - at 1:30am this morning by cackling at The Daily Show too loudly.

Cosmo Wallace. The man. The legend.

word count: 3,151
hours writing: 5