Day 32

13:15

Woke up today with a headache and a sore throat. Motherfucker. Still, it's only a cold.

I'm going to try something new today. In my head, I know that I've started as late as nine in the evening and still done my four hours, so that I've got used to dicking around in the daytime when I'm meant to be working, and then having to work through till about two in the morning before I actually get my hours or word count done.

So, today, I'm going to set myself a time limit. It's nearly one thirty: I'm going to give myself till seven. That's five and a half hours' time.

We'll see how it goes.

19:30

Well, I forced myself to do nothing but write this afternoon. I'm four hundred shy of my word limit, but feel the kind of deep-down satisfaction that you have after doing a long run, or something else that's good for you after you really didn't want to do it.

I'm going out to see a movie - Slumdog Millionaire - in a little bit, then I think I'm going to get back and finish off my word count.

At the same time as being reasonably satisfied - I worked through some really tricky plot points today - I've also had the first intimations of utter despair: there are times when I look at this story and think, I'm utterly overwhelmed, this is hopeless, and I don't have a chance at succeeding in the task I've set myself. Every day seems to get harder than the day before: can I really expect to write 12 screenplays in a year? Will I even finish my second?

But the more I work, the more those voices go away; or at least are abated for a little while.

02:00

Went to see Seven Pounds tonight - missed Slumdog Millionaire by a couple of minutes. The experience of Seven Pounds could be described as thus: waste two hours of your life, then punch yourself in the balls. This is how you'll feel when you leave the cinema.

Came back home and, thoroughly bummed out, watched Bill Maher's Religulous. Now, that's a good movie. The funniest film and the best documentary I've seen for a long time and that's taking into account the fact I saw Sharkwater last week. It makes me wonder what a Stephen Colbert vs Bill Maher talkshow smackdown would be like. I think it would probably blow my mind.

After that four hours of movie engorgement, I did the extra ten minutes of writing I needed to round off my 5 hour's work today.

I'm having to write this plot up very differently from my last script. Because the last plot had been worked out reasonably well in my head, I could move chronologically from beginning to end, really filling in every detail in every scene, and then moving on. I knew exactly what I was doing, where I was going, what was growing and why.

This time I've had to go through the whole thing in a sketchy fashion, ask a bunch of questions, then re-do the sketch and gradually add more to each individual idea for a scene. As a result, it's much more difficult to see arcs or momentum, or whether characters are actually gaining individuality - but there's so much that I don't know about the fucker that trying to go from beginning to end has nigh on impossible.

Looking at the huge amount I've got to do before I can start writing the script makes me worry that there's an awful lot left - up to a week, really - before I can start this script and know that it will be good enough.

But that's a thought for another day.

word count: 2,160
hours writing: 5