Day 35

12:15

Wow. Fucked up on that one. I compulsively played Rockstar's Bully from nine last night until three o'clock in the morning, effectively turning a treat into an punishment.

If I was this obsessive with my scripts, I would have written about eight this year, I honestly would have. I woke up feeling bad. I'm going to leave how bad to another time.

Anyway, it's time to get to work.

16:45

Okay, today is really not going very successfully. So I'm going to do what all successful writers do when they hit a bump in the road. I'm going to go out to see a 3D animated children's movie.


23:00

Finished for the day. I've finished the first complete runthrough of the plot: running at about twelve thousand words, that's more than half the length of a screenplay.

Looking through it all is pretty painful. About 25% of the plot outline is pretty good. Another 20% (if we're being charitable) is okay. The rest is complete hairy balls. I can't start a screenplay with such a poor outline: even if it takes me another week to work through it, I'm going to have to put that in, and risk going behind, rather than torment myself by writing a screenplay I know is going to be poor from the beginning.

So, a lot more pain to go on this one. On an unrelated matter, I've decided on a way I can post my work in this blog.

At the start of the year, I said I'd post the scripts here as part of my resolution. I've come up with a better idea: at the end of every month, I'll post up the treatment for the script I've been writing. That way, you can actually see a tiny bit of what I'm actually spending my time on, without me posting my embarrasing, 130-page first drafts online.

Also, couldn't see Bolt at the cinema. The clerk gave us some bullshit reason about it "not having been released yet". So we got to see Slumdog Millionaire instead. The first half is fantastic in every level. The second half isn't. But it's still definitely worth seeing. I don't understand the charge of 'poverty porn' some critics leveled at it, either. I've been to Mumbai. It's really like that. Maybe these critics mean 'porn' as in, 'an unadorned representation of something'; the film is really about poor people, just as porn is really about people fucking. I don't remember anyone saying any of these things about City of God when it came out.

Anyway, the first half is absolutely fantastic. And now I'm going to compulsive-obsessively play some more video games.

word count: 2,225
hours writing: 4