This is another picture of best friend B and me in Paris in January of 2011. I post it because a) I like it, b) Brian and I are both writers and can spend hours lamenting our habits of procrastination, and c) I couldn't find the picture of birds that was meant to accompany the title of this post. I have an old computer and a new computer and something about a firewire and Bob's your uncle and I don't have all my bird photos.
I'm supposed to write. I like writing - and even more, I like having written - and I get good feedback on my words. I have three projects in the works right now and have spent part of today working on one, which I conceived of in 2006. This year I will finish a draft. It is so damn hard for me to do this - the ease of distraction notwithstanding, due to my editing background I am constantly rewriting as I go, which is exactly what I should not be doing. I should get it all down and then polish. Not supposed to say should but tired enough that I'll let it slide this time. This comes easily to me, jotting down these thoughts about nothing and everything and whatever my brain tells my fingers to type, and if I could I would post and move on, maybe reread in a day or two, because the fact of the matter is that few people read this and the ones who do who know me will forgive me the trespasses of an absentee comma or misplaced, dangling whatever.
Hi Cousin.
I am in the country right now, with my mum and our dogs. It's been a quiet, bonding weekend during which I accomplished bits and pieces of what I'd hoped to. I've started an editing project, gotten further in a (way too long) screenplay I'm reading for a coworker, worked a bit on project the first, read a page or two of my friend's book, exercised, and so on and so forth.
Need to keep writing keep writing don't stop don't worry if it's good or if it's going to be part of the final project or is just the stuff I'm purging to get to the final project. So much easier said, that. Oh! I also read a spec script that I wanted to read and am going to work on on behalf of two of my darling writing clients. Whenever I tell people what I "do" (don't ask me why that's in quotation marks; it just is) they inevitably follow it up by asking what it is that I write and edit - one might think that I'd have my stock answer but I don't, and so I fumble and half-explain and leave things out and mumble and downplay and all that good stuff. What I do for a living: I read and write. That's what.
Bird by bird, I will move forward and write my way through these projects 'cause without a first draft there can be no second. I will not get this done in one shot; it will take many and might very well wind up a pile of pages that allow me to move on to the next. Maybe not. But I have to start with one bird to get to the entire flock. Or murder, if it's crows we're talking about. Nevermore. I've been meaning to memorize Annabel Lee and thus far have but the first and second verses (stanzas?) memorized. Mesmerized.
Okay. This was something. I've now written in my blahhhhhhhhhhggggggggg. Knoblauch.
I might be back later tonight. And I very well might not.
I am a writer, damn it. I really am.
(right?)
