Just another random post

So...

I was originally going to write tonight about how easy it is to hide your self-pity and low self esteem behind liquor, and how it's a terrible habit and something I need to seriously stop doing. But then I bought a six-pack after work, so maybe this isn't the time for that sort of thing.

The screenplay's coming together fairly well. I've been off it for a couple of days, knowing I needed just a few more scenes in it, but not sure what they were. So I let it bounce around in my head for awhile, and as is usually the case, the answer went and showed up all on its own today.

So tonight has seen the addition of a few more scenes. And now I think I'm about as close to a complete first draft as I'm going to get.

Excellent.

Now I just need to sit down with a couple of people for a script reading, so I can just close my eyes, and listen to their voices, and see if it all *works*. See which lines sound wrong or artificial. See which scenes need padding and which need to be cut, which scenes need to have something new stuck after them and before the following scene. Fuel for a second draft / polish.

I'm amazingly thrilled to have this piece almost complete, after realizing today that it was close to six or seven years ago that the idea first struck me.

I'll never understand the logic -- if there is any -- behind which ideas stick with me over the years, and which ones just drift away. I have plenty of ideas in my head that have been there for years, some more than a decade. But surely there have been even more ideas that strike fast and hard, then fade, never to return.

Is there any logic to it? Any pattern?

I'd like to think that it's only the really, really good ideas that stick with me. But unfortunately that's probably not the truth. There probably isn't any logic to it. Just a question of which chunks of grey matter get used.

Still, it's always incredibly gratifying to finish something that has been with you for years, poking at your brain, whispering in your brain, saying, "Finish me! Finish me!"

Finished a short story last Christmas that I had first thought of right around the same time that the idea for the screenplay occurred to me -- six or seven years ago.

I don't know what it was that brought me to the story last December, but it was clearly the right time to do it, as I burned my way through the whole thing in two or three days.

Two or three days, after six or seven years of marinating the idea.

It seems like an anti-climax, but it's not.

It doesn't matter how long the actual writing takes -- days or weeks or years -- coming to the end of an idea that has plagued you for years is just about as climactic as you can get.

Speaking of big climaxes from something begun years before...

I occurred to me this morning that I'm within a few days of crossing a threshold that I knew would eventually come, but one I never gave much thought to, because it was just too...weird.

I got married in the middle of October in the year 1997.

We separated in Mid-February of 2001.

We were married and together for 3 years and four months.

We have been married and separated for 3 years and four months.

Which means that any day now -- if it hasn't happened already -- I will have been married while separated for more time that I was married and together with my wife.

How weird is that?