Days 111 - 124: The Christmas Break

The Christmas/New Year's holiday was not kind to my writing efforts. I was well prepared going into the holidays and even managed to get some necessary proofreading done on the redeye flight home but was not able to accomplish much after that.

My biggest issue was dealing with the Calida/Reydel scene and the Tyler Buys a Truck scene leading into the midpoint of the script. I gave it some considerable thought in the Denver airport and in the first several days I was in Florida, but could not come up with a decent alternative to eliminating those scenes. Eliminating them is fairly easy; the resulting problem, however, manifests itself coming out of the midpoint when Hiram confronts Reydel. Without the earlier scenes, this scene doesn't work, and I can't figure out a rewrite or a creating a new scene entirely to solve the problem. I think I'll just have to do the best cutdown I can on the pre-midpoint scenes and let it ride.

I have officially eliminated Reggie the bartender and Shep's love interest. The relationship felt forced and I justified it by the new ending I had created for the script. But with the relationship sort of wedged into the story, the ending felt false. By removing the relationship, I think I have come up with a much simpler and more realistic ending. I just have to put that down on paper now.

I had hoped to actually spend some time doing that after the rush of Christmas was over, but I caught a cold and whenever I had a few moments of down time - and few they were - I chose to crawl in bed and suffer.

What I have learned in these first 4 months of the journey, however, is that time is a precious commodity, one that I took for granted before embarking on this quest. Due to the daily blogs - well, mostly daily - I have developed a very keen sense for how little time I have. This often leads to a sense of panic that I'm not getting anything accomplished. It's a feeling I wasn't aware of prior to the start of the journey. Writing just happened when it happened. As a result, I wasn't getting very far with the career. Now there is a sense of urgency, and I feel devestated when I don't make goals. December was a bad month for goals. It's the first time I didn't even make my minimum quota of one page per day.

I'm not going to beat myself up to much over it though. I sacrificed writing time to be with my family. Because we live on opposite coasts, I don't get to see them very often. If I didn't make goals for one month to be with my loved ones, so be it. I'll just have to redouble my efforts this month to make up for it. My problem will be finding the time to make the minimum goals, let alone a doubling them. Time is definitely not my friend.