Day 182: Six Months into the Journey

I’ve reached the halfway point of this yearlong journey, a major milestone. On one hand, I’ve made major progress, but on the other, I thought I would be further along than this. Much further.

Part of my disappointment lies in the fact that in the first two months I was between jobs, so I had lots of opportunity to write. In November, I attempted NaNoWriMo, but starting a new gig hampered that effort. December brought the holiday break and considerable down time as I visited with family. January brought long hours at work and I struggled to find writing time. It was a big adjustment from having all the time I wanted.

February finally brought a rhythm to the madness and I accomplished a fair amount in the time I had allotted to writing. This meant staying up much later than I was accustomed to considering how early I had to get up for work. Still, I’ve settled into a routine and the pages are flowing steadily once again. I’m not sure what the exact output was for the month since a lot of it was rewriting, but I’d say I exceeded my monthly minimum.

The website, however, has suffered as a result. Putting time into script pages means there is less time for blog posts and news articles. Social media has fallen off as well. I am squeaking out every moment I have, though, reading articles on my lunch hour, making new contacts at workshops and tweeting the occasional industry development.

All in all, it’s been a good six months. I have never been as dedicated to the writing as I have thus far in the Journey. And I’ve learned a lot. But as much as I’ve gained, I sometimes feel depressed in seeing how much more there is to do, and it all hinges on time. Time is a precious commodity, and I can’t help but chastise myself that if I had started with this type of dedication long ago, I would be so much further along than I am. It is particularly amazing to me how quickly these six months have gone by. There is so much more that I would love to blog about and explain on this journey, but that would be a separate endeavor unto itself. I have to keep my focus on the goal of writing a marketable and ultimately saleable script.

I have made great strides toward that goal, but the finish line still seems rather distant.

But on the positive side, here are the achievements thus far:

228 pages written (plus blog posts) – Maintaining a minimum goal of 1 page per day, I have exceeded my goal by 46 pages to date. That’s a lot of writing! Not all of it was Come Ups, but that’s equivalent to two full screenplays worth of work.

73 Blog posts – I don’t even know how many additional pages this would add to the page count, but even if it’s only one page per post – and there are several that are considerably longer – that’s an additional 73 pages of writing, albeit not script work.

105 New Articles reposted – I have read a ton of informative articles on writing, the industry and legal considerations in the last six months and have passed them on to you. This is an education in itself.

3 ScriptTalk Interviews – I’m disappointed there haven’t been more of these. They were time consuming when I had time, but with a full time job and trying to write means I haven’t been able to follow up on this great feature the way I had hoped to.

166 Followers on Twitter – Having never played the tweet game before, I didn’t know what to expect from this. I was doing quite well early on, but time has limited my tweeting. I still managed to pick up some impressive followers though, and I will try to dedicate more time to that in the future.

Prior to Day One of the Journey, each of those categories was zero, with the exception of the writing. Even that was probably a fairly paltry number with a guesstimate of 100 pages or less for the preceding 8 months. I would say the last six months have been successful, but the goal has not yet been reached. And still the clock ticks.