My list of projects in which I am mid-draft and arguably actively engaged probably sits at about six. My list of projects I would *like* to write is at twenty-four, at last count. I do this to myself all the time.
Smaller projects – short stories, 10-minute plays, can basically pop at any moment. But a lot of my ambitions are in longer stuff; I know when I sit down to work on them, I won’t finish them while I’m sitting there. That’s the long-term commitment stuff, the stuff that is going to ask for months. I’ll push one a little bit forward, then find myself trending towards another, and push it a little bit forward, and so on.
There tends to come a moment, though, when one seems to have enough momentum and proximity to the finish line that I start focusing more exclusively. I feel like I have two of those right now – this horror screenplay and my short story collection. I have about half the first draft of the horror screenplay, but all the remaining story beats are already outlined. I just have to stop dicking around and write them. Today I reviewed a list of kill gags I brainstormed a couple of months back. I had forgot some of them. Looking at them, I think I am a crazy, sick man.
And I think one more short story (plus a medium-sized re-write on an existing one), should put me over the limit to start the process of publishing the collection. This final story won’t be an easy one, it’s sort of a thick language piece that will call for a lot of imagination, but that’s not so bad a thing to challenge myself to.
The horror script is a major strategic upgrade to my Hollywood arsenal, and a hell of a lot of fun to write – letting myself cut loose in a lot of ways. The short story is about bypassing Hollywood and just putting something that’s more purely me directly out to an audience. I’ve lamented a lot here how much I miss that sense of conversation.
I added a few pages to a long-percolating personal project over the holidays, but I think I’m getting locked into these two now. As with all my writing intentions, they are subject to drastic change without notice.