It is rare that I have too much of my creative life penciled in for far in advance – the typical cycle of a stage play is about as far as it extends, and acting almost never takes up a full day except for those rare days when I have a matinee and evening show. I think I sweated out about 8 pounds the day I had to do two performances of The Odd Couple in August in a warehouse with no air conditioning.
So we’re in an unusual period right now – one which explains why there hasn’t been much blogging. Frankly – there’s a lot of writing to do. That’s a good thing, both for professional satisfaction and the occasional Actual Check For Money. It does mean that a few more personal impulses get shuffled to the back of the line for awhile, and that long, involved blog posts don’t surface nearly so often. Actually, there hopefully will be at least one in the near future – my pants got stolen on Monday, which turned out to be…complicated, because of what was in the pants at the time.
But for now, most of my writing time through May 1st is accounted for. A few years back I was hired off Craigslist to co-write a novel. You might call it a ghost-writing scenario, except that I am going to receive full co-author credit, so I guess “proxy writing” is more accurate – it’s his world and concept, but I think he would agree that the majority of the prose and a lot of the narrative connective tissue is coming from me.
We produced about 40% of the book and then ran aground for awhile; but, just before the New Year he came back with renewed determination to see it through, and we’ve set May 1st as the deadline for a first draft. That’s totally manageable if I adopt a “punching the timeclock” mentality. Monday through Friday, I know how many words I need to get done, and so far it’s fallen very effectively into a pattern of getting done in two daily sessions – one post-breakfast and one post-lunch.
As for the third session – I have a hard deadline of April 1st to turn in a re-write of my Vegas screenplay; there are a lot of inside-baseball reasons for that and I have a “don’t jinx it” attitude regarding discussing such details in public. And I just had a long notes meeting with the director on my micro-budget thriller – he’s headed to Colombia for a few weeks and I’d like to have the new draft of that waiting for him when he returns.
That makes for a crowded March, and probably demands that I squeeze in that third writing session every workday – and if I divide between the two scripts I should get everything done on schedule.
What’s funny is – on top of all that, I often find myself compelled, on evenings when I’m being the penny-pinching shut-in I usually am, to fit in yet a fourth session after dinner, to work on something that’s more purely “mine”. William Goldman said it was essential for the screenwriter’s sanity to work on things that they felt some control over. And I’m working on some short stage pieces as well as the last short story for the collection I am still planning to publish, in addition to a more personal screenplay, in addition to oh such an endless list of somedays.
Right now, though – I’ve got priorities, and I’ve got a plan. Funny what a little structure can do for the writing life.