I guess I'll be needing some cheese...

... you know, to go with my WHINE from the previous post. Didn't mean to come off that way. I had had a long day, and several VERY little things contributed to a foul mood. Weird, you'd think I'd know myself well enough by now to not let things affect me so much. I KNOW I'm going to be fine in a day or two, but various things, like little comments from my division chair (comments that are totally innocent and of no cause for concern), somtimes have the power to drag down my entire day.

The thing is, the comment in question, in response to a query of mine on a minor topic, wasn't a negative thing in any major way. Perhaps not the response I was hoping for or expecting, and I don't think the tone was negative either. I still don't know why it bothered me. Maybe because I was just tired and hoping to get a different response to my e-mail.

I've been trying to polish the script I'm going to be shooting next summer, and I am SO not 'feeling' it right now. It's an offbeat comedy, and when I wrote it, originally, and as I was rewriting it over time, I was very into it and little ideas were flowing like an open tap. Now, as I need to come up with a better opening that captures the quirkiness of the main character... nothing. I haven't had a single good idea.

The reality is I just need to start writing and something will come to me, and I'll delete all the crap I just wrote, and I'll have my idea. But since the move here, life at home has not made for a great working environment. Life at hone, mind you, is still fine. No major worries, other than still trying to get the family to settle in, but I don't have a defined "working" space at home. The spare bedroom, which is supposed to become my office, has not been doing it. Rolltop desk doesn't have space for my laptop (PowerBook with 17" screen), and the old desk chair in there is now broken and uncomfortable. My last attempt to work in there was disastrous -- comepletely uncreative experience, and I was only working on a syllabus for next semester!

So now I have this phobia about the room and haven't tried to go back in there to work. My office at work is smaller and more cluttered, but somehow less claustrophobic, which is weird. Distractions abound there, but I get more done. Different type of distraction, I guess.

And all of this has made me neurotic about writing a new script sometime soon. I haven't finished a completely new, polished script in a while. We're talking more than a year or two. I've worked on projects for other people, including adapting for the screen a play I wrote in my MFA program (said adaptation was for a specific project and became a low budget indie film, which probably helped me get this job).

But as far as something new? From scratch? Hmmmm, not so much.

I've been working, on and off, on two very good ideas for a long while. One is an almost complete first draft but is VERY rough. The other I've never gotten past structure problems (but I like the idea and really want to crack it sometime).

I think I'll take up the rough first draft one next so at least I'll be closer to completion when I begin, but even that feels like a copout since it's not 'starting from scratch.' I'm starting to fear my ability to do that -- to take an idea from scratch to completion. A little silly... perhaps.