Fourteen Days

While staring into space, lost in my own world, is great for a writer. It’s not so great when the writer needs to hit submit. Another screenplay competition deadline has come up. This is for a legitimate competition, not most of those take your money and see ya kind. And I have a list of agents to submit to also (screenplays only at this time). And yet here I sit staring into space. Counterproductive doesn’t even cover it succinctly. And yes I know I just dangled a modifier. Heh.

Fourteen days until I go back to work. That is the reason for my staring into space. Fourteen days before I go to a new school in a difficult area. I am to the point where it is becoming increasingly difficult to pull myself out of my writer fugue and into anything else. When I get into that writer-state I disdain leaving it for anything, even food. And yet I must. I must pay the bills. I must pay the rent. I must put food on the table, because it is required and expected of me. My family cheers me on to be a writer and my heart yearns to be a full time writer, but I’m not there yet, so I stare into space, daydreaming about my character’s world while I occupy my own.

Fourteen days. I’m mourning the shortness of my summer break. I can’t call it vacation because I didn’t go on a vacation this year. All my free time when not devoted to family is spent on my writing. I live the writer’s life in carved out niches of time.

Fourteen days is time to get much accomplished. So I will pull out my daily planner and write down my objectives for this week. The biggest project I have is the revision of my first novel. The good news is that I know the areas it needs improvement. I had a chance to practice on it twice during my mfa residence and wow! The change was enormous. I eagerly look forward to revising it because I love my first novel. Fantasy is in my lifeblood, and it is apparent in my first novel, and my third, and several of my screenplays.

Fourteen days is not enough time to do a revision of a 300 plus page novel, (for a first time novelist), but it is enough time to get the framework of it going, to get this script out to the competition, to also send it to agents, to crank out 10 pages on my end of the world script (finally into act 2), to get reading done for my mfa, to clean up the POV in my third novel (basically pick one and stick with it), to dream impossible dreams and watch them become reality.

Fourteen days? Watch my fire.