this machine will not communicate

Ugh, I've been so bad about posting and reading my flist in the past few months, which is to say, I basically have been doing neither.  I haven't been posting because I pretty much have nothing to post about - I work, and then I work, and then I write, and sometimes I do laundry and clean house.  I occasionally eat.  And it's not like I had been slacking off all year to find myself with my back against the wall come screenplay submission season; I have been writing steadily and consistently since September on the two scripts I'm submitting this year.  But this always happens anyway, and it's a particularly bad one this year.

I am really, really happy with the script I wrote this year, though.  Definitely the most polished first draft I've ever put together.  One of those where once I got the idea, the main plot was just there, ready to go.  There was some work on details and the nuts and bolts of scene building, but I didn't have to futz about with "oh how should this end" and "all right, I have a story, now what's the character arc and theme?"  So that was exciting.

I'm trying to get a revision done on a script I wrote last year; I didn't finish it in time for the first two competitions, and I'm very doubtful I'll get it done for Nicholl on May 1 (considering I'm on page 21, ahahaha).  But I should definitely have it done for AFF on June 1, and considering that's always been the competition I've done best at, that's what I'm primarily worried about.

So I'm going to start trying as best I can to catch up on like a three month backlog of flist; if you find a cascade of comments from me, that's why.  (And if you don't, that doesn't necessarily mean I didn't read, but just that I may have become overwhelmed in trying to comment on everything.)  I missssssss you guys, though.  I've felt very isolated lately, because obviously I haven't been really able to go out and do stuff with IRL friends, either.  Once a week I've been going out to eat with some friends from my writer's group, and that's kinda been my social lifeline.

(Sadly, one thing I've really, really missed is having the time to write fanfic.  I have all these stories in my head, but no time to write them down.  As soon as I'm past June 1, I'm definitely going to set aside a certain amount of time a week to write just for myself, just for fun, because whhaaaa.)

To add something of substance to this post: the first clip from the new season of Arrested Development!  I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.

Whew, I made it through the month of May.  That was the fifth May since I started doing the annual screenplay contest/festival extravaganza, and I think it may have been the most work and the most stressful.  (The very first May, my last semester in grad school, may still take the cake, though, since I was doing all of that on top of my master's thesis.  That was right before most contests switched to online entries, and I will never forget finding out the post office closed at 4:30 instead of 5:00 like I thought, and having to literally sprint across campus to get my script postmarked on time.  And since it was May in Austin, it was totally like four thousand degrees that afternoon, too.)  I continued to do revisions after getting the thing done at the beginning of the month.  Then finally got my ass in gear to do the revisions on my TV pilot, which ended up entailing a lot more work and rewriting than I had originally guessed. 

So I finished all of that Tuesday the 29th.  The last major deadline was June the 1st.  Instead of just submitting and being done with it, I decided that since I had three days, that was totally enough time to bang out a Game of Thrones spec script.  (It wasn't.)  (I did it anyway.)  Then I got to work the kick-off summer reading weekend immediately following, and got a new project on my second job, and, and, and.  Well.  Let's just say that I'm still really fucking tired, pals. 

I'm finding myself still sort of not feeling the whole internet thing right now, though.  Not sure why.  I think some of it is that I've come to associate the internet with feelings of guilt over not writing and being productive; I'm sure that will sort itself out soon.

Um.  This post is really boring.  Have some icons!

Preview:

The Orphan Queen: 28421 --> Daily Total: 915 words
The Fall: 11 pages --> Daily Total: 3 pages

I have a screenwriting contest I'm going to enter, because why not?  We were given a logline, and we're to write up to the first 15 pages of a movie based on that logline.  I'm not a huge fan of it, because (a) the only two characters are men, and (b) it's really limiting, but shit.  I can write 15 pages at least.  So I'm going to try and write the first scene of that today, and if I do, you'll see it tomorrow as Contest.

I've had this window open for ten minutes trying to think of something else to write, but I've got nothing.  I go to work, write, come home, write, watch TV, write, go to bed.  That's...pretty much it.  Sorry for being boring, yo.