No, Really

I've been busy.

Writing.

No, really.

I have been--well, this verb brings the wrong image to mind but it's the one that fits--churning through pages. Writing new scenes. Rewriting scenes. In one case, continually working on a scene until it worked much, much better. I have about 110 pages in my script (no matter what you read in the dialogue below) so far, of which approximately 100 have been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten--not tweaked, my usual mode of improving something, but an actual new-page rewrite.

Writing this script has rocked my world when it comes to accepting something I've written--I can toss 15 pages without serious emotional disturbance any more. Sure, I wish I'd written them the right way first, but if I haven't--and sometimes you can't write something right until you've done it the wrong way first--I'll just redo them.

Mind you, I've been a dyed-in-the-wool tweaker my whole life. "Throw out entire graphs? Entire sections? Pages 30 to 43 whole? Are you kidding?"

Now: "It's not working. Next."

Tomorrow I hand out (gulp) 40 pages to my classmates. They won't appreciate it, trust me: they have their own pages to write. On top of that, 40 pages from a classmate to critique? I guess I'll ask for general opinions. Do you believe this? Are you interested? Can you follow what's going on?

Today I had meetings with the members of my thesis committee. In theory, we meet with the members of the thesis committee twice: once in the fall, where we give them a general idea of what we'll be writing and they give us feedback on the story, the plot, the idea, and so on; then again in spring. I thought we were going to do the same thing again in spring. Well, some people are; here's how my first session went:

        THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER
    What page are you on?
    
        DIANE
    Uh...well, as of yesterday...about page 95.
    
        THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER
    Okay. Then best of luck to you. Anything I say 
    now is not going to be helpful, because 
    you're so far along.

He didn't want to hear the pitch. He didn't want to hear anything about it. We talked some about process and what I've gotten out of this program.

My second committee member said much the same thing as the first one: he didn't want to hear a pitch for a script that's that far along. I thanked each of them and walked out wondering why I'd come to USC that day. (I did give the second committee member a one-line encapsulation of my story, and he thought it sounded great and he was looking forward to it. Or maybe he was just looking forward to getting me the hell out of his office.)

I came home and called Len to leave a message telling him what happened--he actually answered the phone (shockingly enough) and we talked about it. (In fact, Len was kind of a Chatty Cathy doll on the phone today, talking about all sorts of things--I told Linda about it and she speculated he'd had another caffeine overdose.) He said that he was glad I told him--if, when it comes time to judge the script, one of the committee members says they don't like something in my story, Len can ask, "Why didn't you bring this up in February?" Heh.

I proceeded to play Civilization II all afternoon. I haven't even opened my script today. I need the break, take a day away from it. I'm probably two days work away (at the pace I've been going) from finishing a complete draft, and another two days away from completely rewriting Act III a couple of times. (I estimate I've been doing somewhere between 15 and 20 pages a day recently, which is a really good way to warp your mind.) Sometimes, you just gotta sit back and say, "I'm destroying your civilization, dude."

I've been so focused on this script recently I find myself thinking about it all the time--more than I think about sex even, which means I'm fairly well obsessed by this screenplay. I make trailers for it in my mind. I think of ways to describe it to people. I've cast the whole damn thing, with the exception of one role, which would be best played by...me! (Don't worry, I'm not going the Quentin Tarantino/ruin-every-movie-by-acting-in-it route.) Darin's father called recently and commented to Darin that I sounded kind of distant on the phone; Darin's first supposition was that I was working and therefore elsewhere.

All of my friends who have done the liquid diet have reported strange behavior starting about the sixth week. The week I'm in. Some wanted to change their jobs, or get new cars, or pick up expensive new hobbies. I'm wondering if the strange behavior I'm showing isn't an amazingly disciplined working ethic--if I can't be eating and noshing all the time, I might as well work. Weird.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Yesterday--don't ask me how--I worked out so hard at the gym my muscles were horribly sore all day today. Ow. Gotta work more on those triceps though.

Day before yesterday: 2 miles.

Today: nothing.

Last week I lost 2.4 pounds. This kind of bummed me out because I was not retaining water for most of that week and I thought the total would be a little higher. But I didn't do enough aerobic exercise during the week, which may explain it.

Altogether, for people who are interested, I've lost 18 pounds on this diet, 20 pounds down since my high of 165 when I returned to school in late August.