it's right next to the analyst's pentagram.
The quote of the day:
Prosecutors had maintained that the immunity that they had granted meant only that they could not tell a jury that they had received the documents from Hubbell.
Running news:
A day off. I'm a little sore from yesterday's mileage.
I am not yet sanguine about criticism. Note the yet--I'm trying really hard. Honest. I am open to the good intentions behind the criticisms, I acknowledge that my work is flawed and can be improved. I desire to be the very best screenwriter that I can be. I want to sell my scripts, not just get a pat on the back.
I also want my Mommy.
I don't want the people who gave me feedback today--that would be Pooks (hi!) and Darin--to think that I don't want to hear what they have to say. I do. Right now, this is Diane's fear speaking. (Hi there.) Fear that I'm not seeing the flaws in my work. Fear that I'm just not getting it. Fear, of course, that I will never get it, that I'll be one of these people with 28 scripts in the closet that I never send out to anyone.
(Now, to be perfectly frank with y'all, both Pooks and Darin prefaced their comments by saying that they really, really liked the script. Darin only started giving me a few story questions that he had when I started pressing him, so any damage suffered is purely my fault. And the notes Pooks gave me were very specific as to the problems--not "Your story sucks and by the way you don't know how to use punctuation" but "The character of the father is not well used and could be improved in this way.")
I have a pushme-pullyou thing going on inside. (That's a tip o' the hat to the original Hugh Lofting Dr. Dolittle stories, when they were still intelligible and fun.)
- I want to take immediate advantage of my status as a USC graduate--"Read me! Read me!" I want to spread my work out o'er the Industry, get tons of reads, and start getting feedback.
- I also want to wait and keep tweaking the scripts until they're totally perfect, so no one could possibly reject them for any reason inherent in the script themselves.
Now that I've spent the last 3 years getting to this place--1 at De Anza, 2 at USC--I'm wondering if I'm going to fish, cut bait, or even get in the damn boat. Darin has been intensely supportive--you might even say, "Indulgent," and I wouldn't contradict you--and I'm terrified that it's for naught. 'Cause I'm never going to step outside and take the slap in the face. Or the multiple slaps: this is a business based on rejection.
I'm not real good at rejection, have I ever told you that?
Okay...have I ever told you why?
Pretty much because I've succeeded at everything I've ever tried.
You'd think that would make me confident, or even overconfident. No, this leads me into being a nervous wreck. Don't send in your theories as to why this is--I spent years in therapy trying to find out and the best answer I've ever come up with is my childhood devotion to Catholicism and an internalization of the maxim that "Pride goeth before a fall."
I tell people about my life and some of the stuff I've done and they give me this look as if to say, So what's your problem?
- I got into Stanford when I'd applied for the hell of it. I wasn't even aware that it was a good school. I really wanted to go to Yale...the only school that outright rejected me. I got accepted everywhere else (Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia).
- I did get rejected when I applied to Stanford's graduate computer science program. I got a really terrible job at a startup in Palo Alto and got fired on my 21st birthday. That was okay: 3 weeks later I was working at Apple Computer.
- I decided in 1990 that I was tired of having bad relationships that left me feeling icky, so I wasn't going to date until I found a guy who would treat me well. I dated a nice guy for a year, and when our individual desires for the future clashed, in walked Darin.
- I wrote a short story and submitted it to one place. It got published; I made $400. Another story made the short list for an anthology but got rejected at the last moment. I've never submitted another story anywhere.
- I got into USC, which I really wanted to attend, and got rejected from UCLA, which didn't bother me because the place seemed to me to be like a bus station.
I've always had a sneaking suspicion that "Everything works out for the best," making me sound like a crazy Leibniz wannabe. But deep down, until that good thing happens, I'm always afraid that it's not going to happen this time. Then it happens and I think, "Wow, that's really good. But just think of what could happen next time..."
I sometimes think that I overanalyze things. But maybe I don't. Well, I'll have to think about this a little more.
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Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com