Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Sisters are doing it for themselves
Sorry the posts have been so few and far between lately. I'm still dead sick and for some reason it doesn't seem to be getting any better. I haven't slept through the night in about a week for the coughing. I've completely stopped leaving the flat, because I don't want to risk the cold and wet making it worse. Until recently, I hadn't been eating much because I didn't feel like it, seeing as I can't taste anything anymore, but then I thought maybe that was keeping me sick because my body wasn't getting enough fuel to fight the infection properly. Okay, I thought, New strategy. I will eat everything in sight just to be sure. So that's been quite nice. You may think this is a little weird because I can't taste any of it, but it's like smokers who are addicted to the act of smoking. It makes me happy to put things in my mouth.
There are too many jokes to be made about that last sentence, so I'm just going to leave it alone.
It's very likely, of course, that I've been eating all the wrong things. Something like this I usually see as an opportunity to eat a lot of chocolate and fried things and still feel like I'm doing what's best for my body. So that delusion is nice. I may have to leave the flat very soon, though, because today I actually polished off the last of my food store when I ate a whole quiche for breakfast.
As a foreign student, I'm not supposed to miss any of my lectures. It says in my handbook that if I'm going to miss a lecture I have to bring a doctor's note proving that I was too sick to make it. I find it gets easier with each passing day not to worry about the fact that I haven't been to uni in almost a week. What's the worst that could happen? I'll fail my history course, I'll go home, they won't give me credit, and it will be as if I never took the class, which is just fine with me because I never wanted to take it in the first place. Besides, I have better things to do, like WORK ON MY FEATURE-LENGTH SCREENPLAY!
Sisters By Habit is the only reason I haven't felt like a totally useless lump bumming around the flat day after day. I wrote that treatment seven months ago, and since then I'd put together an extremely detailed outline of exactly what was going to happen from beginning to end, but when it came to writing an actual script, I hit a roadblock. I didn' t have a clue where to start, or how to write dialogue that sounded anything like the way people actually talked. I came to terms with the fact that I would probably have to hand over my outline to someone who really knew what they were doing, and I would get a "story by" credit when the movie finally got made, something I remain absurdly confident will actually happen. What is wrong with me? Nobody will ever invest money in a production like this. But I'm allowed to dream.
Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is, in the last three days I've written over 65 pages of dialogue for Sisters By Habit. It started around noon on Monday, and I've been glued to my laptop ever since. If I wasn't sick, I would still have blown off lecture. It's been three of the most incredible days of my life, because even though this movie is about something as stupid as a nun going undercover as a stripper, the more I write the more surprised I am that it's actually...kind of good. It's preposterous, of course, but it is a comedy, after all.
Maybe I'm just stupid and in love with my own creation because it's the first time I've done this. It just blows my mind that I've been writing for almost 12 hours every day and ideas are still coming to me as fast as I can type them. This is what I want to do. No doubt about it.
Best part is, no Vikings involved whatsoever.
There are too many jokes to be made about that last sentence, so I'm just going to leave it alone.
It's very likely, of course, that I've been eating all the wrong things. Something like this I usually see as an opportunity to eat a lot of chocolate and fried things and still feel like I'm doing what's best for my body. So that delusion is nice. I may have to leave the flat very soon, though, because today I actually polished off the last of my food store when I ate a whole quiche for breakfast.
As a foreign student, I'm not supposed to miss any of my lectures. It says in my handbook that if I'm going to miss a lecture I have to bring a doctor's note proving that I was too sick to make it. I find it gets easier with each passing day not to worry about the fact that I haven't been to uni in almost a week. What's the worst that could happen? I'll fail my history course, I'll go home, they won't give me credit, and it will be as if I never took the class, which is just fine with me because I never wanted to take it in the first place. Besides, I have better things to do, like WORK ON MY FEATURE-LENGTH SCREENPLAY!
Sisters By Habit is the only reason I haven't felt like a totally useless lump bumming around the flat day after day. I wrote that treatment seven months ago, and since then I'd put together an extremely detailed outline of exactly what was going to happen from beginning to end, but when it came to writing an actual script, I hit a roadblock. I didn' t have a clue where to start, or how to write dialogue that sounded anything like the way people actually talked. I came to terms with the fact that I would probably have to hand over my outline to someone who really knew what they were doing, and I would get a "story by" credit when the movie finally got made, something I remain absurdly confident will actually happen. What is wrong with me? Nobody will ever invest money in a production like this. But I'm allowed to dream.
Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is, in the last three days I've written over 65 pages of dialogue for Sisters By Habit. It started around noon on Monday, and I've been glued to my laptop ever since. If I wasn't sick, I would still have blown off lecture. It's been three of the most incredible days of my life, because even though this movie is about something as stupid as a nun going undercover as a stripper, the more I write the more surprised I am that it's actually...kind of good. It's preposterous, of course, but it is a comedy, after all.
Maybe I'm just stupid and in love with my own creation because it's the first time I've done this. It just blows my mind that I've been writing for almost 12 hours every day and ideas are still coming to me as fast as I can type them. This is what I want to do. No doubt about it.
Best part is, no Vikings involved whatsoever.
