Things are moving a tad more quickly lately.

It started when I realized that a) my “do one assignment a night” strategy was not going to keep up with my workload this week and b) I will have less time than usual because of various social activities over the weekend. This is causing me to freak out a little.

As a result, I am going to try to do as many of the harder seeming assignments as I can tonight to try to get ahead of the game.

One of them is going to be the beat sheet for my feature film, and I am not looking forward to that, because I know how my movie starts and I know how it ends, but the middle is wide open. I know I want my heroine to need to visit various social groups in her high school in order to solve the mystery of the battered bully, and that as she does so she will get further and further from her comfort zone (and learn more and more about how people judge people by reputation and end up hating the people everyone else hates without any direct evidence) until she reaches the home of the kid everyone thinks did it, where she will confront him, the nature of prejudice, the fact that some people have lives radically different than her own, and the fact that the things “everyone knows” can’t always be trust.

But plotting that out beat by beat will be tough. As you may have deduced a “beat” in this context means a single “thing” that happens in the movie.

Like a beat sheet for Star Wars might go like this :
1. Two droids escape to Tatooine with valuable information
2. Luke Skywalker lives with his aunt and uncle who raised him, and hates it there
3. Luke Skywalker buys a pair of droids
4. Luke Skywalker goes to see the mysterious Ben Kenobi
5. Luke learns Darth Vader killed his father
6. Luke returns to find the Empire has killed the aunt and uncle that raised him

And so forth and so on.

The standard formula for a film following the Three Act Structure formula is seven beats for the first act, fourteen for the second act, and five for the third. That’s because the middle act is where most of the action takes place. The first act is setup and the third act is the conclusion. The middle act is where everything else happens.

And this will be the first one of those I have ever written. They are, by all accounts, the toughest part of screenwriting. Beginnings and conclusions are easy. Middles are hard.

And yet, if you went straight from setup to conclusion, the movie would be extremely unsatisfying.

ACT 1 – The Beginning
Hero : You killed my master! HE WILL BE AVENGED!
(fade to black)

(fade in from black)
ACT 3 – The Final Battkle
Hero : Wow, what an amazing adventure!

You would want your money back pronto, plus punitive damages, I would think.

Today was decent. It was a relief to find out that I didn’t have homework in either of the classes I took today, Feature Development and Writing for Animation. It soothed my entirely justifiable paranoia about missing things, and means that I am now, as far as I know, completely up to date in my little calendar app.

I did my Feature Development time last week, so today, it was all about feedback on other people’s movies. I felt a little impatient but for the most part, I like workshopping. I’ve never been in a situation before where I could contribute as part of a team. It’s taking some adjusting to get into the groove of it and I am still not all the way there. My incredibly strong urge to talk has to be kept in check and I have to learn to view my contributions as mere possibilities and not worry about how well they go over or whether my suggestions are followed or not.

I’m just one node of the group mind, and together, we makes people’s movies better.

Like I have said many times before in this space, I have a huge problem with letting my identity be subsumed into a group identity. It actually makes me feel like I will die. As if my identity is so fragile that any participation in group identity will completely overwrite it.

Maybe in the past – I have gone through some very dark times – but not now. I don’t need to identify with my own solitude any more. I know that part of me is still that scared little animal, filled with fear and anger and ready to gut the first motherfucker who comes too close. Like a cornered rat.

And that’s the part of me with whom I must negotiate if I want to get closer to others. And it might be a long time before I can talk it out of its tree and get it where I can give it the love and safety it needs so badly. I want to be able to rescue it, but at the moment, I don’t know how.

I guess I will have to feel my way through it.

Today, I relaxed somewhat at lunch, and you know what? Things went way better. I spoke without thinking, or rather without the twenty step verification process that usually has to complete before I feel like it safe to say what it on my mind. And nothing bad happened! In fact, it turns out that I am even funnier and way less socially weird when I just calm the fuck down, stop trying to control outcomes with the power of my mind, and let things flow naturally.

I will try to take this lesson to heart and learn it deeply. It goes against an enormous percentage of that I have thought about the world for a long time, so it might not take.

But the truth is, I want to grow up. I want to get over my mental blocks. I want to become a real little boy.

I want to be alive, instead a member of the walking dead.

I need to resurrect myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.