I just can’t win.

Today, I wore my jacket – my thick black leather jacket – to school. And it kept me warm in the morning.

But then afternoon rolls around and it’s sunny and hot and I am sweltering. When I came home from school today at around 1:30 pm, I felt like I was being broiled alive. So right now, I feel like the next time I am going to school in the morning, I will probably skip taking the jacket entirely.

And thus, freeze my ass off in the morning. Sigh.

Oh well. Today’s class was awesome. We workshopped that beat sheet from my movie, and I got a lot of highly valuable feedback. Feedback that I am going to apply ASAP. And that… is going to be a heck of a lot of work.

That’s no surprise. After all, it’s my first beat sheet ever and it’s for my first feature film ever. It was highly unlikely that I would get it right the first time. And every screenwriter working in the industry goes through many drafts before they are done.

In fact, one of the bits of advice we’ve been given about The Biz is that all drafts are first drafts until someone buys them. That way, you can get them to pay you for the second draft, the third draft, final script, the shooting script, and so forth.

But this is still very new to me. I am, as faithful readers know, the sort of person who writes it, posts it, and forgets it. Which is fine for a blog like this one where it’s mostly just a way to express what is in my head that day and so it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect or not.

But obviously that’s not the way anything else works. If I want to be a working TV writer, I am going to have to acclimatize myself to rewrite after rewrite. No more fire and forget – now it’s hold and perfect. Which is new.

I think I can do it, though, as long as there’s someone else in the loop acting as editor. I can do a draft, hand it in to the head writer, have him or her order a bunch of changes, and go do them. That won’t be too harsh an adjustment for me.

It’s perfecting it on my own that I can’t do. I have to fire and forget because if I stay with it, all my belief that it is any good will disappear, and I will hate it and want it destroyed and hate myself. I am just that emotionally unstable.

But at least I am not so arrogant as to think every word I write is unalloyed perfection and to change it would be like pissing on the Mona Lisa. I know it’s far from perfect, and that “less than perfect” is not the same thing as “so devoid of merit that all who gaze upon it are struck blind”. Even the best writers in the world don’t get it right the first time.

I’m just glad my chosen profession doesn’t require perfection on the first shot. Sure, I have to make it good enough to show to the head writer (or whoever), but I don’t have to deliver polished perfection straight out of the gate.

And I need that kind of margin for error.

I have another skit to write, like I said yesterday. No idea for that “memorable comic character” yet. If I can’t think of anything better, I will default to writing a skit based around what will clearly be a self-insertion character to anyone who knows me. Something a lot like my Fruvous persona, but with the smartass factor dialed way up.

Creating a smartass character is always a big risk. One wrong word and the audience will turn on the smartass and then you are dead in the water. So I will have to make sure that my smartass is both doing it for a good reason and doing it to a very deserving target, punching WAY up. And make sure none of the smartass remarks come across as cruel or abusive.

But if anyone can writer a lovable smartass, it’s me. I’ve been playing one for years.

Or maybe I will go a very different route and create a comic character who is someone old enough to just not give a shit any more and therefore says exactly what is on their mind. And not in a crude way. I picture an elegant lady who is asked to be on some kind of program to comment on something harmless like gardening and uses the opportunity to speak her mind on a variety of topics in a dead on accurate and hilariously dry manner.

Maybe she’s even offered her own show at the end. Could be a fun character to write and even more fun to play.

here it is, middle of July, and I am still trying to figure out how to spend the $50 Indigo.ca gift certificate my sister gave me for my birthday… in May.

What can I say, I’m a victim of option paralysis, as usual. Too many possibilities. I am probably going to buy a PC game of some sort, but which one? Bioshock Infinite? It has AMAZING reviews but it’s three years old now and I was hoping to get a game other people are playing right now, for a change. The latest Heroes of Might and Magic? Indigo doesn’t have it. Ditto the new Master of Orion, but that is probably because it isn’t done yet.

And it seems like it’s only going to be a “collector’s edition” of the first three games anyhow. Would be nice to play them with souped up sound and graphics, but still. Lame!

Or I could try to figure out a more practical gift, something that would help me at school. But what might that be? Writing does not lend itself to technological enhancement. I could get some new Bluetooth headphones, but all the ones on Indigo are the super expensive “beats by Dre” kind and fuck paying $250 for headphones.

Oh well. I am sure I will figure it out eventually.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.