If you saw a “no homework tonight” post for today, rest assured, it was merely an illusion!

I had planned to get into doing that fourth draft of my pilot for my instructor Thiemme tonight. But when I found the notes I made last class, they didn’t make any sense to me.

I was having a bad note-taking day and the notes were coming too fast and I lacked the assertiveness to tell people to slow the heck down.

And these are the notes I am supposed to integrate into the new draft. So I am kind of inside the brined gherkin right now.

Translation ; I’m in a pickle. But I am sure you already knew that.

The other bit of homework that I need to git done is that I have to generate notes for tomorrow’s TV Pilot 3 class. That will probably take what remains of the evening after I am done blogging. And me with a brand new video game to play.

Oh well. It will have to wait. Maybe I will play it a little before breakfast tomorrow.

If not… oh well. It can wait.

After all, it’s just some goddamned video game.

It’s hard to wrap my brain around the entire concept of school ending soon. I am on week 5 of 8 in the term. That means I am over halfway through Term 6 out of 6. I am basically on Term 5.5 right now.

VFS is what I have been doing for almost a year of my life. Not having that as the focus to my life is going to be weird. From experience, I have learned that time off only feels like time off for around four days.

After that, it’s either action or ennui. I have chosen ennui for a long time, and quite frankly, I am sick of it. I need to hammer it through my thick skull that there is a cure for feeling lost and adrift, and it’s called actually getting shit done.

So I see my post-VFS life as being one of great creative output as I harness the spirit of play to all my creative outlets and even to ones I have never tried before, or even heard of.

All true art is play on some level. The fingerpainting child is not thinking of anything other than pleasing themselves in the moment with what they are making.

The play cycle is simple :

1. Discovery : the child discovers that a certain manipulation of objects produces an effect which pleases them
2. Repetition : the child repeats said manipulation in order to enjoy it again, and to make sure they know what did it. When that pales, you get…
3. Variation : the child varies the manipulation in search of other pleasing effects

And when you think about it, that’s all art is. We creators discover things (or are inspired, same thing) and try them out, and if we like the result, we repeat it to make sure we know how to do it and what,. exactly, was the part that produced the effect. Then we engage in the generation of variations we call “creativity”.

I think that’s why there is always a sort of childlike quality to great artists. The truly great art comes from people who retain their childlike curiosity and sense of fun even when they are creating serious art. They are still exploring to find those pleasing effects, mastering that which pleases them, and then looking for other pleasing variations.

Had therapy today. Not a great session, or at least, not that good compared to the truly excellent one I had last week. What I was trying to avoid happened anyway : I ended up caught up in talking about trivial details of my current life instead of doing the kind of deep dive into my traumatic past that produce real, tangible changes in how I feel.

I don’t blame my therapist. I tend to lead the sessions the way a big dog “leads” its owner at the end of the leash. Often my therapist is struggling to keep up.

It’s one of those little things that suck about being a genius. Even highly intelligent and educated people have a hard time keeping up with your thought processes. What I wouldn’t give for a therapist who can operate at my speed all the time.

But then again, that’s always been my problem, hasn’t it? I was smarter than most adults by the time I left elementary school. That is probably why I had no fear of adults at all. I knew I could out-think them. That made it impossible for them to exert true authority with me. I was too goddamned smart for my own good.

Part of me still longs for someone above me. Someone who can challenge me, give me some pushback, show me where the limits are, and teach me the lessons that no amount of IQ or education can teach.

Someone who can be a goddamned role model for me. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be smarter than me. But it does mean they have to give me the impression that they have it together better than me and that they know how to live their life in a balanced and socially integrated way.

I’ve not had those people around me much, maybe not ever. Maybe the sort of person I am talking about doesn’t exist. Or they do exist, but I don’t see them because I am so good at seeing through people that sometimes I don’t see them at all.

Wow, that’s kind of deep. I will have to remember that one.

So maybe, due to my gifts and my messed up mind, there is nobody alive… maybe even nobody at all, even in theory… that could be an authority over me.

The problem with that, though, is that the lack of said kind of person have left some rather large empty spaces in me, and as of this moment I don’t know how to bypass those spaces so that they stop blocking my growth.

I dunno. I’m a writer, maybe I should write myself an authority figure. Someone with a strong will, a strong mind, and a strong personality. Someone who is not impressed or awed by my mental acrobatics but is, instead, interested in helping me grow the hell up

(EDITOR’S NOTE : The following is a fannish discussion of modern box office and television trends. As such, it may seem innocuous, even harmless. But within this work there is a very harsh truth. Consider yourself forewarned. ) \

We live in an era of creative cul-de-sac. At least half of the movies and a third of television series are based on properties that the public already knows. Whether it’s based on a comic book, a novel, a TV show, a movie franchise, or even a video game, the odds are good that you, the audience, will not have to deal with anything original and hence unfamiliar. You can just relax and watch whatever has warm memories attached.

But those memories shouldn’t be too sharp, because then you will notice all the ways that the new version is appallingly different from the thing you love and you will go away from it at the very least disappointed but more likely in a rage over how insulted you feel by the pathetic piece of garbage they have dressed up to be superficially similar to the thing you love and cherish.

It is as though they are saying, “You love your mother, right? Well here is a giant sack of dog crap with a picture of her face stapled to it! Don’t you love it?”/

I am not immune. I have felt that rage. One of the defining characteristics of a nerd like myself as opposed to other species of intellectual is that we are very open about how deeply we connect with certain media properties. There is little room in fannish culture for casual indifference or even mild interest.

To be a nerd is to care.

But I have come to recognize the futility of such rage because I have come to recognize the futility of the entire endeavour. From the fannish perspective, there is absolutely no reason to ever reboot a media property.

Why? Because it is literally impossible for them to “get it right”.

For one thing, we nerds have extremely high definition memories that love to absorb all possible aspects of the things we love.

This means that that details the filmmaker would have to get “right” is absolutely staggering. This stacks the deck against them before they even start.

Then there is the fact that movies are not made to please audiences, they are made to make money. The fact that those two thing overlap a fair bit is the whole reason the entertainment media exists in the first place. It’s called show business and not show art for a reason. Whatever else a movie is, it’s an investment.

And if it was your money on the line, you would want to make sure that the movie makes as much money as it possibly can, and that means making it appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

And nerds are a rather small minority of the population. We are a subset of another minority, intellectuals, and as such are a minority of a a minority. There are just not that many of us relative to population.

That means that it simply isn’t worth it to make movies or television shows that appeal only to nerds. You can’t turn a profit on a population that small that is spread so thin. Sure, there are millions of us all over the world, and the Internet brings us together like never before, but we are still a tiny diffuse minority.

Not only that, we are incredibly hard to please, and the media companies know this. They know that no matter what they do to appeal to the hardcore fans, they will get hundreds of fans violently rejecting what they do and flying into a rage that seems insane from a mundane point of view. And these people will call you and your company horrible things (like childhood rapist) and act like you should be on trial for crimes against humanity.

So why even try?

But the real reason reboots are futile is that, for us nerds, they are doomed to failure because what we really want is to recapture the good feeling we had when we discovered this media property, and that is completely impossible.

Time doesn’t work that way. No rebooted project can take you back to those happy days when you were young and fresh and the world was full of exciting possibilities. Nothing you experience now, as a more experienced and jaded adult, can ever be as good as your memories of your favorite thing.

And that leads to that harsh truth of which I warned you :

The thing you love is never, ever, ever going to come back. Ever. It won’t because it can’t. It’s impossible. You are a different person than you were when you discovered it, and that means that even if they “got it right” on every single detail you can think of, it still would not please you because it still wouldn’t be the same.

Stop demanding the impossible and simply close the book on all thought of a return to the days of yore when every single movie or episode (or book, or issue, or…) was a joy to discover. Enjoy your memories instead, and if they need refreshing, go to your treasured collection of your chosen property and its merchandise, and accept the fact that, as you define them, there will never be :

Another episode of your favorite show
Another movie in your favorite franchise
Another book in your favourite series..

And so for and so on. The rule is simple : if it has stopped, it is dead. Period. Nobody can bring it back to life to your satisfaction. It will never happen. I

The best you can hope for is a new thing based on the thing you love that will partially please you. But that can only happen if you accept the truth that the thing you love is never, ever, ever going to come back.

The past has passed. It is gone forever, with no possibility of return.

It’s time to face forward and find new things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Today has been rough so far. That’s because of the bad sleep.

You know what I’m talking about.. The dream-packed sleep where I wake up sweaty and disoriented and feeling like I have been running a marathon underwater. The tortured sleep that leaves me drained instead of refreshed. The sleep that wears me out and leaves me so tired that, despite how bad the previous sleep was, I need to sleep even more.

That’s where I am now. I have slept for around nine hours so far, and yet, I really want to crawl back into bed and sleep even more.

It’s almost like an addiction.

But I have things to do, and so I must resist. At the very least, I have to get my blogging done. That’s non-negotiable. If I have the strength, I want to finish my DDD as well. I have two categories left to do : Weapons and Gadgets, and Locations.

Locations will require some (gasp!) research. I have set my game on the island of Manhattan, which in the game is practically a ghost town with only 67,000 residents. It’s also the seat of power for the Christian Fascist government that are the bad guys of my game. And seeing as I am using a real place as my setting, and I insist upon accuracy in that kind of thing, that means I will have to study a map of Manhattan and get an idea of where my adventure will take my protagonist.

This is why I normally make everything up. You don’t have to research make-believe places and things. They are exactly how you say they are. All you have to worry about is making sure everything is internally consistent.

But my game is about a worst-case nightmare America, and as that happens to be a real place, I have to get it right. And it has to be someplace iconic because my game has very strong political underpinnings and that requires equally strong symbols.

The other possibility is setting it in Washington, DC. There are plenty of iconic monuments there. And it has the sort of privilege versus poverty thing going on that I want for my game. But I dunno… seems a little too on the nose for me.

Plus I really want to explore just how eerie a ghost town version of Manhattan could be. Vast apartment complexes with nobody living in them. Silent streets with no cars and no people, just the sound of the wind. Piles of rubble where there used to be homes. Everything left to rot and decay.

Urban decay is a powerful symbol. It both frightens and soothes us. It frightens our civilized side, which knows how important it is that people remain civilized and just how dependent we are on modern society, and how horrible it would be if it all fell apart.

But it’s soothing to our untamed side because it shows nature triumphing over the artificial constructs of humanity. There is a part of us, buried deep, that rebels against the thousand tiny suppressions of modern life, and when we see the natural world win over it, it makes this side of us very happy.

Finally, this side of us say, things are getting back to normal.

So I would like to get that done. It’s not due till Wednesday, and to be honest, the full thing isn’t due for two weeks after that, but I have the damned thing nearly done and once I am finished with it, I I can move on to other assignments.

For one thing, I have a buttload of work to do for Career Launch class. None of it is due till the very last class, technically, but I want to be able to submit it to Kat ASAP so she can tell me what I have done wrong.

This is important stuff that will represent me in the future, when I am looking for work. I want to get it as close to perfect as I can.

Plus I have a rewrite of my pilot and second episodes to do, and of course notes to generate on my classmates’ stuff.

I am always dissatisfied with my notes. I am always pointing out small language and logic issues when my classmates are talking about the deeper and more important issues. It makes me feel like my notes just plain suck.

I think the problem is that I read their work and make notes at the same time. And that means I only notice the small stuff because I don’t have the big picture yet. If I was more energetic, I would read the whole thing once, then do something else while I am processing it, then read it again while making notes.

Oh well, I can only try harder in the future.

It feels like graduation is coming on like an out of control freight train. This upcoming week will be Week 5 of 8 in the term. Imagine that. I am beginning to worry about the nitty gritty issues of what my life will be like after I graduate. The whole notion of it freaks me out sometimes because it looms so large in my mind. And there are so many possibilities.

I worry that I will sink back into the depressed state I was in before I went to Kwantlen without some external source of structure. I have plenty of ideas on how I will stay busy even after graduation, but ideas alone won’t keep me out of the doldrums.

There were always tons of things I could have been doing in the pre-Kwantlen years. I didn’t do any of them. All I did was play video games and chat online and surf the Web and read. For twenty fucking years, that was my entire life.

The worst illnesses are the ones that keep you from seeking treatment. Depression was that kind of illness for me. I was too timid and passive and unmotivated to demand the kind of therapy I needed for a very long time.

Hell, for a big chunk of that time, I didn’t even know I was sick in a way that could be treated. I just knew there was something terribly wrong with me.

But at least now I have gone quite a long ways down the road to recovery. I am hoping that the sort of life I led before Kwantlen will now leave me bored, frustrated, and dissatisfied with my life.

It will be up to be to act on and thus reinforce those feelings instead of doing what I did before, which was to passively wait for the feelings to go away.

Once I graduate I will be in a state of constant peril.

It will do me good to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

I have had such fun today.

See, today, my task was to do a first draft of the detailed design document I am writing for my Writing For Video Games 2 course.

A DDD is basically a blueprint for the game from the writer’s point of view. A full one would include every script in the game, but we don’t have to go that deep.

Instead, I got to create the characters, setting, story, and everything else. And that kind of detailed creation is something I love to do.

So I spent four and a half hours pouring myself into the thing. And I was in deep. I wasn’t doing anything but writing. I wasn’t even listening to music.

When I am really deep into writing, even music is an annoying distraction.

That’s the joy of being a deep focus person rather than a multitasker. We deep focus types can get thoroughly absorbed in what we are doing. To a fault, sometimes. I would hate there to be a fire when I was in The Zone, because I might not notice until I am physically being consumed by fire.

For a multitasker to achieve that state, I assume they would have to have their optimal number of plates in the air. When their task space is full, then they feel peace.

It all sounds like too much work for me. Then again, to some, writing for four and a half hours and creating a six page document (which is not yet complete) would be way too much work for them.

Well, the only difference between work and play is whether or not you want to do it. And that has a lot to do with whether or not you find it personally rewarding.

I found doing all that writing to be personally rewarding as hell.

In fact, it was hard to pull myself away from it. That’s how deep I got. It was like it had a magnetic grip on me and I had to overcome that magnetic force to pull myself out of the hole I had fallen into.

Like I had been digging for so long that I couldn’t get out of the hole I had dug.

In fact, I didn’t really escape. I just reached the point where I ran out of stuff that was, as it were, pre-written in my head. That’s how my creativity works. I get an idea and a whole bunch of other ideas crystallize from that starting point.

I like to think that this is what keeps my writing logically coherent. Or at least plausible. If one thing didn’t connect to the other, how did I come up with it in the first place?

Anyhoo, eventually I ran out of gas, and stopped writing. Only then was I able to order some Chinese food, and I pointedly did not do any writing while waiting for it to come.

Instead, I tried a new CCG style game I downloaded called Star Crusade. Verdict : it contains nothing that you do not find in lots of other games. But I don’t demand that my CCG games be original,,just that they be fun to play.

Plus, the fact that it is sci fi themed and not fantasy themed is such a welcome and refreshing change. I am so sick of endlessly rehashing Tolkien! At least science fiction tries to be original.

Oh, and the makers of the game, or at least their voice actors, have a cheeky sense of humour and are not above stealing from sci fi properties. Like, there’s a Heavy Gravity Ship card and when you play it, it says “I have a strong effect on mass!”.

That’s a reference to the Mass Effect series.

And when you play a Terminator, it says “Come with me if you want to live. ”

Cute. So I can see me playing that for a while.

Which is good, because I beat the game I had been playing, Dishonored. Fun game. You get to be a deadly assassin going up against the bastards that killed your beloved Empress, kidnapped the heir (a 12 year old girl it was your job to protect), and then framed you for the crime.

And you do it. But then you are betrayed by the group of loyalists that had been supporting you, and then you have to hunt them down and kill their sorry asses.

Still, they had something I enjoyed very much in the first half of the game : when you finally get close to the Lord Regent (head bastard of those who framed you), you have two choice : either kill the motherfucker outright, OR send his recorded confession out to the whole island kingdom, resulting in him being arrested, thrown in jail, and loathed.

I of course chose the latter. Not out of mercy, though. Quite the opposite.

If I had killed him, his suffering would have been brief. But by ruining him instead, I ensured that he would suffer for the rest of his natural life.

That’s what you get for fucking with me.

And I totally saw being betrayed coming. From the third mission with the loyalists onwards I was looking at them and thinking “I wonder when they are going to decide I have outliced my usefulness and must be killed so I can never tell anyone what they have done.”

See, the loyalists were led by an aristocrat and a retired general. Both people way, way above a hired killer like me. And I make a policy to never, ever trust anyone who is more powerful than me.

Because we the lowly are not people to them, and therefore they have no qualms about lying to you to get you to do what they want then throwing you away like a used diaper the minute you become a liability.

Even otherwise good people can’t help but feel like those of a lower social status are not real people. Just props so they can show off what good people they are.

So yeah. I knew they would betray me. But I had to watch my character accept a drink from those bastards while saying “Don’t drink it! It’s poisoned. ”

And I was right.

Anyhow, it has been a productive day, but I think I may have overdone it because I now have a splitting headache and I feel sort of dazed and dumb.

So if you don’t mind, I am going to go take an Aleve and lay down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Had a low blood sugar incident today.

Let me set the scene. During a break in the morning class (Adaptation), I am reminded that my scene in the sitcom episode we are writing in Writer’s Room class was due today,. not Monday as I had thought.

D’oh! I had made the same stupid mistake that I had made a dozen times before : thinking an assignment is due the day of class when I should know that it’s always due two or three days earlier in order to give people time to read it and generate notes.

I had only one chance to save myself from disaster : skip lunch to work on the damned thing and minimize lateness.

Fortunately, I speak sitcom, so I was able to do this. Also fortunately, Adaptation ended half an hour early. That gave me an hour and a half to save my bacon.

And I needed to save it. This was what I had always dreamed of : writing for a sitcom! I could not fail at this. I wanted to prove that I am good at this kind of writing.

And I am. I think my scene is quite good, if I do say so myself. And it was a joy to write. There was some highly stressful bullshit with the software and formatting and such, but other than that, I loved it.

Just think, I got to write part of an episode of a Normal Lear show! Kinda!

I finished my scene with only ten minutes till next class (though I was fully prepared to be late for it if it was necessary). Victory! I had just enough time to get the printing done for class. And I was being workshopped today! Yay!

Well, okay. technically it was my writing being workshopped, not me. But for any good writer, those are basically the same thing.

And there was more bullshit because the printer ran out of paper in between printing my third and my fourth episodes. So I had to go get Steve. Then my print job still would not print. or so I thought, and I was beginning to panic.

Then I looked at the print jobs piled atop the printer and lo and behold, mine was there. I hadn’t seen it the first time I looked because by some bizarre fluke, it had printed the damned thing sideways, aka landscape style. So it looked totally wrong.

Luckily, I only really needed to make notes on it, so it doesn’t matter if it’s readable.

Still, some days it really feels like the universe has it out for me. I know it doesn’t, of course, because it is not a sentient entity and therefore cannot have emotion or intent.

But I am a mere human being and subject to the same mix of instincts and intellect as anyone else, and therefore I can’t help feeling that way sometimes.

Anyhow, so after more or less two hours of solid stress, I was able to relax in class. And everything went fine for a while. I completely forgot about the skipping lunch thing. I went on my merry way.

If I had thought about it, I would have seen the mess I was in. Not only had I skipped a meal, but instead of the meal I had worked quite hard. Writing is tough work and it takes a lot of brain calories to do.

If I had realized this, I could have gone down to the basement on break and gotten myself something from one of the vending machines there to keep me out of the Valley of Death.

But nope. I was clueless as always.

So the fuse was lit. And the bomb went off around 3:15 pm. There I was in class, minding my own business, when I felt the sudden sickening lurch that my blood sugar level has dropped to a critical level and that I am now basically running on fumes.

I was in the Danger Zone, and not the funny Kenny Loggins kind.

So I waited till end of class, just barely there. I call it the Valley of Death because it really does feel like I am dying.

And I am.

By the time class ended, my whole body was tingling as my suddenly starving muscles cried out for fuel. I carefully walked to Bon Chaz, got my food, and ate.

In a little while, I felt much better. Still not totally okay, but better.

And the whole incident makes me wonder about what kind of fucked up life I lead. I was within spitting distance of death’s door today. I am still feeling the effects of that. I am both very tired and very physically anxious.

Tired and wired. My least favorite mental state. It’s hellish.

But the real story is how casually I treat these kinds of experiences. It’s like I manage to save my sorry ass by going into emergency mode, where I am outwardly calm but inside I am kind of giddy and fucked up from the warring brain chemicals in my mind. But I am able to carefully pilot myself out of danger, whether it’s low blood sugar or that time I wiped out on my bike on a very busy street in my hometown.

Granville street. Doesn’t every town have a Granville Street? Makes me wonder who the heck this Granville guy was.

Anyhow, apparently I live the kind of life where nearly dying is treated like an “oopsy” and forgotten soon after it happens. You would think it would be more of an event, but you would be wrong. After all, I’m fine now, so what’s the big deal?

Oh, and the cherry on the cake? End of class, my teacher offered to buy a round of drinks for the class at a local bar called Jeager’s. And I had to beg off.

And that is exactly the kind of anti-social bullshit I have been trying to avoid. If I want to make it in entertainment – and I do – I will have to foster relationships with other people in the biz. That means I can’t afford to be anti-social. There is no way to become a TV writer and stay an anti-social hermit.

Today I had to miss a lovely chance to bond with my classmates and my teacher in an informal manner. And I hate that.

Granted, I missed it because I had to go eat or I’d die. But still.

I am going to have to change a lot fo things about myself to make it in show biz, and one of the biggest things is kicking my social anxiety to the curb and forcing myself to get good at things like networking and socializing and fitting in.

I haven’t done a great job of that at VFS. But at least my fellow students know I am a very funny writer. That might get me a recommendation from someone some day.

I don’t know what my teachers think of me. If I was them, I would have no choice but to think I am very talented but unreliable.

And people like that don’t get recommendations to people.

They get warned about.

Oh well. At least I am a much better writer now.

That has to be worth $20K, right?

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow, homework permitting.

Yesterday was amazing.

Let me set the stage : Due to poor forward planning, I ended up having a LOT of work to do on Monday and Tuesday.

Monday, I had to do rewrites on the first two episodes of my show, Sam.

For those of you who have lost track, I do two episodes for every one episode of everyone else’s shows because my show is only 11 minutes long.

So I gathered up all my notes for both eps and read them, thought about them, then set about my work.

I am getting way better about rewriting things and other forms of editing now that my medication increase has burned off a lot of the mental fog I was in (without knowing it) for most of my VFS history.

Hopefully, I will make a really good last impression.

So while I didn’t exactly enjoy making all the changes to my first episode, I didn’t hate it either. And it was a lot of work because it was a lot of changes.

But I got it done, son. I will never be the sort of person who says “yay, rewrites!”,  at least not for my own stuff, but I can do it.

So that was Monday afternoon, after Writing Room class. Monday night I did the rewrite for my second episode. There were surprisingly few notes on it, so it was a shorter rewrite, but it still took me three hours.

Tuesday would make that seem like kids’ stuff.

See, I thought Tuesday would be like Monday. I would rewrite my third and fourth episode then play video games for a while. But when I sat down to do so, I soon realized that it would be impossible to rewrite them because I hadn’t actually written them yet.

I had forgotten that we only got as far as the outlines for the episodes last term. And you know what that means for me.

It means I had to write two episodes that day, and that is way harder than rewriting. And on top of that, I had to read and generate notes for the scripts of the other two people who were being workshopped today.

Lovely! Once more my general cluelessness had screwed me over. Sigh.

But it was actually quite awesome. Admittedly, it was the kind of awesome that you don’t experience at the time because you are too deep into the work, but still.

It was awesome.

I have never had a day like that before. I wrote from around 2:30 in the afternoon till 1:00 at night, only stopping to eat supper.

That is ten and a half hours of writing, by my reckoning,

I had never had a day like that before. Even when I worked for my uncle, that was, at most, a six hour shift. And being a clerk/cashier is way easier than writing.

So to me, this was a marathon. I wrote episode 3 in the afternoon, after therapy, and I wrote episode 4 in the evening. Then straight on to the notes.

Notes which were complicated by the fact that I discovered a certain classmate who shall go nameless (Dan) decided to rewrite his ENTIRE hour long episode instead of the half of it we were assigned, meaning I had to read and generate notes for the WHOLE THING.

Back from school now.

So yeah. I did a hell of a lot of work yesterday. Now I feel a little bit hollow. All that work filled me with a sense of purpose and now I am back to being my usual rudderless self.

Oh well. I have lots more homework if I feel the need to connect with life again.

I am still worried about whether I will find employment in my field. I have decided that, because TV is very ageist, I am not going to put my birthday on my resume and I am never going to reveal it until I am asked about it directly.

The real trick will be keeping myself from making references that are too old for the age I am pretending to be. That’s a very hard thing for a top notch comedy writer to do.

References are our children.

Had something happen today that triggered me. In Pilot 3 class, the teacher told me (and me alone) that she wants a fourth draft from me in which I implement the notes I got today.

Why did she single me out? Is my work that bad? Am I way worse at this than everyone else and people are only telling me now?

Or is this one of those “I am harder on you because I know you can do far better” kind of things? Please tell me it is.

Obviously, this has made me doubt myself, not to mention doubting the thing I have been doing for almost a year.

I know this is most likely an irrational reaction and a product of my depression. And I am fighting it as hard as I can. I even messaged the teacher on Facebook and point blank asked her what the deal was.

That’s a very neurotic thing to do, but I did it anyway. We writers are a sensitive bunch and we (usually) get so little feedback on our solitary task that whatever people do say about it looms large in our minds.

Especially when you are riddled with self-doubt, like most of us are. Even the successful writers. It doesn’t make for a happy life but it is also what drives us to constantly improve our writing until it is finally Good Enough.

We know we won’t ever get there. But we keep pushing the boulder up the hill anyways.

I thought my episodes were pretty solid. I integrated a ton of the notes I had gotten over time about them. But apparently, that’s not good enough for people because they kept harping on the ones I did not implement.

I know hy. It’s because I was such a space case before my medication adjustment that I integrated very few notes when I rewrote things.

It was just too hard for me to keep the episode and the notes in my head at the same time. Let alone imagining altering it.

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to ask for the higher meds before I even walking in the door at VFS. It would have made me a much better student.

As is, I just hope I have not burned all my bridges with the profs.

I wanna write TV, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.