Today was a pretty decent day.

Made it to my first class of the term, Adaptation. It was fairly entertaining because it’s taught by Rudy Thauberger, and he has a zillion awesome show biz stories. I could listen to him tell them for hours.

Three hours, in fact. Minus a fifteen minute break.

But I am not crazy about the course, and really wish I didn’t have to take it. I don’t want to adapt anyone’s anything. I do my own work, period. The very idea of me adapting someone else’s work fills me with a queasy feeling akin to the nausea I have when contemplating using someone else’s toothbrush.

Other people’s stories have their germs all over them! In a sense.

I think this is because what I write is really, truly a part of me. That means I can’t ever think of anything I have written as just a product, separate from me. Anyything I write stays a part of me for a very long time, and the sense of connection to it never fades.

That’s why editing myself is like trying to perform surgery on myself. I would be a much better writer if I had an editor. Handing it over to someone else would give me that much needed sense of detachment.

Otherwise, it’s just too painful.

I put a lot of myself into what I write. In fact, the major overall trajectory of my development as a writer has been the pursuit of putting more and more of myself into my words until I am practically climbing through the screen and into my word processor.

It’s not the usual kind of transcendence, but it works for me.

I guess, in a strange way, I am still trying to escape into my books. The difference is that I am doing it by writing them. It’s like the difference between regular dreaming versus lucid dreaming. I know I am creating the dream and that I am in control of it.

And yet, any decent writer knows that they are never fully in control of their stories. At best, you ride them and do your best to steer them towards where you want to go.

But sometimes, the story’s got to be given its head and let go wherever it’s got to go. That’s part of why I stopped making outlines and such before writing things.

What’s the point of planning if the story is going to go where it wants anyway?

Of course, I am going to have to break myself of that habit, at least a little bit. Winging it might work when I’m writing a short story or even a novel. But if I am writing a TV script (or teleplay… love that word), there are far too many moving parts for the winging of it or anything else. Visual presentation demands a much tighter form of writing because so much can be said in the language of the moving image in so short a time that it requires more than good instincts to keep it all going in the right direction.

In addition, the fact that the audiovisual medium is so much more “real” than the written word means that it has to follow a lot more of the rules of reality than a book. Things that would be plausible enough in a book might seem downright ludicrous on TV.

Plus, by freeing the mind from its duties to imagine everything that is happening (like you have to do when you read), it opens the mind to think more deeply about what it is experiencing and thus logic flaws become more glaring than they would be in print.

So planning is a must. At the very least, I will need to make a beat sheet.

Then again, television writing is collaborative, not individual. So t’s not like I will have to write entire episodes by myself, or at least, not right away. And I am grateful for that.

I am perfectly happy being assigned a little piece of the puzzle and doing just that. That is likely where I would be starting and it suits me because I am not ready to handle larger structures just yet. At least,not at a professional level.

But I am damned good at writing funny dialogue and I am pretty sure I would be a genius at desk jokes once I got used to the format. I can write in any genre you can name and I am very good at writing both deeply emotional, moving moments and grand thematic crescendos that take your breath away.

Add to that that I am clever as hell and not at all afraid of hard work, plus I am an affable fellow who is easy to get along with, and I think I have a lot to offer a potential employer.

And if I work hard and get lucky, I might just get a regular paying gig and be able to live on my own, be fully mobile, exercise to get healthy, and leave this entire twenty plus year saga of depression behind me for good.

And let it fade away like a bad dream.

Oh, also in local news : I am taking a higher dose of both of my antidepressants now. I started on Sunday. So far, I do feel considerably better. I feel more “up” and energetic, and I feel hopeful and optimistic.

The really amazing thing is that I don’t view my future as a blank gray horror any more. For a long time, I never thought about the future because when I did, I would be overcome with a wave of misery and despair intense enough to shake me to my core.

It was only when I had recovered enough to think about my future and where I was headed that I was able to do things like go to Kwantlen and then to VFS.

For a long long time, I had nothing on my horizon but a long slide into an open grave.

But now, I have hope that I might actually be able to support myself and become a real adult and finally join the rest of society.

That is my fondest dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.