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.