I’m tired as hell but I am going to blog anyhow.

The good news is that the first half of my first draft of my Bob’s Burgers is complete. It’s a little underweight at twelve pages, but I can always add stuff later. There’s a D plot that I haven’t even used yet because I wasn’t sure I was going to need it. But right now… it looks like the answer is yes, I will need it.

Damn it feels good to be able to use italics. You’re not supposed to use italics or bold or any of that kind of thing in screenplays, which I find irritating. I have honestly forgotten any other way of indicating emphasis. All I can do is hope it comes through via context.

Today was fine. Had Pitch 2, so I will heave to learn to pitch again. I took Pitch 1 in my first term. This teach, Ita, seems a lot more focused and serious than the other one, Kelsey. My social anxiety is, of course, squealing like a car with locked brakes rolling downhill, but I am not paying much attention to it.

The thing is, I know I can pitch well if I just get my shit together. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that I can really cast a spell on people when my charisma and enthusiasm are firing on all cylinders. We watched some pitches today and the good ones (as judged by Ita) all seemed to take the sort of spellbinding storyteller approach that I imagined myself using when I pitched. So clearly that is the proper approach, and it’s one that comes to me naturally.

So, I’m good there, I guess.

But it’s harder for me to pitch in class. I think the problem, ironically, is that I know my fellow students. That makes them part of my social reality and makes the stakes higher. If I fail to impress some room full of strangers, oh well, there’s always next time. I may never see those people again, and regardless of that, they are not part of my social group and therefore there can be no social repercussions.

But I work with my fellow students all the dang time. And I will be working with them for the next eight months. SO if I make a fool of myself in front of THEM, repercussions galore.

Well, in theory. That’s what my social anxiety tells me anyhow. I am slowly disarming it. It’s tricky work. I have to move very slowly and cautiously so I don’t accidentally trigger it. And when it does get triggers, I have to struggle with it to keep it under rational restraint.

Maybe that’s my problem. I am trying to restrain it with reason when emotion would do the job better. Fight emotion with emotion. Ita mentioned something that I wrote about a while ago today : turning nervousness into excitement. I had forgotten about that technique until she mentioned it, and then I was like, “Duh!”.

So I think I will give it a shot. I am also going to try doing next week’s pitch as if I didn’t know anyone in the room. I think that will be the only way to access my A game.

for this first pitch, we have to pick an existing movie and pitch it. I don’t like that exercise. For one, it’s hard for me to pick a movie. For another, it’s hard for me to come up with a pitch for something that isn’t my work. Compared to my own stuff, it feels like I know too little about the movie, and then there’s my rabid insistence on originality. I don’t want to promote someone else’s movie for the same reason I don’t want to direct someone else’s script.

Namely, that it would mean the sort of splitting of identity I find distasteful. If I am promoting my own work, than there is just one identity involved : my own. But if I am promoting someone else’s work, well… now there’s two of us.

Or at least that’s the closest I can come to explaining it.

So I am not looking forward to this combination of option paralysis and identity weirdness. But I will get it done.

Having trouble concentrating, on and off. I guess it’s because I have so much on my mind now. But it worries me a little. Because it means my mind keeps wandering when I should be paying attention and that’s not good. It’s rude and offensive if it happens while someone is talking to me, and I would never do that deliberately. But it happens anyhow.

And out in the real world, it could be downright dangerous. I could get seriously hurt if I space out, say, while crossing a busy downtown street. Or waiting for the Skytrain. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me up nights (figuratively speaking) with worry.

Plus, it represents a victory for that terrible gravity well in my mind that is always trying to pull me out of reality and into the inner world of my mind. And as regular readers know, getting stuck in my own mind forever is one of my worst fears period. I know damned well that it would be my own personal Hell, not some lucid dreaming paradise. I have too many demons yet to be able to believe that an inability to connect with reality on any level would turn out pleasant.

And I am desperately trying to become more engaged with reality, not less. I want to be part of the world and bask in its warmth, not become endlessly lost in my space-cold world of the mind. I want to live, goddamn it.

And I will keep fighting the war against the tide inside until I have won.. or died.

After all, I’ve been the living dead for long enough!

Hopefully my physical health will hold out long enough for me to win.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.