Using the visual editor, aka the WYSIWYG one, for tonight’s blog entry. I usually use the text one so I can see my HTML, but tonight, I am going to take a walk on the wild side and use the mode which works just like a word processor. Besides, the real reason I used the text one for so long was that the visual editor messed up video embeds. And I don’t do those very often any more. So it’s visual for me.

Whoop de freaking do.

Feeling sort of dark today. I guess I am depressed. I tried to get myself jump started in the afternoon, but I felt like crap and without a compelling reason to stay out of bed (that is, compelling by depression’s standards, which usually means extremely high reward to effort ratio activities), I ended up spending my Saturday afternoon in a state of confused depression and non-restful sleep. A mode that in the bad old pre-Kwantlen days I used to call “every fucking afternoon”.

So that shit is always there, waiting for me to slip up and fall off the path and get lost. It’s a sobering (and depression) realization to make. That no matter how well I am doing or how good I am feeling, the hot suffocating darkness stretches before me like the mouth of a well, waiting to swallow me down into the belly of the best once again.

Every day, no matter how it looks on the outside, on the inside I am tiptoeing across a tightrope stretched between me and the warm bright world of the living.

And somehow, no matter how far I go, I am always in the exact middle.

Admittedly, some portion of the depression might be coming from the fact that I am currently without a major project. For a while there, I always had the movie to work on, and after that, I worked on my TV spec script, but I sort of finished that.

I saw sort of because I do have a complete script, with three entire plotlines. It is, however, only 52 pages long, and a standard Bob’s Burgers is 62. So I am twelve pages short. I thought I was done because I had written 32 pages before I went in and manually double spaced the dialogue, like they do in the show scripts.

(Yes. I had to manually double space the dialogue, because the program I have been using, Trelby, is terrible and doesn’t have a double-space function. Fuck, it doesn’t even have italics or underline! Because, of course, they are not allowed in standard screenplay format. Which is fine when you are writing a screenplay, but I am writing a TV script and TV people don’t give a fuck about standards. They make their own rules. And one of the rules for Bob’s Burgers scripts is that act headings and sluglines are in bold. And the thing is, I am stuck with Trelby for now because there is no way to export it to some other format and have it retain its formatting, and formatting is kind of super huge when it comes to all forms of screenplay. So I can export it to an uneditable PDF, or nothing. And it is really pissing me off. Rant over. )

So I have to come up with 12 more pages of Bob’s Burgers. That’s a tad daunting, I admit. I have a D plot in my notes, and I can probably add more jokes to some scenes. But I am not sure that will get me 12 entire pages, even with the dialogue double spaced. So I am going to have to strain the ol’ noodle to make pagecount.

Oh well, I am sure I will come up with stuff. I’m a funny dude and I have loads of creativity. It’s just a matter of bearing down and putting in the effort.

I also have to write a presentation for next Friday on the movie Groundhog Day. No pain there, it’s a brilliant movie. I have to come up with my own thesis, and I am pondering having it be that Bill Murray’s character actually dies at the beginning of the movie and the entire rest of it represents his trip through Purgatory.

Then again, I haven’t seen the movie in a while, nor have I read the script yet, so hopefully something a little wittier when I do. I am supposed to consult with the other people who are presenting that day in order to make sure we don’t have the same thesis, but a combination of laziness and arrogant confidence in my own originality has prevented me from doing so up until this point.

Still, that puts the pressure on to come up with something really off the wall, just to be safe. I know, I will theorize that the whole movie is the universe’s way of telling Bill Murray that if he wants to keep his career going, he has to play more likable characters.

Alright, that might be a little too meta.

Otherwise, not a lot of homework this week. My homework for Feature Script is already done. Ditto TV Spec Script. TV History doesn’t give homework. I have to do an exercise for The Second Act where I am given beats for the first and third act of a movie and I have to fill in the 15 beats of the Second Act.

Hey, that’s the name of the course.

That should be fun. I am super good at the whole “three card whatever” game, where you get three cards with random pictures on them and you make up a story as if it was three panels in a comic strip. In fact, when I was given that test I got so excited that I came up with three or four stories before they managed to get me to stop.

I am assuming that means I passed. And honestly, looking back, I realize just what a special little dude I was.

And you know what? All that’s changed is my size.

I’m still special as fuck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.