thesis

I finished my thesis script and turned it in on Monday, once again proving that if you give a writer a deadline, she will work as close up to it as humanly possible.

There were times when I hated this script and just wanted it to go away. But toward the end, I kind of started to like it. At the 11th hour, I cracked a couple of scenes that had been giving me trouble all the way through, and suddenly I not only understood the script structurally but actually started to enjoy writing it.

Funny enough, my attempt to write something "not political" ended up being about many of the same things as my "political" scripts: resistance, and standing up to someone much stronger than you, and making the choice to fight instead of flee, despite the greater risk involved. Those themes were there from the beginning, but the more explicitly I dealt with them, the more I liked the script and the easier it was to write. Thanks are owed to James Cameron (for Terminator) and--you guessed it--J.K. Rowling for helping me work that out.

I keep waiting for the little knot of anxiety that lives in my stomach to untie. It hasn't so far. Perhaps this is because I have about 45 pages of a pilot and a rewrite of another script still to accomplish in the next 5 weeks, and a pitch to prepare by Saturday morning, in time for the first rehearsal for our end-of-year pitching event.

45 pages...there was a time, not so long ago, when that would have seemed incredibly daunting. Now I shrug that off as three solid days' writing.

In other news, Jess finished Harry Potter! I was able to hold off my desire to sleep after turning in aforementioned thesis just long enough to watch her liveblog the final chapters on Monday night.