It's been months since I've updated--goodness, actually horrifyingly close to a year--so let's just do a quick catch-up. The long and short of it is, I set out to do 5 feature scripts in 2016, I made it through 3.5. Not bad, but certainly not what I wanted to do.
So, what happened? Particularly when, for a while, I was holding to the schedule pretty well? As you can imagine, it was lots of little things. There was a lot of personal family business in the latter half of the year, for one. I also let the election stress get to me way more than I wish it had. Also, the third script, THEATRE IS EVIL, ended up being a lot about staring down artistic failure head-on, and in the middle of this crazy ambitious project, that kind of thinking ended up throwing me down a pretty nasty little depression cycle. And, oddly, it totally derailed me from this blogging, which was supposed to be all about working through failures and frustrations. Basically, the wheels came off a bit.
Also, one of the notes I'd gotten off of a few of the scripts I'd written was that Hollywood's not really making features like this anymore, that kind of storytelling is only being done in television. That threw me some, as I began feeling like I was just fooling myself writing feature scripts that weren't going to go anywhere.
So, what's to be done? Well, I'll tell you: I'm spending this year writing television. I've already finished my first pilot, GRIMOIRE, and I've begun planning the second.
And I'll say this: even though I didn't make the full 5, I definitely feel like I've grown significantly as a writer. I've learned a lot about my process, my strengths and weaknesses. I feel like my artistic muscles have gotten much stronger, and I feel much more confident sitting down to tackle an assignment. To be honest, I'm actually feeling really good.
I'm going to try and get this blog back up and running. I may also find somewhere on here to publish the first 15 pages of all the scripts, as I think it'd be nice to at least have something of that work available.
The TL;DR of it all is I missed the goal post, but I learned a lot, and I'm still working. I'll see if I can get back on the wagon with posting. I'll keep trying to make this crazy dream a reality.
Until next time, dreamers.
-Jake T.