ScriptSuperhero.com

I wrote 45 pages in about 24 hours late last week. Unfortunately, that work wasn’t on my novel. Instead, I stoked my creative fire pits to blazing on behalf of my sermon-writing.

These efforts including my first full-length sermon, as well as a Torah commentary, and while this sort of writing can go quite a bit faster than novel-writing, it’s still quite an effort to complete 45 or so pages in that kind of time span under any circumstances.

The last time I can remember being that productive in such a short stretch was when I completed the novel for my master’s degree, back in college, when I wrote over 200 pages of material in about a week.

One doesn’t need a Sony Vaio to be a great writer, although it helps if you like to write while away from home. Personally, I have far worse writing habits.

Most of my writing is producing laying on my stomach on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, neck craned up at an uncomfortable angle to see my screen, and usually late at night. And my PC of choice is a powerful desktop system fully outfitted with the latest version of Microsoft Office 2007. Although it began out of necessity, it’s not part of my writing routine and I’m not sure I’d immediately be as productive if I suddenly invested in a computer desk and a comfortable chair to sit in.

Although it’d probably be a lot easier on my neck. Maybe I should think about it a bit more.

The main fear I’m holding in terms of my mother’s pending death is not so much the death itself, painful as that will be. No, the main fear is the ongoing absence of her from my life.

It may sound terrible, but I’ve always had an easier time talking to my mom than my dad. I love them both, but I’m closer to my mom because I can talk to her more openly.

While Dad is still with us, once Mom is gone, one of my main security blankets in life goes with her. The fact is that she’s always been one of the people I can call and talk to when life isn’t making sense.

That’s the biggest fear. That in the weeks, months and years that follow her passing, there will be days, or nights, when I wake up wanting to call Mom… and realize, I can’t anymore.

(And here when I was a kid, I thought acne treatment was my biggest fear.)

Pride comes before the fall. And that doesn’t mean before autumn.

I’ve been thinking some today about how important it is not to let the little things bother you. It’s a hard skill to employ. After all, it’s usually the little things that trip us up.

It’s rarely the major things that cause fights or disputes; it’s rarely the big stuff that causes wars to break out. It’s the details.

The great thinkers say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and “It’s mostly small stuff.” But if that’s true, why is it so hard to actually DO that?

Take for example weight loss pills. I need to drop at least 40 pounds. Pills like that might make it happen more quickly. But what’s the long-term damage, and is it worth it?

For me, how quickly I lose the 40 pounds is the small stuff. The important stuff is that I’m moving in the right direction, toward losing it.

It doesn’t take a Slingbox to keep up with your manuscripts while traveling for the summer. All you really need is a laptop. Unfortuantely, I don’t have one.

Of course, I’d love to have one; for one thing, it’d make me able to sit in the living room with my wife while she works on homework and blogging, while I work on my writing projects and blogging. That would be a great benefit.

But ultimately, it comes down to spending priorities, and with my car currently in the shop needing to be repaired, transportation is taking the lead and mobile writing ability is taking a back seat. So it looks like a flash drive may be the best way to go, for the moment.

It’s not like many writers get gold watches at the end of a long career, but have you ever stopped to think about how much work writers who stick with it put in? While those who specialize in manual labor might disagree, even a creative pursuit like writing can be exhausting.

Trouble is, an exhausted writer may have worked hard for months and seen no return on his labor. That’s where manual labor workers have a bit of an edge; they get paid for their efforts no matter what, more often than not. Not so with writers. We can go through a world of ideas without landing a single paying gig.

Maybe it’s just the Sunday night blues talking, though. Time to get some sleep soon.

The romantic image of a writer pounding out a script in cheap hotels while hoping to land his first big break in Hollywood is familair to most people, but that’s not usually how it’s done.

Typically, Hollywood producers meet with proven writers and want to hear thumbnail sketches of several “high concept” ideas, rejecting most of them out-of-hand before a word has even been typed. The real writing work comes after a studio’s at least offered concept approval.

It may tarnish a favorite Hollywood legend; heck, the mythical image of the struggling writer sweating and pounding away at a typewriter has been a popular one; it was even the core setting for “Barton Fink,” by Joel and Ethan Coen.

Unfortunately, it’s a false image.

I’m not sure I understand the urge to “go small” with everything. I recently bought an Insignia 4GB MP3 player, mostly for music and audiobooks. But the thing has about a 1.6-inch screen and is capable of playing videos.

On a 1.6-inch screen? Are you kidding me?

About the smallest I could imagine going is an iPod Touch screen, with features a much larger screen at 3.5-inches… about twice as big… and even that has given me squint-headaches when I’ve seen in-store demos.

I mean, it’s a nice feature and all, but practical? Not really.

It’s the same will text messaging. I like email; I can put it on my 17-inch monitor and puff the text as big as I want to; on the average cell phone, you again have maybe a 1.6-inch screen and keyboards so small, it’s hard not to hit more than one letter at a time with my big, oafy hands.

Smaller is more convenient, sure; and more portable. But, much like a woman wearing a corset, bigger’s not always better.

In this digital age in which we live, it’s important to have the right self defense products on hand to protect your computer (and thus your work) from outside threats.

That’s why I like Kapersky Antivirus, which I recently picked up from Best Buy. In the last couple years, I’d tried and been disappointed in both Norton and PC-cillan due to incidents both my wife and I have had with those products.

Kapersky’s different; while those products update maybe once a day, Kapersky updated pretty much every hour on the hour. As such, they respond more quickly to the viral threats that can take down your hard drive and thus subject you to losing a lot of your work.

Trust me, after having not just one, but TWO computers crash on me in the space of three months last year, I’ve gone through that pain. Twice. Now, in addition to backing up my work a LOT more often, Kapersky is one of the things that gives me peace of mind about my writing being secure on my hard drive. This isn’t an official review of their product… I just was thinking about how much I appreciate it and decided to share.

It’s more expensive than other solutions, but this is one case where you get what you pay for.

One would think that with the days of corsets long behind us, people would be only too eager to leave the past in the past; yet period dramas are as popular as ever, which at least keeps the corset business alive in the entertainment industry.

It would be perhaps interesting to focus a drama around some sort of mom and pop business that still makes the old-fashioned lingerie… and nothing else. Or perhaps it wouldn’t. Adding in a murder mystery element to the plot would certainly help, though, since I can’t imagine there’s be much interest in a couple hours of watching workers sew fabric together using the same designs that were used over 200 years ago.

Still, it’d make for a unique setting.

Sometimes you have to know a lot more than what ends up on paper.

Whether it’s a screenplay, stage play or a high school essay, it always comes across who knows their stuff and who’s flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to writing well on any topic. And you can be sure, when you’re in the writing biz, that eventually someone’s going to come along and go over your work with a set of exam gloves and a fine-toothed comb.

My best example actually comes from a high school essay I did on Nicholas and Alexandra, the last Czar and Czarina of pre-Soviet Russia. All I had to turn in was a 15-page paper and I had an entire high school semester in which to write it. I probably could have flipped through one basic primer on the Russian Revolution and obtained all I needed. Instead, I got caught up in the subject and read about four books on the topic, including one on Rasputin and one on the love letters written between Nicholas and Alexandra.

While the Rasputin stuff was nice and spooky, it will always be the love letters book that made the biggest impression on me, because it humanized authority figures for me. Here was Nicholas, Czar of Russia, one of the most powerful nations on earth at the time, and then there was Alexandra, member of the royal line of Europe. Both very important people, powerful and impressive.

Yet their love letters were little more than the sweet and foolish things that passed between boys and girls in my own senior class, full of sweet nothings, insecurities, uncertainty about whether the other person liked them. Just normal beginning of a relationship and falling in love stuff. It was an amazing book that helped me see, even at 18, that folks in the halls of power in our world are all just people, no different than anyone else.

That’s good writing. And after all that research and reading, I think mentioning the love letters of Nicholas and Alexandra made up for less than a page of my essay. Yet because I did that research, I knew my subject so much better as a result, and my problem was not reaching 15 pages; my problem was trying to stop when I reach page 25.

This is advice I need to follow better myself. What am I doing still up and blogging at 1:35 a.m. on a work night?

Of course, some of us feel compelled not to stop when the juices get rolling, and that can lead to health complications.

Last weekend, too much of this led to me having a serious migraine all weekend, on top of a cold. Try that mixture sometime.

Better yet, don’t. Better to avoid a migraine than need a headache treatment at 1:35 a.m. when most businesses are closed.

Good night, all!