Hard Deadlines

Last weekend I was at the Screenwriting Expo, teaching a pile of classes. Expo was one of three hard deadlines I had to deal with - Expo was going to happen whether I showed up ready to teach classes or not. My other two hard deadlines are American Film Market and the holidays. My niece is getting married (how can she be old enough to get married?) during the Holiday season, so I’ll be going home for Thanksgiving and sticking around for Christmas and New Years instead of returning to Los Angeles. It doesn’t look like there will be anything for me to do in LA anyway. But that means some things need to get done before I go home. The plan was to finish up the last 3 Blue Books... I have the desktop publishing program on my desktop, not my laptop... so the Blue Books have to be done before I leave my desktop behind. Now it looks like I might get 2 of the 3 finished in time, but it’s starting to look like I may only get one done, now. The materials for the other two I’ll finish up on my laptop, and they’ll be in booklet form at the beginning of the year. There are a couple of other things that I need to get done before heading home for the holidays, too.

The AFM hard deadline really snuck up on me.

The plan was to do some of the new Blue Book articles in the handful of days between Expo and AFM... but Monday I was just wiped out. I tried to get some work done... but my brain just didn’t cooperate. Ended up a day behind. Tuesday, exact same story. Hard deadline approaching! Wednesday, I decided to sleep. Then sleep some more. Wasted the day, but felt a lot better. I designed some posters for film projects in the couple of hours that I wasn’t sleeping. Thursday, I felt great. My brain was fully functional (which is rare). The plan was to stop by Pinks Copies and make up a zillion 8.5x11 “flaps” (posters on one side, one page synopsis on the other) for AFM and get a couple of scripts copies (I need to sell a script in the worst way) and then hit the post office and then actually knock out one of the Blue Book articles... I was feeling good enough to maybe knock out two.

But that was before the copy machines at Pinks began breaking down. Copy places are usually hot enough, but Pinks’ has huge windows facing the setting sun that act as magnifying glasses frying anyone standing at the counter. So, as I’m waiting for them to fix the B&W machine so they can run my scripts I’m burning alive. The machine keeps breaking down. Finally they get my copies done, and we move on to the color copies - and there are hundreds of them, and the machine keeps screwing up, and I’m burning under the hot sun and about to pass out. When all of my flaps are finished, it’s too late to go to the post office, so I head to Starbucks and drink a Venti iced tea in about 3 seconds and get a refill, then quaff the refill in a couple of minutes, then... well, not much got done.

Friday, I’m roaming the halls at AFM with my flaps, wondering if I’m going to get *any* of the Blue Books finished before the next hard deadline a couple of weeks from now.

- Bill