Categories
30Hz Bl-g On Writing

The Two Week Deadline

I’ve been plugging along on #Bond_age_: The James Bond Social Media Project for nearly 18 months now. The end goal has been, for some time now, to create a book out of everything we’ve accomplished with the project. I’ve had some people express cursory interest in a full-length manuscript. I owe it to myself to give the publication thing a shot.

Thus, the two week deadline.

I gave myself a deadline of two weeks from today to complete the book proposal along with the screenplay I’ve been tinkering with, on and off now, for six months. It too ties into the James Bond project as it is a revisionist version of DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER spun off with different characters. I am viewing it as both an homage and a satire of the film I revile and enjoy in equal measure. I wrote my #Bond_age_ essay for DAF considering how I would recast and thus re-assemble the film. Thus NOT IAN FLEMING’S DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (working title) was born.

I plan to use my sluggish bl-g here to document my push to finish both projects. If I confess my inactive days, my distractions, my procrastinations I only have you to blame when I don’t finish and nobody calls me out on my tardiness. I’m already redirecting responsibility…. this will surely be a smash success.

The bottom line is this: I need to finish something. Anything. I’ve been toiling on this book for 18 months. I need to nut up and try to make something out of all this time and effort.

In order to complete my quest I have enlisted Raiden, my go-to Mortal Kombat character from back in the Genesis days, as my spirit animal because he’s a guy that knows how to finish.

Mortal Kombat - Raiden finish him

Words of wisdom, support and/or packages containing liquor are welcome.

Categories
30Hz Bl-g On Writing

Commence NaNoWriMo

It’s November. For some it’s #Noirvember (watch as many Film Noirs as possible). For others it’s NaNoWriMo (write 50,000 words or die trying).

I’ve been “participating” on and off in NaNoWriMo for five or six years. The first year I was just out of my MFA program, and gung f’ing ho to write that first m’f’ing goddam novel! YEEAAAAAHHHH.

NaNoWriMo calendar

Year One:

By the time Thanksgiving hit, I was something like 30,000 words in and hating. every. single. sentence.

I wasn’t into the book I was writing and I’d hit a stone cold wall of self doubt. There’s nothing… and I mean nothing that kills a writer’s mojo more than self doubt. 99.9% of all cases of so-called “writer’s block” I’d guess have something to do with self doubt. That’s how much it cripples me. And it doesn’t happen all at once. It starts with 0ne discordant sentence that grows into a paragraph, a page, a chapter… and then, finally, consumes the entire project. With only a week left, I threw in the towel, scrapped the project and never returned.