Pen to Paper

I just saw Julie and Julia last night (and I can’t praise it enough), and I’ve only seen bits and pieces but Funny People has been out a while now. Both of these movies are having similar effects on me, though. Both remind me that creative success takes a while. More importantly, they’ve taught me that creative people are often most successful when they’re working with someone – sort of a creative positive feedback loop.

In other words, I miss my theatre Fam.

I get frustrated with myself.

Right now, my falcon cannot hear the falconer and the center is not holding.

I was thinking today about Edison’s workshop. Though the man was a bit of a jerk sometimes (and isn’t romanticized by steampunks like Tesla), he knew how to get things done.  According to radio-electronics.com, at Edison’s ‘invention factory’ in Menlo Park

“He said he would create a minor invention every ten days and a “big trick” every six months. In fact he had over 40 projects under way at any one time and he was applying for around 400 patents every year.”

Menlo Park was founded when Edison was 29, so clearly age was not a factor.

I keep hearing about the tremendous output of professional authors, people I respect. TV writers have astounding production when you look at what a good show does in a season.

So what’s my problem?

I’m starting working on my submission for the ABC Television Writing Fellowship, and I’ve added a progress bar to reflect that. (So far I’ve just brainstormed and started outlining, ergo zero progress as of this post). But since this is time sensitive (a very hard deadline), I’m going to be focusing on this project for a bit so the other status bars probably won’t be moving for a bit. FYI.

See, when you’re working with things you only half understand (like, for example, css and php and other wordpressy things) and you know one way to solve your problem, it would be a bad idea to spend two hours looking for another way just because you think it’d be “the right way” to do it. You can solve things in about 45 seconds and move on to the way you’d planned to spend the night. Looking for another way to do things would be silly. It’d be idiotic, and roughly as painful as smashing your head against a concrete wall.

Sigh.

New site is starting to come together, although trying to figure how to make Wordpress do what I want is taking time I’d like to be using writing. The first round of that’s closer to being over every day, though.