6 months??!? I better post an update then...

It's now been a year since I started this blog, and it's fair to say that progress to achieve my ambitions before I turn 40 is a bit, well, non-existent, if I'm honest.  Actually, that's not entirely true - I am still chipping away at the film script, but progress is really, really slow.  Like, measured in glacial epochs slow.  But!!! I have reasons for this.  So here are several legitimate* reasons why I have not got very far writing the script for 'The Harrowed Man':

1) I bought a Tablet PC to work on it during my daily commute - but then my commuting pattern changed...

I don't want to outright blame my wife, but it kind of is her fault: she recently changed jobs and as she works in the same town as me I get a lift in, rather than the train.  This means that I now only get a train four days out of every fortnight.  I do use the time, but as my train journey is only just over 10 minutes I'm only able to do a few lines each journey.  Still, every little helps...

2) We got addicted to 'Breaking Bad'...

Actually, this isn't much of an excuse as we'd already started watching this before I started working on 'The Harrowed Man'; however we recently got on to Season 4, and it sort of snow-balled from there.  Anyone who's watched this series will tell you - aside from it being absolutely brilliant - that it's pretty compulsive viewing from the end of Season 3 onwards, right through to the finale.  But watching this has kept my attention away from my script, which hasn't helped my writing process is really slow anyway...

3) My creative process would make a sloth look like it's got ADHD...

It's not so much that there's no motivation (alright, sometimes that IS an issue!), but just that my ideas don't develop when I'm forcing them.  Let me employ a gardening analogy (probably incorrectly): it's like tending to a plant which not only grows slowly, but flowers and produces fruit after a long period of time.  So each scene is like a vine or branch of this plant, and each time I go back and think about it, a new detail will come to mind - like it's very slowly developing from a bud in to whatever kind of flower it's going to be when it finally blooms.  Or something like that.  To counter this, I'm now basically writing the outline as linear piece, before I truncate it down to become a treatment, and then finally a script.

4) I've been writing my Film Blog... quite a lot actually

I know that one of my other ambitions was to write something else - a blog about movies wasn't quite what I had in mind!  I do have other ideas of what I could write, I just need to settle on one particular thing to write.  However, if nothing comes of any of these other concepts at least I can use the Blog to say I've fulfilled that ambition!  The other side of that however is the time and headspace this requires, which takes from that which could be spent on the script.  I've managed to separate the two things though, so I'm able to be strict about when I can work on the script, and when I can write an entry for the Blog.

Anyway, despite all this, I'm still committed to getting this script done - just being very slow about it.  And as for the other ambitions - well plans are afoot.  But those are long term things which may take a year or two to come to fruition, so watch this space...

I apologise for the lack of pictures on this latest blog post.  To compensate, here's a picture of a sloth, seeing as I mentioned one earlier.  He looks a friendly fellow, doesn't he?

* Actually, I think they're more like excuses than legitimate reasons...