on 2nd thought, no need to utterly nostalgize that innocence ...

so i'm poring thru old files and i came across this list of 'contacts' i made, probably as a freshman in college. The parentheses notes are real. LOL!

CONTACTS:

-Ella (show scripts to the place she was interning for)
-Mike from class (screenwriting@gmail.com)
-story analyst guy whose info. career development center gave me
-maybe Cheri whatever, alum from Oxy? (wrote draft of toy story 3)
-Doug from myspace
-older guy from party that emails me (producer)
-Alan (sold me IPod on craigslist)
-writing group that dissed me

For Novel:
-Todd ? – Oxy alum who feeds me sushi

the fact I know so many amazing people doesn't help

it really, really doesn't, when it comes to being original and self-confident. i often feel as if i am (subconsciously of course) co-opting the brazilliance of the ever-expanding network of true artists I am lucky enough to know.

i want to break free of this self-consciousness and regress to the raw truth of my early twenties, back when i ran away to mexico and found myself writing a gothic horror novel about rebirth. it's called 'the perfect love' and i'm revisiting it now, realizing that in many ways, my adult sophistication is merely a deceptive net of distraction, hard, festering shreds of my ego hanging from it like barnacles.

the fact that i can be too obvious with my symbology, too corny in my sensitivity, too wide-eyed for the lounging hipsters, is not something to keep hiding from.

the innocence of childhood is fraught with imagination for good reason, and toeing this line between creative originality and slick, baudy self-marketing is like cartwheeling on a cliff for a disinterested audience. maybe i will just cartwheel somewhere else for awhile and stop worrying about toeing that edge.

thanks ruth (friends since 11 years old now?!) for sending me the above picture

thoughts from diablo cody

i noticed there's this horror film called 'jennifer's body' written by diablo cody coming out, and because she suddenly seems not only so prolific, what with juno and united states of tara and now this, but also along the lines of my unfinished stacks of creative variations, i looked up her old blog and found this awesomely encouraging and oh-so-'me too!' snippet from 2003:

The Book shall be conquered soon, this I swear to you.

I started writing The Book in 1999, when I was living in the Dodge Mahal, an ill-maintained college house so named because it was on Dodge Street in Iowa City. The Dodge Mahal was so squalidly kept that there was an overturned full-size Christmas tree in the living room. In May. I remember writing the first paragraph of The Book (which has now been so heavily edited that it bears little resemblance to those opening lines) and thinking "This could be something." Little did I know it would take me four years to write seventy pages. Seventy. 7-0. Stephen King probably writes seventy pages during his morning rehabilitative Pilates, and it takes me four fucking years.

The shocker is that I work on it often. I'm just so obsessive that I'll routionely rewrite entire ten page blocks. I'm never satisfied. I still think it sucks.

I have no idea if my back-assward labors will ever pay off. Today, for fiction by a woman to be considered marketable, it has to be about a sassy Prada-clad nanny/editorial assistant trying to find love in Manhattan. I don't think a slim novel about a bulimic high school physics teacher who's obsessed with amusement parks qualifies as "hot fic" these days.

I'm gonna finish. I have about fifty pages to go, so we're looking at, oh, 2005?

update

and so metaphorical for life; right when you think you have it defined it mixes it all up on you without actually going anywhere.

it's a mouse, not a lizard.

and it is still behind the dresser.

this just happened

a lizard ran into my room from under a crack in my outdoors-door i've noticed before, but never realized the full implications of, and i discovered my immediate reaction to be, uttered in what i hoped were loud, commanding tones: 'WHAT THE FUCK, ANIMAL?'
and then he went and sat behind my pink dresser, and i just sat there too, only in my bed, and thought about how i should probably do something, but all i could think of, and eventually did do, was open my door to the less-inviting outdoors and then go bang the lid of a hard, vintage suitcase i keep some shoes in, against one side of the pink dresser.

unless he is supremely wily, which i don't really want to consider at great length, he is still under there, even as we speak. neither possibility is really what i'm looking for in life, right now, sorry lizard - yes, you, i realize you are a LIZARD, not an ANIMAL - but i'm glad we had this talk, i really am.

my agent dropped me, but it's not over yet.

call it what you will - bipolarity indicative delusions of grandeur, fools gold, a fairy tale - but i have something primal, mystical, fundamental and sweet hammering on the eggshell of my delicate reality, with an insistent and insatiable clamor to get out.

i will keep writing. i know that much. it is so, so worth it.

12-Step program for procrastinators

The Cult of Done Manifesto
There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.