Afeared

Every day for a while now, during lunch, I take my little steno notebook out for a sandwich and write.

It’s been good, getting back into it on a regular basis -– even thought right now “writing” is limited to making bullet outlines and jotting down notes on scenes and bits of dialogue.

The four stories I’ve been playing around with have been:
--the Harlem rewrite
--the suspense thriller that started as a dream I had
--a twisty police drama
--a cheeky horror thing

Interestingly, the one that I find myself working on most is the one that came from the dream (as written about a few posts back). But I do keep bouncing around.

Here’s one fear I have, about the dream story: if I dreamed about it, does it mean, subconsciously, that I REMEMBER it? As in, it’s already been done and I’m accidentally plagiarizing?

Here’s another fear I have: soon, I’ll have to choose one of the four to really flesh out.

Because of work and family, I don’t have a whole lot of time to write. So it’s scary to think I might put six months into starting a script (O, to be able to spend hours a day writing and bang them out like Greg and Ryan do) only to realize I picked the wrong one to flesh out and it might have made a fun little outline but it’s a shitty 120 pages.

Because then, it’s six months later. Maybe someone has shown interest in Dismal and wants to know what else I have written. And I have nothing. Maybe the guys who showed interest in the adaptation script (if they haven’t forgotten about me already, which, actually, is most likely the case) will have totally forgotten about or lost interest in me. Because I still have nothing.

I guess there’s no easy answer. As we continue the recut of Dismal, I’ll keep working on these outlines and notes, and then, I’ll just have to suck it up. Use my gut to pick which one I think is the most viable. And then write it.

(Scary.)