Sunday, December 30, 2012

Matt Millen & Drake

OK, 140 characters couldn't capture my disappointment in finding out the origin of this amazing picture





It made so much sense to me that Matt Millen would be a huge Drake fan. Alas, Maria Taylor's original tweet says that she taught him who Aubrey is.



(exhale) Matt Millen is exactly who should be buying Drake CDs and finding out that he doesn't even know who Drake is just moments after seeing this picture is a heart-rending discovery. It's like I was given a pot of gold and it was taken away from me. I had marshmallow extract bubbling away to create "real" marshmallows and I spilled it and had to replace it with stale store-brand marshmallows and that cup of hot chocolate was not only ruined because it wasn't as good as it might have been, it turned out that it was actually bad. If you had a blind taste test of my hot chocolate with store-brand marshmallows in it you would have guessed that it was a cup of mud. So, thank you, Maria Taylor, for this truly inspirational photograph but I wish you had kept the origin of it a secret.

A Day Of Football

Hopefully I don't slide into this tomorrow but I watched a lot of football today. That isn't the worst thing ever but I've got work to do and I've got a whole separate life to live. One where I get paid for writing instead of just writing as an escape from reality. This is a theme of my life. I'm sort of stuck dreaming instead of doing. How do you fuckers do it? I'm a better writer than lots of shitheads getting paid a livable amount to just pound on the keys. What is the entry point that I'm missing? That write for free shit is a poison. If the person not paying you to write is making money for what you wrote then you are a part-time (or worse) slave. This doesn't, of course, preclude spec writing. You need to have something to sell. A body of work. But... what? I don't get it. This whole selling myself thing has escaped me for 35 years or so. I just don't get it.

I was looking at the stats that The Black List put out today and I noticed that the second batch of scripts they rated got a little better aggregate score than the first batch. I've got to figure that has more to do with leniency than some mass jump in quality but here's the thing: I was in the second batch. And my scores were horrible. Below average no matter how they push it on me. I feel I've estimated myself too well for a long while now. It's a debilitating thing for me. I've been looking down on people that are objectively better at my craft than I am. I'd rather beat off all day than deliver anything of value. I meant that literally. Crap. I'm in a sinkhole. I've got to dedicate myself. 15 pages into the second draft tomorrow or I've failed. That's got to find it's way into a day of health and activity. Damn the world.