Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Not going well

I don't seem to be able to do what they want for this section of the storyboards. I sent my contact a new script, yesterday, and she asked me not to do anything about it till she talked to me...which usually means she needs something else or more or different. Dunno what my problem is, but every time I try to make sense of what she wants, I get it wrong. I'm usually not this dense...and it doesn't help that I have to wait for her to get back to me, making me restart the project in my mind every time.

Looks like I'm one of those creative types who can't handle interruptions well. If I get a rhythm going in my writing or artwork, I need to keep it...and when I'm distracted from my project, I have a hell of a time getting back to the right place for it...and sometimes I don't; I have to just start over. It wasn't a problem when I was living alone in LA and could just hermitize myself. And the writing jobs I've had so far weren't so very demanding that I needed the sharp focus on them. Until I started POS. Now I'm just a jumble most of the time and it's beginning to get me down. But mom can't be left alone and Kelly's not capable of tending to her (hell, he can barely tend to himself) -- so I keep getting sidetracked to do "little things" for "just a minute" that throw me off, completely.

Maybe it's all the chaos around family and Christmas and me stupidly overloading myself and pushing to do things that shouldn't be pushed. And now I may have a packing job outside Washington DC just after January 1st, pushing back my meeting in Baltimore. I spent half the day prepping a cost estimate for that. So I'm just a one-thing-at-a-time kind of guy. I used to think I could multi-task, but I guess I was being optimistic about that, too.

At least I got my book on "Sister Kate" and can read that to better work up the chaos at Altangelvin after the PD march is attacked. I'm overstating the situation, a bit -- the march continued into Derry where it was attacked, again, on Irish Street in the Waterside -- but it works for the emotional context.

It's interesting reading the different accounts of the People's Democracy March. So much truth in the idea that if ten people see one event you'll get ten completely different tellings of it.

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