Christmas Day

I'm facing this blank screen without a thought forming in my head. It's like I'm on hold with everything in my life, so why not my mind, as well?

In a little bit, I'll start making notes on that script I'm editing. I'm rereading the draft I did and I do have some ideas on how to make it fit what the writer/director says he wants...but we'll see. I just want it over and done with.

I'm starting on the storyboarding job, tomorrow. I know some sections that will work, no matter what. And ditto the above sentiment.

As regards POS...lately I've been thinking of how T. H. White wrote "Once and Future King" (the story of King Arthur) to begin light and frothy with Arthur as a child then grow darker and sadder as he aged and became aware of man's (and woman's) duplicity. I can't quite see how appropriate that would be for a Catholic child in Northern Ireland considering the state of the society at the time, but then J. G. Ballard's memoir, "Empire of the Sun", entailed him growing from a child to a man without the necessary stage of adolescence while interned at a Japanese concentration camp in China during WW2, and he found ways to make that light enough, in spots. (I love Spielberg's film version, but it was highly sanitized from the book and did get a bit too "Spielbergish," here and there.)

Maybe that's what these thoughts are about -- me losing sight of the fact that Brendan's just 10 when this story begins. Granted his father's a bastard who's made into a saint for the most dubious of reasons, but maybe I have Brendan growing up too quickly. After all, he's not the only child in Derry dealing with Protestant hate and condescension. Maybe I need to first see the natural progression from a boy who knows no other life to one fully aware of the world's prejudices against any and all they deem less than worthy before I can truly understand the ending it's aiming for.

This book is making me hungry...and not for something to fill the belly but for that which fills the mind and soul.

Aw, jeez, that sounded so late Victorian British I actually jolted. I think I'll end this before I become maudlin.

And so much for having an empty brain when I started this post.