Almost settled down...almost...

This has been me, the last few days. No writing done. No artwork done. Nothing but full scale war within my psyche. Fortunately, I live alone so no one could overhear my mutterings and ravings and have me locked up for lunacy.

Also fortunately, the verbal battles I've gotten into with people who blame Israel for the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and don't even think of holding Hamas at least partially responsible. Israel might be overreacting to Hamas' provocations, but it's Hamas doing everything it can to cause this while using its citizens as human shields. But what I've found is, most of the people blaming Israel for everything have zero sense of the history of that region. So bringing that up and calling lots of carefully-worded names let off a nice bit of steam.

I'm finally calm enough...relatively speaking...to see what the trigger probably was for this freak out -- Speed. The movie. With Keanu at his most beautiful and Sandra Bullock at her most endearing. It's a great action film with an elegant script by Joss Whedon (fuck Graham Yost)...and it was playing as I did laundry. Starting at 1pm. And that's when I began spiraling out of control.

I'd been living in LA for just over a year when the movie came out. I was doing my first storyboarding job, out there, too -- for a short film made by a Vietnamese film grad, using a John Woo style. All very lovely...and gratis (I think I found the job in the back of Dramalogue).

And here I am, twenty years later, doing the same fucking thing. It's like I haven't progressed an inch since then. Granted, I've actually written 25 screenplays (on top of the 8 I already had), lots of short films, plays, one-acts, books, won awards for my scripts and placed nice and high in many other competitions; the time has been filled with work and experience. But I'm still in the exact same position I was the weekend I went to see Speed. No, worse, since I now live in Buffalo instead of LA.

That brought on a serious attack of "WTF is wrong with me?" I'm way over my due date and into "time to be thrown out" territory. And what's worse? I do not want to write another script. I just don't. Even the thought of it makes me ill. I hate having to cut back on aspects of the story that won't make it into any film version...according to what little I know about the industry, today. I don't want to censor my work, but to write a script, you must.

That's where the anger fired up. Why should I have to? Because some unknown twerp of a producer might cringe at the idea of a woman castrating a man who raped her sister after she fucks him with a dildo? And yes, that was in the initial draft of CK. That's how angry Carli is. I can do that in a book, but unless I hit just the right producer who doesn't mind an NC-17 rating for the project, and who knows distributors who feel the same way, it'd be taken out. On top of that, the director and actors would get to do whatever they damn well want with my characters and story. And that's after me rewriting the script into as tight as I possible can...going through draft after draft to make it work.

Well, the hell with that. I'm writing what I fucking want to -- and that means doing it in book format, and self-publishing, if I must. Which I don't mind. That way, I can follow my own style instead of this enforced shorthand scripts have to be in; nor will I have to accept the limitations and demands of anybody else, if I don't want to.

So...now let's see if tiger's really got his roar back, or if he's just got a throat made sore by too much hissing.