and a long line at the post office

Well, I’m staring at an accomplishment. This week I’m doing three things I’ve never done before. First I wrote a teleplay. It’s for “Will and Grace.” It’s okay. Then yesterday I buckled down and wrote the “Sex and the City” that’s been in my head. I did it. I wrote two teleplays. And this afternoon I go down the post office to mail them off to a contest.

So, that’s three things. Three new things for me. And this contest part is strange, because I’ve been stressing about it for probably two months now and after this afternoon there’s nothing else I can do. I won’t even hear anything about it until at least August, so I just forget about it and move on. Hurry up and wait. That’s how this business works.

The “Will and Grace” took a long time because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never seen any sort of teleplay format before and I was trying to figure out how everything worked. I understood the rhythm and the voices and the way a sitcom unfolds. I watch a LOT of television. But formatting it correctly was tricky. I started by hand, making templates and trying to do the whole thing on Word. I’m so grateful for Ray and stee figuring out how to put Final Draft on my computer, because writing the “Sex and the City” was much easier because of it. And people seem to really like the “Sex and the City” script. After they read the “W&G” they’re always like, “So, Karen did that because why?” and I end up explaining a few things and then rewriting more and rereading and asking questions and revising and eventually the script was confusing even to myself. I had to step back and simplify things.

After people read the “Sex and the City,” they have no comments. No comments at all. Other than, “This is perfect.” Or, “I looked for something wrong. I really did. There isn’t anything wrong.” “This could be an episode.”

The negative side of my head tells me that these people are telling me nice things because the deadline is this weekend and I don’t have time to revise. But I know that these are the most honest people in my life that tell me when something isn’t as good as I can make it. These are the people that support me and give me the best advice. Their word is important to me. So when they tell me that I should send it in, and they could just say, “Well, you still have the ‘Will and Grace.’ Maybe you should just send only that one in,” but they don’t say that… I don’t know. It feels good. But strange.

With the way recaps (my final Popstars recap is up) work and the way this journal goes, I’m so used to immediate feedback. I’m used to sending something off or uploading it and I’m done. I hear back quickly if people liked it. In this case I’m just sitting around a stack of scripts. They all have the potential to do something. I could use them to try and get a writing agent. I could submit them to studios. I could break the finals for this contest. But right now they just sit there, having only been read by four people, and these pieces of paper are very quiet.

I simply can’t seem to relax about it. The nice thing about the 24 hour play festival a few weeks ago was that when I was done, there wasn’t anything else I could do. It was going to go up and people were going to see it and make their decisions on the quality of my writing. Here I could just toss it away or start over or hide it or never do anything with it at all. Except for the fact that it’s getting sent into the film festival contest today. So there. I didn’t hide it. It’s doing something. Starting this afternoon.

And a new batch of t-shirt shipments will be sent with them, so if you ordered in the past week, it’s coming to your house soon.

And for the first time in a while, I’m almost free this weekend. Almost. I still have an assignment due, but maybe I’ll do it tonight.

I blame the Tivo. A couple of nights ago Ray and I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning watching American High. Then we watched Seinfeld. And then Friends. And then we went through and found more shows we wanted to tape. We ated too much Tivo and woke up the next morning feeling like ass.

Ooh, and just as I wrote that, Tivo started taping Oprah. Good Tivo.