Happy Easter. In my basket I got... creative struggles. Ugh.
So after spending days designing a new piece that I wanted to do in payons, this morning I went to apply the water-color finish today and realized that I had used a washable pen to do the inking and the entire piece is now un-finishable. Allow me to loose a short, violent exclamation. DAMN! WHY AM I SUCH AN IDIOT? Okay, that's out of my system.
My latest writing gig backfired. The director asked for everything to basically be reset to his original draft, and after spending almost 2.5 hours on a conference call I felt like I had just been talking with Michael Bay, who was going, "GUNSGUNSGUNS!". It doesn't help that I had spent 3 months thinking the project wasn't even going to happen and had only just gotten my hopes up again. So now I'm second-guessing everything I wrote, wondering if my brilliant ideas about metaphor and reinforcing character are totally lost. On one hand, I was paid some nice compliments regarding the tone and feeling. And the entire thing seems to have shifted from schmaltzy sepia-toned patriotism to bitter and unpredictable reality. Trying to sandwich that into a short story with a proper plot and escalating tension and turning points (blah blah blah English 101) was one of the biggest improvements I thought I had made. Nevermind all of the complexities of the relationships which I had to unearth from layers and layers of reactive and surface-level writing. He just doesn't understand character, or get that the story needs to be driven by it.... not by designing a cool set piece and making everybody run around reacting to explosions. This is going to be a tough one to re-write.... AGAIN. But that's the process. It never stops. And I need to focus on little victories... at least I was able to subtly re-work the entire ending.
So now in frustration and semi-celebration, I'm going to eat all of the chocolate that Jesus brought me. No, not Jesus like the biblical fellow. Jesus is a guy who works at la tienda familiar down the block. Happy Easter, Jesus! And all you other chocolate lovers out there too.