Roller Coaster Extremes

It's been a crazy CRAZY week. I had two amazing meetings at the beginning of the week, and have five comics and a novel to read and come back with possible feature takes on.

Thursday I got the news that my job has come to an end. It was great while it lasted! Now I am going to research signing up for unemployment.

Thursday night I went to a new members discussion at the WGA that was alternately exhilarating and depressing.

Friday went to my first WGA screening (saw "Stranger Than Fiction" with my little sister and heard the writer speak - we both highly recommend this film!)

Saturday I finished my (first manager-worthy draft of my) new outline (thanks to DA, LE, AQ and the incredibly gifted and excruciatingly patient JB for reading and offering thoughts - every one of you made it better).

I've been doing a lot of house-cleaning and book-keeping today, I think I'm recovering from the extremely intense nature of the outlining process, and possibly freaking out about money.

Anyhow, compared to last week at this time - things feel very very different all of a sudden. In both good and bad ways.

Fifty Crappy Ideas

Last week I scored another 2 points in a game. (Did I already mention that I'm also playing basketball this fall?)

I realized I haven't been blogging on this blog for a long time. It's been an intense 6 months.

Right now I'm trying to generate a list of new screenplay ideas. So far this week I've come up with 50 crappy ideas. I'm trying to do 25 ideas a day (I started on Thursday and had to skip Friday). I can generally get through 16 or 17 quickly, but that last handful gets tougher and tougher. The idea here is that if you just focus on generating LOTS of ideas, eventually, sort of in spite of yourself, you'll hit upon a really good idea. I will let you know if that happens. As I said, right now I've got a plethora of crappy ideas.

I've always hated brainstorming. DA is amazing at this. I'm trying to get better. So. How many crappy ideas do I need to generate to get to the center of a good idea? Stay tuned.