Continuous typing

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep up the once a week postings, partly because I’m rapidly running out of things to say, and partly due to the embarrassment of realizing that people are starting to read it.

I finished writing the pilot that I first started thinking about two weeks ago. The statistics on this project are like a dream; neither good nor bad per say, but utterly surreal. It took me eight days to plot out a season of the show. I took a day off. I started writing the pilot. Four days later it was eighty six pages, with commercial breaks plotted in at what I think are appropriate intervals. When I finished it I just stared at the computer, as if one of us had had a terminal malfunction and the other one didn’t know what to do about it. I’m not sure which was me.

Whenever I finish a project, anyone I mention this to asks me if I get a feeling of accomplishment. The fact is, all I feel is drained. I practically can’t speak for all the words I’ve poured out of myself. Even when I write a new opening or closing program for PTC, my brain checks out for an hour or two and for that brief window I never want to write again. It can be a useful phenomenon; I can’t stand to play video games for about half a day after I get to the end of one, which means hours of time dedicated to more useful things.

Finishing this pilot – named “Fantastic” for lack of anything else to call it – was particularly rough, since I had also finished playing “Final Fantasy X” earlier that day. I can’t describe or even fully remember the sensation of the total vacuum in my personal world, but I can tell you the curious phrase that popped into my head when everything else rushed out. It was “I feel like someone just opened the top of my head and peed in it”. Vulgar as it is, I have no idea what it was supposed to mean, except that it felt extremely appropriate at the time. In the immortal words of Lewis Carroll: Curiouser and curiouser.