Simon Fairbairn – Aural Antidotes for a Prescribed Life

The end of November is rapidly approaching and it has become clear that I’m not going to be able to finish all the things that I set out to achieve. That’s OK because the important thing wasn’t the arbitrary and meaningless date – it was the focus that the date provided.

Focusing on an end date meant that I had to prioritise my goals and also assign them attributes that I could use to measure my progress – page counts, completed songs. It was no longer ‘write a good screenplay’, it was ‘write 120 pages of a screenplay’.

I have made a good start on all of the things – 60 pages of a screenplay, 1 1/2 songs finished, new design of this site finalised – but, more importantly, I’ve learned a lot about how I work best – focus on one thing at a time until it’s done.

In that spirit, I have therefore created a new arbitrary and meaningless date to aim for – 31st of December.

It’s my birthday tomorrow. I will be 29 years old. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this yet.

My partner baked me the cake pictured above. I know exactly how I feel about this. Here’s a close up.

There. I bet you’re feeling it too now.

Progress Report – Screenplay

Things are moving along nicely. Yesterday and today it was mostly all about the screenplay. #ScreenplaySunday rolled over slightly into #MusicMonday, but seeing as I’m not in work this week there was enough time for everything.

I’m beginning to understand a lot more about character development. The more time you spend writing a character, the more you begin to understand what they would or wouldn’t say. I had to spend some time erasing all the swearwords from my lead character’s dialogue today because it dawned on me that she wouldn’t actually swear unless she was really, really stressed.

Although it involves some work going over and correcting this, it actually feels really good. When you’re certain about how a character would or wouldn’t behave in a given situation, that’s when you know they’re beginning to take on a life of their own.

I should be on page 64, but I reached page 56 and then wasn’t feeling it any more, so I stopped and moved on to music.

Music

Over in the music corner, things could be better but I’m not so worried. I’ve got one tune basically finished and another one half way there. I should, by this point, have 2 finished and 2 more on the way so that I can spend the last week recording, but it’s still been the most productive month musically that I’ve had in a long time.

Web Design

I finished my first plugin and had it approved by Wordpress (if you’re interested, you can find it here), so that’s pretty exciting. It still needs a little work, but it works and it’s already available to download from my site, so what the hell. I can update it later…

Everything’s going pretty good. If I carry on like this, it should be a good month.

I have decided that doing only one thing at a time is definitely the way to go. Get’s you all focused and stuff. So, here’s what the week looks like:

• Screenplay Sunday
• Music Monday
• Teaching Tuesday (Line In Blog post)
• Website Wednesday
• Er, Video Thursday

Friday and Saturday are catchup days if I fall behind (which I will – especially on the websites). So far, it’s going well. Got quite a few hours of music done yesterday and I’ve just published my Line In blog post for the week (Developing a Wordpress Plugin – part 3).

Hurrah for manageable schedules that work!

It’s been a busy few days. This weekend we hosted our second set of couchsurfers and again we had a lovely couple of days. The pair that stayed with us were amazing and we had a lot of fun. Thursday we took them to the fireworks at Platt Fields, then Friday we went out to an acoustic folk night at Fuel in Withington and then on to a Zimbabwean Afro-Jazz band at Lloyds in Chorlton.

As far as my plans for November go, though, it was an enforced break which, it turns out, was a Good Idea (mark that for future).

Side achievement: Managed to go the whole night without alcohol. Actually got easier as the night progressed – saying no to the first round in the first bar was very, very tough.

Progress

After my minor breakdown last time, I have taken a metaphorical deep breath and have realised how silly I was being. One of the benefits of keeping a log like this is that you get to be a little bit more objective as time passes. Re-reading my post, I realised that I should just try focusing on one thing; not get distracted by email, Twitter and the like; and not feel like I have to do anything else.

Having decided this, I chose to focus solely on my screenplay today. Technically, I should be up to page 32 if I was on target (4 pages a day x 30 days = 120 pages or 2 hours of film). I was on page 12.

Results

It’s actually gone incredibly well. Focusing on one thing a day is a Really Good Idea (mark THAT for future, too).

I’m easily up to page 32, but more than that I have the entire plot mapped out. My characters are becoming more rounded (the antagonist is not necessarily who you think), I’m letting a lot of action tell the story and my dialogue is becoming more confident.

Best of all, the ideas haven’t stopped flowing since I took a shower this morning. That thing about getting Eureka moments in the shower is totally true, by the way.

Ideally, I’d like to get well past page 32 so that I’m ahead of the game as this week is going to be mostly spent on only doing one thing an evening. Haven’t decided what tomorrows is yet, but I’m hoping that it’ll be as good as today.

I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about this mission – feel free to leave a comment.

“…The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!”

- Robert Burns, To A Mouse.

I was going to use the first line of this excerpt of To A Mouse as a kind of clichéd introduction into how things aren’t going as planned, but then I read the whole thing. It’s actually really awesome – a scathing attack on man’s impact on nature together with a philosophical look at the pain and fear caused by our large frontal lobes.

Still not enough to stop me carrying on with this daft scheme, however.

How it’s going

Randomly is probably the best way of describing, which is why I looked for the quote. In my head, at the start of the month, it was going to be a little bit of everything every day, and it’ll all be done.

Nope. Not even close. I’m beginning to learn (despite the fact that this is about the hundredth time that life has tried bludgeoning me with this lesson) that I don’t work best to schedules. I get caught up in one thing, which becomes a kind of obsession that I can’t stop thinking about.

So, just do that thing until it’s finished and move on, right?

Yeah, this would be fine except I’m fucked up in the head. Basically, if I go at that thing full tilt I feel guilty because I’m not keeping up with all the other things that I’m supposed to be doing.

If I continue on my piecemeal approach, I feel rubbish because I’m not spending my time doing the task I really, really want to do and I end up doing pretty poor jobs on all of the things that aren’t this task.

Which is pretty damn stupid, right? Unfortunately, that seems to be the way my brain works. Doesn’t help that my first solution to the problem is to sack it all off and go out for a drink.

Alcohol may not be the answer, but at least it stops the question being asked.