How True

Last night my girlfriend and I had dinner with a friend. I call him that now because of what friends do for each other. Sometimes they give you tough love when you need it. A slap in the face and a little shake up about what you need to be doing with your life. This friend happened to read an earlier draft of The Face of the Earth and for some strange reason saw something in it. That was a while ago and he wanted an update. Noticing that my progress bar hasn't budged at all since we spoke last perturbed him.

"Got an outline!"

"Okay, when ya gonna write the script?"

"Well, I'm in this workshop."

"That's great, when ya gonna write the script."

All this in a serious but well-intentioned tone. All this to beat me into realizing the now. You have the now and it's fleeting. You know, the get busy living or get busy dying thing. No truer words spoken. A theme that's been all around me lately. After all, this is coming from a guy who got me to reinvest all this time back into this screenplay. Call it an intervention. If my girlfriend told me that it was planned all along I really wouldn't have doubted it. But it wasn't. Coming off a trip from the Toronto Film Festival, just a guy in town to do some business and then off to the Woodstock Film Festival to gracefully float about the room being the man. Screenwriter. Provocateur.

So here's the assignment. Five pages a day, new draft in forty-five days. Looks like I'm back in the twelve-step program.


Sincerely,

A friend of Bill