Actually at work now; early shifts, not always easy to get out of bed. Saturday was basically the only day this week that I had to myself but they asked if I could work. Can’t really afford to say no to shifts right now, especially not when it’s a shift which pays time and a half. So this will be a week with pretty much no time at all which also means that simple things like cleaning have to suffer. End of next week it should ease up though.

Yesterday I went to the hospital with my mother again and I will have to do the same on Monday. She’s getting chemotherapy which was expected but it was still a bit of a shock to her. She even talked about giving up her dog if she has too much trouble with the chemo. I tried to dissuade her from that seeing a dog is also a companion, so it’s not just a burden.

Having his much work this week also means that there is very little time for script stuff. On the train there hasn’t been much chance to do so either, busy trains, delays, all sorts of things.  So there has been general thinking but nothing substantial. I really don’t like having no time for myself at all.

So today I went to the hospital with my mother again, results sort of expected. I however did not expect that I would have to take her to hospital again on both Friday and Monday. So that basically removes any free time this week as I have work on Thursday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. You only have one mother though.

It also means little time for conceptual script work, except for on the train. Though I’ll be on the train quite a lot so maybe I will get something done. I actually had ideas for two new scripts, one more promising than the other I think though. It’s all still in the conceptual stages, I have quite a few concepts already. Destiny still has priority though.

Still annoying, I got called three times today about work.  They actually called me while I was on the toilet if I could be at work in 45 minutes while I was over two hours away at my mother’s house. That’s besides having to take her to the hospital. Yesterday I signed a new three month contract though, it also might be my last. We’ll see how the financial crisis affects travel in the next couple of months.

I actually wrote one blog entry while I was at my mother’s place for over a week but it’s on my laptop and I can’t be bothered to boot that up right now, so I’m not posting it. Not that there was anything special in it. Luckily everything is fine with her and the strangest thing is that she has no pain at all.

Now for the big news; I finished TH, registered it with the WGA and submitted it to a competition. The Big Break competition which is run by the Final Draft people. It might not be the best choice in competitions in this case seeing it doesn’t offer any coverage but it’s a big one. If you don’t take a chance once in a while what should you do? I should be taking more risks in certain ways. I don’t like certain situations I’m in but I’m also chicken to change them, the script writing is a way to break away from that.

I already started work on the next one, codename Destiny. Now this is a concept I came upw ith fairly recently but to me it seems to be the one with the most potential. Again I’m being a bit weird with genres as it’s best described as a modern fairytale, fantasy type of thing. That’s all I can say about it so far, really only in the early concept stages. Trying some other ways of developing the concept compared to what I did before. The new way involves colored pens and blank sheets of paper instead of ones with squares (I don’t use lined paper).  That is only for the conceptual stuff though, later on I’ll return to normal notes.

So what do I expect from the Big Break competition? Absolutely nothing. I’ll see what comes of it, seeing I don’t get any coverage I probably will also enter TH into other competitions where you do get coverage. Though with that I would be nervous what people think of it, without the feedback you’ll never know though.

Off we go to my mother’s place. I guess I’ll be somewhat active on Twitter, that’s doable on a phone. Otherwise nothing happened since yesterday of course. Though I did had a good night of sleep which I didn’t completely expect, I don’t sleep eight hours that often.

About the short film script I wrote, I didn’t register it seeing I don’t think anyone would want to use it. So I did post it on a forum and I also put it online. So it can be found here.

So tomorrow I go off to stay with my mother for a week or so. Depending no how everything goes with the surgery and everything next week. I can honestly say that the tension is mounting more and more. Though my mother called me and said that I should take care of the clogged drain when I’m there. I think she’s in a way trying to find distractions which is very understandable. Though the drain did have some issues recently. One good thing about tomorrow though, I will have my mp3 player back. Left it there the last time and it didn’t help that my spare is also there.

My sister is annoying without even trying at times, so she wants to be there for my mother’s surgery to support her and also help take care of her after the surgery. That will be very useful when she shows up the night before the surgery and leaves again the day after she gets out of the hospital. Yes very supportive. The intention is also that her boyfriend tags along, honestly I don’t think he should be there. I believe that mother doesn’t want too many people around so I don’t see why he’s there. Though my mother figured I would have a problem with it. I can honestly say that I don’t have a problem with him, he’s a nice guy; I have a bigger problem with my sister. She’s been nothing but inconsiderate recently, this is just  another sign of that.

Nothing new on the script friend except for some random minor ideas as I was busy all day. Think I can get something done when I’m with my mother, need something to keep my mind occupied besides  my mother and the clogged drain.

Six more days and my mother goes under the knife; somehow that is always on your mind. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing it’s always in the back of the mind somewhere.  A lot of different emotions about it, I really should learn to channel those emotions better into creativity. Somehow I’ve never been fully able to do that.

Though yesterday on the train ride home I had a bit of inspiration. I sat there  with my notepad just staring into the starting twilight and just try to blank the mind. Just writing down random things and I think I’ve actually come up with a solution for something that has been bugging me in the TH script, the introduction of the end was just dragging on a bit. It’s a very simple solution but often those are the best. Don’t know if I will expand on that later today seeing I also have some other stuff to do.

Yesterday at work I actually fixed a problem for one of my superiors. Her computer  crashed last year (failed motherboard) but she still wanted to save data from the hard drive. One professional, one police officer who works computer crimes and one amateur told her that the hard drive was dead. So I took my external hard drive bracket and laptop with me yesterday. I had all the data she wanted on a DVD within fifteen minutes, the hard drive was perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with it at all. Funny how some people call themselves experts; I don’t and I can fix it. Makes you wonder.

Might have to work tomorrow but if I do I’ m going to hate it, I know that much. For one the date of the 9th of June draws closer every day and second the job I have to do in that specific case. I really need to get out of there……

I see that now I’ve linked this page on my Twitter I’ve gotten visitors. I will have to see if that was a good idea in the long run ;).

So today it’s Pentecost, not that it means anything to me seeing I’m atheist but it’s still somewhat odd. It’s officially a holiday but no one seems to care about that anymore, the grocery store was open as on a normal Sunday. Not that I complain about that, I actually needed something.

Somehow my hard drive is getting slower and slower, I know that Windows told me that it’s failing but still. I just don’t want to do a complete new install of Windows, nothing worse. Woudl also mean that I have to talk to someone at Microsoft and try and convince them why I needed to re-install Vista yet again. Still hoping it won’t fail and that the slowing down is due to certain things I’m doing right now.

I also joined Twitter yesterday. Why? I don’t actually know, probably because so many people are doing it too now. I never did it with any of that myspace junk but Twitter can’t really hurt, it’s only short messages. The interaction with people on Twitter also seems fun enough. It’s also far more direct than any of those myspaces and facebooks. It’s simple, I like simple things. Does that show from the design of this blog?

This breast cancer thing with my mother is getting weirder and weirder. I’m starting to wonder if the entire country knows by now, the possibility that the family wants to spread the news themselves is lost on people.

So I added all the posts I wrote in the past week, can’t be bothered with one right now though. So this one was actually posted when it was written.

My mother is back home so that means that I’ll be heading back home tomorrow. So this is the last post which will be made which doesn’t match its publishing date. Not that that really matters as it’s only for personal use really. I actually did go to the vet today and I did write one blog posting for one of the more visitor heavy blogs (the secret one).

Other than that nothing really, just waiting for mom to get home and some minor stuff. So tomorrow I’ll head home and catch up on my email though that won’t be too bad. I will have to filter all the spam of course.

On Friday it’s back to work, I traded my shift today from an early one to a late one. Basically only doing a co-worker a favor. That and I hate the 7.30AM shift, I prefer the 3PM shift actually. That’s also the shift I have on Saturday so it’s a bit of regularity as well. After that I don’t have any scheduled yet, so plenty of time next week it seems. So I can just catch up on some stuff and also do some major cleaning.

I also want to go to the gym once or twice, even though it seems my and still isn’t alright yet. I have to go back at some point though so I’ll just see how it goes.

So I pretty much did what I set out to do today, I finished proofreading TH again today. As I figured there was less to change towards the end though I did had to do some tweaking. Even though you think these things through so much you always make mistakes. Just today I noticed that I didn’t actually introduce one of the main characters by name. I would call that quite a major oversight though something like that is easily fixed.

I didn’t write anything new, the inspiration didn’t come today. Which is too bad but at least I got something done. I had to take care of other things anyway seeing my mother comes back tomorrow. Though I didn’t go to the vet because of the weather, I don´t have a car here right now so I would have needed to walk. Can´t really show up with a dog to get her shots when she´s soaking wet. Maybe tomorrow, we´ll see.

I didn’t write anything for the blogs today as I said that I wouldn’t, wasn’t really inspired to do so anyway. It’s not like I’m in a rush to get stuff finished for that right now. I don’t have to post that stuff the minute I get home and I have access to the internet again.

Actually got an extra shift at work this week, originally I only had a shift on Friday but today they called and asked if I could work a late shift on Saturday. Seeing I get time and a half on Saturdays I said yes, also a pretty quiet shift usually anyway. Earlier this week the temp agency also called about extra shifts at a different location, three actually. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

Honestly I don’t know what their malfunction is. They have my availability schedule so why on earth would they call me? They know I’m not available for most of this week and they know that I work on Friday. This isn’t the first time that something like this happened. I though the most useless person working there was gone (she’s actually in charge of her own branch now, that’s bound to fail) but I guess I was wrong. Just read the bloody schedules.

Quite annoying anyway, you can’t actually go away for a week without being called about work. Though it’s not just the temp agency that does it, a co-worker asked if I could pick up one of her shifts on Thursday. She got the suggestion to ask me from our scheduler who knows very well that I’m not back yet on Thursday. That’s a lot of unnecessary phone calls that are being made. Sometimes when I’m off for a couple of days I’m tempted to turn of my phone. The scheduler even called one of my co-workers while she was out of the country on holiday.

You try and get away from work for a little while, just shut off and do something else and you’re unable to. Even though the two calls today were very short it still screwed with the rhythm of the day as I was just proofreading TH. Can’t say that it really influenced it but maybe it did. My very own butterfly effect, something I think quite a lot about actually. What if? It’s one of the questions in this world that can’t be answered.

I never really said why I write movie scripts, besides the obvious reasons of it being an artistic expression, send a message you believe in, a way to make money (even though you have to be very good to make a good living out of it) and all sorts. For me the one is that I don’t want to be forgotten. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be famous. Screenwriters rarely do get famous. I just want my little bit of eternity and general acceptance.

Right now I can’t say that I feel very accomplished. I have a pointless dead end job, I’m not in a relationship and my circle of friends is limited (not that I’m an asshole, people usually like me. I just suck at keeping friendships going. I’m an extreme example of out of sight out of heart) and there are several other things (I really should get my diet going again, I keep delaying it, it’s not like it didn’t work before). So I can’t say that I’m really happy right now.

I know very well that a movie script isn’t a direct way to happiness. The script would have to be good and it would actually have to be made, I’m very aware of the fact that far more scripts don’t get made than that do get made. Doesn’t mean I can’t hope, if you don’t have hope there wouldn’t be a point to writing. Why would you write something when you’re 100% certain that it would never be made? I know I’ve written scripts that never had the intent of being made but those were for practice. I mean come on, why would Disney make a Hannah Montana episode where Miley is a serial killer? (I actually added that script to the site recently and can be found here)