perpetual state of ketchup

Fell behind on the blog, which wasn’t surprising, work got busy, out of town on friday, helping move saturday, not enough hours in the day type of thing. I’m always half a step out of pace with any given thing. Deadlines, bills, etc get the half step back, and things like appointments, movies, I’m always half a step ahead. I hate being physically late to stuff. Weird contradiction, that. On the whole it’d certainly be better being on time or ahead of time for everything, but I’ve yet to manage that. If anyone knows the secret, please share.
It’s been threatening to snow here on and off, and I’m fine with that as long as I’m not on I-40 when it happens. Earlier this year, like Feb or March we had a bit of surprise snow, and people lost their fricking minds! I was on the highway for 11 hours trying to get home! Just as soon not do that again.
N&D will be going out for the big read here shortly, which of course means I think it totally bites the big one. Technically speaking it’s probably more than the 90% the meter over there shows, because there’s just some bridging scenes left here and there, no more than 10 pages. Why it doesn’t move though is I’m not really writing those scenes, I’m editing the previous stuff. Delay tactics. Rereading some of the stuff it strikes me as if I just couldn’t think of a good, original exciting way to write a scene so I just wrote it, boring and hackney’d and cliche, and figured I’d go back and fix it later. Except the whole script is like this now, and ‘fixing’ it isn’t going to be quick, or painless. Thus if you’re one of the people who agreed to do a whole read-through, feel free to point this out when you get to a section that’s unbearably bad. Red-ink. I think I’ll physically attach a red ink pen to the scripts when I hand them out. One of the hardest things when I’m asking for crit, is getting across the point that I want readers to be evil. I mean, okay maybe I’m masochistic, but I really almost want every other line to have a question beside it. Why does Max smoke cigars? Why is this set in Chicago? Why is the sky blue? Because this is what I have a hard time doing when I read my own crap. The justification may never make it into the story, but I want to have it onhand. I’m not going to go in and add a monologue about why the sky is blue, but I know if I keep asking the whole way through it’ll keep me on my toes enough to spot the really horrendous mistakes. That’s my theory at least. I need Snape to crit my script. I can feel the emotional scars growing now. So if anyone else wants the opportunity to berate and insult me, let me know and I’ll get you a copy when it goes out.
That’s it for today. Going to German Church service this afternoon. Need to brush up on my conversation skills.