Hi everyone. Yeah, I just wanted to talk about my day off of the internet for 24 hours. I kept a journal throughout the day. Actually, I had started off in the morning not feeling very good because I woke up at like five o’clock in the morning in pain. So I’m not going to read you that part because I’m just rattling on about my pain and how horrible that was. So anyway, I stayed off the internet for the most part. At one point I did go to Duolingo because I want to keep my streak going. That was the only reason I got on the internet yesterday, unless you count the ebook that I read. Okay. Technically, that’s the internet.
Well, at least I was reading a book as opposed to scrolling through a lot of social media crap or any other crap that I scroll through, which tends to happen unfortunately. It’s so easy to do. It’s so easy to slip into that scrolling mode, especially when you have people writing long ass things that they think are interesting. And actually nine times out of 10, they’re not that interesting. Anyway, a lot of words to say very little. Let’s put it that way sometimes. Anyway, I will just tell you this later. I’ll just tell you that because of the fact that I was offline for that time. Okay, I will start with this. This is what I wrote in my journal at Double-Oh 13 Hours. 1:00 AM No, that’s not 1:00 AM. That’s 1213. That’s 13 minutes past midnight. I dunno why I wrote one a.m. there.
I have to say this has been both the crappiest Sunday ever, because my hand is absolutely nutty and making me nuttier, but it was also the best Sunday ever because I stayed entirely almost offline.
No distractions, no emails, no social media, no Fakebook posts, no Twitter. Just focus on reading. Feels good, feels freeing. I got a group text from the Cafe Columbia group. I need to get back into meeting with them. I have to do more local events. Am seriously considering forming a Howard County based screenwriting meetup. We could do script shares, skill building exercises, collaborative stuff.
How to give notes to producers or give notes to other screenwriters who want to enter their screenplays into contests, because it’s very different, what you’re going to tell somebody who wants to enter a contest than somebody who wants to say, make their own movie. Very different. Or if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, if you’re trying to, you have a project and you would like to have the movie made, you need to get the money to make it right?
So depending on how big or small your budget is, you have to develop a pitch and so forth. You have to write the kinds of screenplay they’re looking for. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to get through to them. You have to be able to convince them why they should be interested in this thing that you’re working on. Without going into all that, I won’t go into all the things we could possibly do, but I will say that it was a wonderful day of great clarity. I was able to sit down, come up with a plan for this coming month, something that I have never really successfully done and certainly have not accomplished by sitting online reading articles about how to do it.
All of that has been not a waste of time, not a waste of time, but I’ve read enough of them, thank you. Now I need to do the doing part. And the doing part is always the hard part, right? So I will just say, this is my update. Not only having the crappiest Sunday ever, but the best Sunday ever, not being online. I read a lot more of this book.
I have to tell you, Chinese thinking is very different than Western thinking in so many very interesting ways. Lawyers would have their minds blown by this book. Honestly, the concepts of cause, proximate cause for any lawyers out there, you know, the term proximate cause.
I’d love to talk to a Chinese lawyer about how that works. If it works. Of course, I read a little bit more of Orwell.
He’s good. He’s very good. I also got to pick this up at a little free library. It’s called Radical Friendship, and it’s a good thing to read. It makes you kind of, it’s kind of expressing a hunger for the kind of relationships we don’t seem to be forming these days. Close, tight-knit bonds with people. Somebody outside your house who you’re deeply in friendship with, that you feel a kinship with. Actually, I’ve seen this actually, I’ve seen this online between people. I know these things can happen. Do women do it less than men? I don’t know. Do we do it more than men? I don’t know. All I know is that this book does have a tendency to focus on female friendships.
I think it’s geared toward women. You can and tell by the cover the colors, everything. It’s geared toward women. Anyway, I will just add that A Murder in Paris is a highly readable book, and I’m highly reading it right now.
Not this moment, but yeah, I am in the midst of reading it. I also spent the weekend, I spent all day, well, not all day actually. It really took only a couple of hours to read V for Vendetta. Okay, yeah, I read the script. That’ll save me the trouble of seeing the movie. I don’t really feel like watching this movie. That’s what it comes down to. It’s based on a comic. It’s based on, I’m sorry, a graphic novel by Alan Moore, and that’s basically a comic book, right? I mean, really when you come down to it. But I mean, it’s a high class comic book and high concept script.
It’s funny because I could see every twist coming. In fact, it almost felt like a flashback to me because I wrote a story when I was 18 or maybe actually 17, that had elements of this script in it. I was like, oh my God, that’s my story from, that’s the plot twist I had in my story from back when I was in high school. Oh my gosh. Except mine was very different. Mine was more like a mashup of, it was like fan fiction, Star Trek combined with something else. What was it, Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s right. It was very Orwellian. So I’ve always been influenced by Orwell. He’s been a big influence on me. Anyway, so anyway, that’s how I spent my weekend. I spent it reading. I spent it thinking, I spent it planning. I spent it quietly without the noise of social media to distract me.
And that was wonderful actually. Of course, there were a lot of things in this other script I was reading that I wanted to look up. I couldn’t, couldn’t go online, but I can do it now. So anyway, just wanted to say that taking the day off from social media and from online interaction can really, I think, be beneficial for everybody’s health.
I honestly think that, and if you sit down and just think about what your day was like and what you did, you may find that you’re getting more accomplished as a result. You might even find yourself thinking more clearly instead of reacting to things you see online, like, oh my God, look at this horrible thing is taking place or … relax, take a day off. Just don’t go there.
Try to enjoy being with yourself, sitting with yourself, thinking about what you want to do. Give this a day for you, it’s a day for you to relax and be your best self when you come back. It’s like taking a little mini-vacation kind of without going anywhere. Anyway, take care and I will talk to you later. Thanks. Be seeing you!