Timesuck
Hmm, a lot of my little projects these days are huge timesucks.
The plan today was to read all of the Chuck writing essays and Q&As, watch the first segment of the Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVDs, do some writing, read some Madame Bovary, and call it a day.
I guess somewhere along the way I forgot how many Chuck essays they were, as I often didn’t read them. I would just be sure to go to the site on the first of each month, grab the text (screen grabs, couldn’t get the actual text), and plop it into a folder. As it turns out, there seem to have been 24 essays total (although I am missing one of them), and it took hours and hours and hours to go through them all.
The upside is they highlighted a lot of the good choices I made, and showed me ways to improve others. It was also interesting to see how when it at first seemed like I was violating one of his rules, especially ones where he strongly encouraged you to not do something, my text started as a pure violation of the rules he laid out, but as they were rewritten, they changed slightly to adjust for the rule. Like, he says to never let your characters be alone and thinking, and when I read that, my first reaction was "Oh, shit! I do that a lot." But when I thought of the chapters where this occurs, I had already added specific devices where the narrator does interact with other "characters" to get him out of a pure monologue.
Strangely enough, Chuck started talking about Joseph Campbell in one of the last essays, so even reading these long-dormant PDFs on my computer transitioned nicely into my day as it had been planned.
Anyway, it’s after 9 p.m., and all I did was watch the end of Proof, work out, read all of the Chuck essays, and watch the Campbell segment. Not that I’m calling it a night or anything, as soon as I finish this up, I’ll be jumping into the book for a bit. I’m on the fence as to how to proceed chemically, though. I haven’t had any caffeine since early afternoon, an intentional plan to ensure I crash early tonight, but I might actually want to plow through a bit longer. Oh well, we’ll see what happens.
As for Proof, I wasn’t a huge fan of the play when I first saw it. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, just didn’t really wow me. Seemed overly geeky, with all the characters talking about advanced math theories, and just didn’t find anything with which to connect.
With that background, I somehow still give the movie a shot. Not sure why, but I totally get into it. I’d been putting it on as I was falling asleep for the past few days, but this morning was getting sick of seeing tiny segments of it, so had to plow through and finish already. The nutshell version is that Gwyneth Paltrow wrote this huge math proof that can potentially change the math world, but seemed unable to address the burden of having this huge task ahead of her now, despite it being her creation and her intellect. Draw your own conclusions as to what I took away from it, heh.
The GOOD news, and I know I’ve cried wolf about this before, but there is, now, absolutely nothing else that was originally (and wrongly) slated for me to do after this draft which was more properly suited to happen before it. I’m done. Nothing to do but… plow through 700+ page draft, and make it magic.
Gulp.
