It is October the 19th, Constant Reader, and my blog post is going to be rather terse this week. Not that there isn’t a lot to talk about, because there is. The pandemic is still raging, as is our election season, each offering their own existential threats to our Republic. The Tony Award nominations were finally announced, quarantimes notwithstanding. The actors’ unions have gone to war with each other as to who has jurisdiction over the remote productions we’ve been making do with over the past seven months. I had a play of mine performed over Zoom this past weekend.
And I’m not going to be writing about any of that.
Because, again, it’s October the 19th, and the submission deadline for the script I’m currently working on is November the 18th. So I have one month to finish it. And at the moment, I’m maybe a quarter to a third of the way through a rough draft.
I’m more than a little bit worried here.
It’s not that I can’t finish it, of course. Plenty of pieces have been drafted in this sort of a time frame. The fastest I’ve ever drafted a full-length dramatic piece, in its entirety, has been three weeks. (There was also that time in college when I frantically had to write 90 pages of a creative writing assignment in 48 hours, but that brings up some terrible memories I’d rather not think about write now.). But that requires a heck of a lot of time to sit down and write, and a heck of a lot of time to focus, and in the world we’re currently living in I don’t have very much of either.
The thing that sucks is the sense that I might fail to make this deadline despite doing everything right under these extreme circumstances. I haven’t blown anything off; I steadily researched and prepared everything over the summer, outlined and prepared during September. I’ve juggled these demands against my day job, and my hosting job, and my other writers/performers group. By any reasonable standards, I’m a successfully functioning adult. And yet I may have nothing to show for it.
Again, I have 31 days in which to complete this task. That can be both an endless expanse of time and a blink of an eye, and I don’t know which of the two it will prove to be, and won’t know until those 31 days are past.
I’d worry about this some more, but time spent worrying is time not spent writing.