Plan Vaguely

Last week I worked intensively on my next hybrid essay, a study of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. I'm nearly finished. It's less hybrid than the pattern has been so far, as I didn't have any ideas for a thread of fiction to weave in. Instead, I integrated quotes from Cixous, repetitive thoughts, and, if I'm lucky enough to find a graphic designer to help me, a few diagrams. The only titles I've come up with are either lame or obvious, so I'm hoping a good one comes along soon. I wanted to submit it to True Story, because I thought it might wind up long enough (>5,000 wds), but it did not. So who knows.

It's good to be almost finished with this one. Dielman is the most sophisticated film I've written about for this collection so far, the least mainstream. I worried about how that would impact my writing about it, but it seems to have come out okay. Also, the more of these I write, the less it seems like a fluke that I'm writing them, and the more it feels like a collection. That's a big relief.

Three more to write this year. Next is Last Tango in Paris, which I'm not really looking forward to seeing again, but which makes a point I've never seen another film make. I hope to finish that one before the end of July. In August I've arranged to spend a week away, in a nurturing creative environment, and I want to draft the one about Mildred Pierce there. (I was also thinking about starting on a bigger project involving Plan 9 from Outer Space during that week, but I applied for a couple of residencies with the Plan 9 project so maybe I should leave it alone for now.) The final hybrid essay will be on The Misfits, and my calendar says "fall" for that.

I didn't want to give myself really tough deadlines in case some other project or job became a huge, unexpected time-suck. There's nothing worse, for me, than setting a goal and not meeting it. Doing that makes me feel worthless - a whole different thing than just reworking a calendar. I can make writing plans a few months in advance, but beyond that I try to plan vaguely, then sharpen up my intentions when the time comes. If the next two essays go really well, I might end up finishing the Misfits essay in September, but I'm not ruling out being in-progress on it by the time December comes.

I also wrote a handful of other things, articles I didn't expect to write and a couple of reviews. And I read a bunch of books and sent a bunch of pitches and shot my mouth off on Twitter, resulting in more opportunities, for some reason. I'll never understand this. It's like how, in Mass Effect, rude-ass Shepard is treated exactly the same as kind-hearted Shepard. Why. People should be nicer to nicer people, shouldn't they?

I continue to count down the days until my little women's fiction story, "After Gardens," releases from the Wild Rose Press. You can preorder it on Amazon here. Eight more days!