I'll be honest. There's been kind of a creative drought recently.
This wasn't helped by watching Die Hard 4.0 (I really prefer Live Free or Die Hard, but apparently that title wouldn't play over here in Free Europe, so what can you do?) because, well, it's kind of difficult to put into words.
See? Creative drought.
I always thought being a writer would be easy, somehow. An inside job away from heavy lifting, that sort of thing.
But I have trouble even considering myself as a writer, even though - as you can see, because you're reading it - I'm writing right now.
Let's start over.
I really want to talk about Skyfall, but to talk about Skyfall would mean talking about tuning out. So instead, let's wait until I've had the chance to see Skyfall again and, instead, talk about tuning out. Without, hopefully, turning out either on my part or yours.
I have this weird relationship with time, sometimes, and I suspect it doesn't make me unique in any way.
Normally, it manifests as - to borrow a phrase from William Gibson, describing a character called Laney - "pathological hyperfocus".
It means that if I'm doing something that triggers the right switch in my brain, I toggle over to this mode whereby I can go for hours at a time without even acknowledging the existence of the outside world.
Primary examples of this are video games (normal) and video editing (less normal). For example, when Spore came out I - much to the entertained bemusement of someone else - ended up playing it from evolutionary soup to galactic nuts in the space of seven straight hours, only stopping for biological necessities.
In terms of video editing, though, it's a mixture of hyperfocus and stubbornness, because video editing is all about solving problems until they give up and beg for mercy.
Given examples include 12 to 14 hour stints right at the fag-end of my Last Big Project, i.e. the 29 minute film that took seven months to make.
By the end of that I was basically - once my suite-mate had finished and handed his in - working the aforementioned twelve hour days just trying to finish and submit. But to phrase it like that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, and that's one of the conditions of the hyperfocus; firstly, it has to be about problem-solving, and secondly, it has to involve enjoying something, if only the smallest bit.
In gaming parlance, it's called grinding - i.e. doing the necessary actions to achieve your goals over and over again.
Then again, one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the same task but expecting different results, so film editing = insanity; modus tollens.
I miss it, though.
I don't have anything film-like to work on at the moment, nor do I have the equipment to do so, and I really don't have the time.
But I do miss it.
This is not a sane and rational confession. I'm confessing to missing frustrating, angry days spent sitting on shitty chairs in a windowless bunker shared with other people giving off that special mix of stress hormone that students have as the end of term approaches.
You can't even claim it's a kind of adrenaline junkie thing, because there's no adrenaline until the week before the deadline. It's just frustration then solution, followed by the next problem, repeat ad nauseam.
I appreciate that that's two latinate terms in italics in one article, but I only found out about modus tollens earlier this week, so... Deal with it.
That's the weird, sickness kind of addiction that filmmaking is, for me, at least. You make deals with devils and work for months to put less than half an hours' student film up on the screen, then you walk away, unsatisfied.
And then you want to do it all again.
Can someone else explain that to me? Because I sure as donkey don't understand it.
#Losing faith, chukkah? No way.#
So this has been a column about nothing, in its own way. But to justify that, at least I'm trying to actually keep writing.
Bah! Next week will be here soon, and with it, many things and worlds of promises.
Well.
You can dream, can't you?
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