I realise with a start that I have been home for nearly three weeks. I am plodding on very slowly with the script and made a little progress today, but have annoyingly neither managed to work properly or have a holiday, just some unsatisfactory combination of the two. And it's led to me not being relaxed and not having my script finished. Balls.
At least I was a bit more focused today and lifted myself out of the mini-slump of lethargy that I've been trapped in. I went to the gym and didn't stuff my face with junk food (oh yeah, you know what it's called now don't you, you Mastermind loser?) and even got round to signing the second half of the limited edition Talking Cock programmes. And yes, the first green shoots started peeking through the field of fetid shit that is the sitcom script. For some reason I always think it's going to be easy and that I'll write a script in a week and it will all flow easily and be brilliant. Which is odd because that has never been my experience of writing. It's always stressful, depressing and stultified, I am never able to sit at my desk for more than twenty minutes and am constantly distracted by the tiniest thing and I am always convinced that I am useless and washed up and that even if I somehow manage to cobble 30 pages together it will be rejected.
That ALWAYS happens.
So why do I always forget that and even imagine for a second that it might be easy?
It's because, as I have discussed many times before in the last ten years, the euphoria of finishing a script and the productive last few hours that lead to that moment wash away all the pain and self-hatred and doubt.
But unlike Adam Sandler I am creatively hobbled by the fear of writing something that is just not good enough and sometimes that means that nothing gets written at all.
I fear success as much as I fear failure.
I think I know that if I get this script right and I am lucky enough for it to find its way to the desk of an executive willing to take a chance on something a little bit crazy that it could do well. But if I get it wrong there's a danger it will land on the desk of the executive who commissioned Big Top and they will green light it and the car-crash disaster that follows will end my career.
I have carved out a lucrative niche of writing a TV script a year which I get paid for but which never gets made. Actually getting something on might be the worst thing that could happen to me.
But the self-doubt and procrastination are all a part of the process. It's just annoying that as usual the work I have to do will expand to exactly fit (with a small amount of overflow) the time that I might have had off. But I will rest when I am dead. And also holiday. I will have my cadaver sent to a tropical beach so it can be left rocking and rotting in a hammock. It might sicken the living tourists, but I'll have paid my fucking money and won't even be able to eat the buffet breakfast so if they don't want a corpse in a hammock festering in direct sunlight then that's their problem not mine. I will have earned that holiday as much as they have. More, because I waited until I was dead to enjoy it. I don't believe in Heaven so this is all I have to look forward to. My decaying flesh being pecked off my skellington by a flock of exotic birds and rodents. If I can't even have that then I'd have to question the meaning of life itself.
It's all right for you. Even the most dedicated fan of my stuff can only really spend about an hour a day in my company. I am stuck inside this stupid, self-defeating, mediocre brain all the time. I can't escape it. Even in the midst of the self-induced coma that is Adam Sandler's worst film my brain is still ticking over and thinking things. I for one will be laughing when a Sharp-beaked Ground Finch is pecking at it. "What are you going to think about now?" I will be shouting at my brain, "Not very much is the answer, what with you being dead and all pecked up. Think of something now if you can." BUt for once my brain will be empty and on its way to becoming Sharp-beaked Ground Finch shit.
So yeah, anyway, what I am saying is that the holiday is on hold.
