Chasing The Good Idea

So I've been in something of a writing rut recently.

Mostly it's a time management problem. Work is busy, and when I'm busy, I don't have the time to write, while I'm so burned out thinking about other people's scripts that I don't want to tackle mine.

(My mother is right, I should have become an accountant).

I took the weekend off to take my wife south for her birthday, and we had a relaxing time knocking around the area about 25 miles north of San Diego.

We did go to the Del Mar track for a while, but honestly it's not the most user-friendly track; it's a long walk from parking (even with the tram, which doesn't actually go to the parking lot that most people wind up in) while the betting lines are huge as well. We wound up taking off after a couple of hours, and blowing off Gnarls Barkley, rather than fighting the crowd to see a concert where it wasn't even clear where the concert was being held.

Santa Anita is better.

Anyhow, the point really is that on the way down I pitched my wife this thriller idea I've been toying with for a little while, a violent, definitely-R tale that I wasn't sure what her reaction to would be. Because there's some dark stuff in there.

Not only did she like it, but she helped me brainstorm an even darker ending. Heh.

So I've been wrestling for a while with the question of what to focus on banging out this summer. I was working on a comedy, and it's first 40 pages got a good reaction in group, but I pulled it back because I really needed to go back and work out the plot, before I wrote myself into a corner.

I'm also concerned about its possible resemblance to the upcoming Ricky Gervais film GHOST TOWN, written by David Koepp and John Kamps. If anyone has a line on that script, let me know.

So I'm leaving the comedy on the hydraulic lift for a while, and I'm going to try and bang out this thriller, which is one of the rare things I've set out to write that doesn't have some sort of supernatural/fantasy element to it.

I'm going to try and reinstitute the old hour-a-day thing, though maybe not today, because I have a pile of work left over from not doing it over the weekend. Sigh.

*******

THE DARK KNIGHT did a solid $75 million for the weekend, breaking the ten-day record by some huge margin. Good for it. I still haven't seen it yh I wwillet, but I will.

STEPBROTHERS did a strong $30 million. X-FILES only did about $10 million.