#as long as i finish it tonight. u will see it tomorrow. AHHHHH

[txmxkis]

y'all ready for tomorrow

[maggiejulienne]

2017 Midway Check-point and Writer Feelings

Hello, the internet!

2017 has undoubtedly been the best year of my entire life. It’s amazing what getting out of an emotionally abusive relationship can do for the mind, body, soul, and career! I highly, highly recommend it. I hear it’s a lovely time of year not to have been in one in the first place, but if that isn’t an option, telling him “boy, bye” is a excellent back-up plan.

So let’s re-re-re-re-re-rewind!

January

February- Asked to do a treatment for Someone Else’s Musical So I Can’t Tell You More which definitely went under the category of “labor of capitalism” rather than “labor of love,” but it was 

March - Demo recorded for Musical Chairs. 

April - Begin work on Monster Prom, an exciting new computer game, with one of my dearest school friends who I’ve known for more than a dozen years. 

May- Ahhhhh! PRINCESS TEN TEN AND THE DARK SKIES workshop in my homeland of Southern California!!! This trip was a dreamdreamdream.

June - Back in New York! Hard at work on Invincible, Monster Prom, and did a lyric brush up for Someone Else’s Musical Screenplay So I Can’t Tell You More But It Was Fairytale-Themed And Therefore Awesome.

July - The toughest month so far - one of my best friends went through a lot of really hard stuff back-to-back and since she doesn’t have a great family support system I really heavily took that on emotionally trying to be there for her and help her in whatever way she needs - she 0% put any obligation on me, but that’s where my soul lies so it’s always gonna be what it is. That being said, she’s doing MUCH better now and we’re both so much happier for it. I finished the last piece of Invincible materials needed for the author to start pitching to producers, and am now good to set that aside until the next step, when- and what-ever that may be. I saw a whole slew of friends, Natasha, Ashleigh, Hannah, Katherine, Hallie, Zach, their friends, all multiple times within a very brief time-span, and that was great.

So to recap, that’s one short film with my lyrics (Smile), two pieces for a collection of one acts (Alcestis: A Tragiquilt), three musicals based on pre-existing material (Invincible, Musical Chairs, Princess Ten Ten and the Dark Skies), one movie adaptation of a preexisting work of mine, two brush-ups on other people’s scripts (shh! you’ll never know), one computer game (Monster Prom) and a partridge in a pear tree.

That’s NINE projects for other people in six months. 

Holy kjahkjhkajehkehrh oh my goodness SO #blessed, so thrilled to be making my living as a writer, so happy to feel the validation that comes from having the same people hire you again and again because they like your work and they like who you are as a person and have them recommend you to others and you make new connections etc. It’s wonderful, truly, and it’s an amazing feeling and an amazing life.

Now. You will notice that conspicuously absent from the above are such phrases as “my original musical” “my screenplay” “my T.V. show”or “my novel.” And yet I have m-u-l-t-i-p-l-e of all of the above either finished or in-progress. Just in the past month or so when things were getting kind of “eh” in my personal life because of how much my friends were hurting and how deeply that affects me when it’s people I love, I really started missing my own work. Getting paid to write has been a double-edged sword in a way - it makes me feel more like a “real” writer in a very external, tangible way, it does that capitalism thing where I can feed and house myself, and it gives me hard deadlines and people to report to who believe in my work enough to have chosen me over everyone else. On the other hand, it gives me hard deadlines and people to report to who believe in my work enough to have chosen me over everyone else.

I haven’t stopped working on my own pieces during this time, and actually wrote my first-ever short film(s, two of them) since I’m starting to get anxious about getting my feature done and want to start making some kinda movie and it seems like all my friends have produced shorts at this point and YOLO. But I LOVE my feature so so so so much and it’s gotten almost exclusively positive feedback from everyone who’s read it, but hasn’t quite stuck the landing by finding the right person/place/thing with the right resources and the right opportunity at the right time. I may now have a production company for it but we still need to finding funding, and although it’s low-budget as far as feature films go ($500k-$1mil), it’s not exactly crowdfunding material. Mostly, with all these projects, especially the ones on strict timelines, I’ve started carving out time to make sure I’m continuing work on my Most Favorite Novel I’ve Started Since I Was An Adult, here after referred to as MFN.

Tonight, around 10:45/50ish, I got into bed to finish up some Monster Prom/Alcestis work before going to sleep (breaking my recently-instated rule of working on the couch in the living room and sleeping in bed, like a human, but hey). I was casually scrolling through Facebook when I saw an advertisement, inadvertently screamed, threw my phone across the room, curled up in a fetal position with my fists so tightly they hurt and yet I couldn’t unclench them, and sobbed myself to sleep.

WTF?! you ask (no, you don’t, I presume NO ONE will read this whole thing, but this is my e-journal, so I’mma post whatever I want)

I saw an advertisement for a book, the cover of which could easily be for MFN, and the title of which is one I have actually used at one point. I finally had returned to it and started actively scheduling ways to make sure I stayed on top of it, and someone had beaten me to the punch with a shocking level of specificity. There are a lot of things that make me feel strong feelings and my life is an emotional rollercoaster and I just don’t blog quite often enough to write about every single mood shift.

But I have literally never experienced a feeling quite like that in my 26+ years of being alive, and I didn’t know there were entirely new feelings left to feeling.

I’ve never been literally “paralyzed with emotion,” but that’s how it felt. As I said, I literally felt as if I could not loosen my fingers, could not move my knees from my chest, could not open my eyes. I just folded in on myself and fell asleep within minutes, something I haven’t done in weeks, because my body literally needed to shut off rather than deal with the emotional pain I felt of, in one picture and twenty-five words, feeling like a piece I have spent the past eight years working on had been rendered useless and defunct and - I’ve sat here struggling to think of a word to describe exactly what it was but the best I can come up with is - dead. And dead. It felt like MFN,this thing I love, was dead, had been killed by the unfairness of the universe that gave two creative souls the same thought and let one beat the other to the finish line.

What should make this less surprising to me is the fact that the darling young newlywed playwright assigned the Alcestis scene immediately after mine came up with - independently of me, having never met, never discussed the piece - almost the EXACT SAME premise and themes for his interpretation of the text.

(And this author’s book was published by the same publishing house that published my friend’s book that I was explaining to this gal I’m just starting to be friends with led to a kind of complicated dynamic with this other person da da da because of fucking COURSE it was)

Anyway it’s 6:51AM right now and I need to go to sleep so I can wake up and do the writing I’m being paid and/or asked to do rather than just writing about the writing I’m being paid and/or asked to do, so I’ll hafta fill in a few of the beats tomorrow but these are the bulk of my feelings and there’s just a lot of them lol. Mostly I hope that my current trajectory continues and maybe if my writing reaches a broader audience people can see these records of how I got there since we usually only see the sort of “overnight success” moments and miss all the work to get there.

So let the record show that for the first five years I lived in New York, I got a total of about four or five writing jobs, and now have had nine in the last seven months. I did a whole buncha acting in that time, but will soon be acting for the first time in a year and a half. So it took a long time of writing before people started asking me to write things on a (too???) regular basis, and now we’ll see how long it takes until people start asking me to write my own things and they’ll pay for them and let other people see them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

XOXO

gossiprat