January 1, 2014: IT BEGINS.

Last night, I went out to a New Year's Eve party at my good friend Rob's house. I'm a big fan of New Years, I'm a sucker for the symbolism it brings, so I'm always up for doing something party-ish. This year, however, I had to push myself out of my comfort zone a bit- for the first time ever, I actually kinda felt like staying in. 2014 is a big blank slate right now, and that scared me a little. Plus it'd been forever since I'd been to a house party and I'm starting to feel, God forbid, a little 'old' when I go to them these days.

This paranoia was indeed justified later in the night when a particular party guest, who clearly thought he was pretty seasoned and mature at the ripe old age of 24, totally freaked out when he found out I was 32 and had to call his girlfriend and a bunch of people over so that they could all guess my age and marvel at 'how great I looked'.

Anyway, I sucked it up and headed off to the party, and had an (unsurprisingly, now that I think about it) excellent night with some good friends, my brother and his girlfriend, my own partner, and a bunch of new people we met. There were lots of film-type people there (including a few other people working on feature scripts) so I blabbed and blabbed about how I was starting my feature at the start of the year, how exciting it was to be finally doing it, etc. Somewhere around the 2.30am mark, someone pointed out that the New Year had well and truly begun, so I had better start writing soon.

There was a slight moment of panic.

Luckily my friend Josh started crumping and we were all distracted by his hotttt dance action, but the initial pang was still there - this is actually happening now. After all this talk, I gotta come up with the goods.

We left the party at 4am or thereabouts, were home and in bed by 4.30am (a definite record for me - it's been a while since I've been out that late!) and didn't get up until early afternoon. We made a giant breakfast / brunch and then were too full to move. The afternoon lazed by. The clock was ticking. It was the first day of my Giant Writing Adventure, and by 4pm I still hadn't written anything.

So, with great concentration, I peeled myself from the couch, plonked down in front of my computer... and BEGAN.

It was pretty sweet. I wrote the first two scenes (about 8 pages or so) which meant that I was already smashing my lame 'one page a day' average.

Not a bad effort - especially since this was me, not that long beforehand:



It's only one day down. But I'm still pretty excited.