Suleyman Films

Happy Friday, All!

This week’s blog will be a bit shorter, but that’s because I am trying to keep on top of some of my projects. Recently, I purchased a set of boards from The Container Store (yes, they sell more than overpriced plastic bins. Who knew?) in an attempt to corale the mess that is my creative life. I even bought some index cards from Amazon to feel extra official.

The tools of the trade.

So, what all is going on? Well, for anyone who has read my short story collection, you’ll know there are some typos there. That’s because for the countless hours I spent revising the stories, a lot of grammatical and spelling-related stuff broke through the net, which is my tired set of eyes. So, I wanted to begin revising that (number one on my board). After receiving oodles of feedback from my last residency at Wilkes University, I also want to revise the Nth draft of my novel, The Exorcist Archives. Number three is to start working on my screenplay for my screenwriting class despite that part of the class taking place next fall. I also want to revise my previous script, which earned me a quarter-finalist status for The Big Break.

Oh, and I also need to keep writing my novel.

Oh, and I need to do schoolwork.

But how do you tackle all these projects at once?

I’m not too sure. The board doesn’t help, nor do my neon-colored index cards. They do help make my little office spot look more official, so there’s that. Small victories.

For me and the creative process, I try to keep a schedule. Wake up, have breakfast, get to work, do chores, do some more work, and wonder where the hell the day went. How does that schedule work when we run out of milk and eggs? Or when we get a cat who needs to go to the vets? Or when my wife has some time off, and I want to spend it doing anything but working on revising thousands of words on a Word Document?

Lately, for me, it’s been trying to work on one thing versus working on everything. I want to make a second edition for my short story collection and stop feeling embarrassed about all the typos I somehow missed, so that’s been my big ‘thing’ this week. And by this week, I mean as of yesterday. But there is satisfaction in making progress, even if there is still much work to be done. Yesterday evening, I looked at the number of mistakes Grammarly flagged (still in the thousands, mind you) and was happy to see that it had a few hundred fewer errors. Sure, like, 50% of those flagged ‘errors’ are missing commas, but still.

I was happy with the progress, and that made me happy.

This week has been off for many reasons, but as it closes, I can look back at it as less of a time period in which I made little progress on my revisions or screenwriting but as a week where I plugged away and made a few hundred adjustments on one specific project. Any progress is good progress, something I try to remind myself daily. It can be hard to see the end of what is essentially a never-ending project (writing a book), but with every page I write, I know it’ll get there eventually.

So, how do I manage working on all these self-assigned tasks?

I don’t know.

But I don’t suppose I have to. I just have to keep writing and see where it takes me.

Until next time.

P.S., if you have any suggestions for working on a ton of stuff at once, I’m always open to ideas.