Musings & Thoughts for Friday, May 21, 2021, or: On Weekends, Writing, and Goalposts


Photo by Ben Mack on Pexels.com

Hi, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon on Friday, May 21, 2021. Here in New Hometown, Florida it is a warm, almost summery day; the temperature is 85˚F (30˚C) under partly cloudy skies. With humidity at 35% and the wind blowing from the east at 17 MPH (28 KM/H), the feels-like factor is 85˚F (30˚C). We can expect mostly sunny skies, strong breezes, and a high of 88˚F (31˚C). A huge swath of this part of Florida is under a “fire weather” warning, which means that the combination of drier-than usual air, strong winds, and high temperatures makes the possibility of brush fires quite likely. Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear, and the low will be 66˚F (19˚C). The Air Quality Index is 44 or Good.

Photo by the author

Well, the regular workweek is almost over, and another weekend is drawing nigh. Not that it makes much of a difference to me; the only thing that changes in my routine on Saturday and Sunday is that I put aside any work on the script I am working on – whether it’s actual writing or reading from the two “how to” books (Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field and The Screenwriter’s Bible by David Trotter) that I own on weekends. I obsess over any project I am working on for most of the week, so I find that taking two days off to mentally decompress is actually helpful to the creative process. (Of course, once I get a grip on the story and the characters taking the weekend off is less important. But when I’m working on a first draft, I usually need to step away from it unless I get smacked upside the head by an idea – whether it’s a character, a plot point, a line of dialogue, or even a visual detail – that is so good that it has to be written down right the hell now.)

I took this photo in the summer of 2014 during one of my evening walks to get away from the oppressive environment in my house during my mom’s final years.

Other than that, though, weekends for me are just “meh” days that are unremarkable and downright dull. They remind me of those not-so-long-ago days when I was taking care of my mom (spring of 2010 to the summer of 2015), except that at least here I don’t have to contend with a temperamental and possibly unstable half-sister and a dying parent.

And, of course, I’m also not having to deal with the daily grind of caregiving or the day-to-day worries of running a household under the worst of circumstances like I did during my last half-decade in Miami.

After an hour-long rest break, I’ll get back to work on the aforementioned script. I don’t have a specific “I must write X number of words by 6 PM” goal; I’ve tried that before and I find it frustratingly self-defeating, so I’ll just write as much as I can before my self-imposed 6 PM stop time. Again, stop times are like days off for me – necessary in the early stages of writing, less so once I am in the world I am attempting to create on Movie Magic Screenwriter 6. Right now, the 6 PM quitting hour is needed, since it’s like a destination on Google Maps that I need to reach, or else work becomes a chore and not a joy.

And on that note, Dear Reader, I’ll beg your leave. I have a few things to do before I can get to the business of being creative, so, “Ciao, for now!”

Published by Alex Diaz-Granados

Alex Diaz-Granados (1963- ) began writing movie reviews as a staff writer and Entertainment Editor for his high school newspaper in the early 1980s and was the Diversions editor for Miami-Dade Community College, South Campus' student newspaper for one semester. Using his experiences in those publications, Alex has been raving and ranting about the movies online since 2003 at various web sites, including Amazon, Ciao and Epinions. In addition to writing reviews, Alex has written or co-written three films ("A Simple Ad," "Clown 345," and "Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss") for actor-director Juan Carlos Hernandez. You can find his reviews and essays on his blogs, A Certain Point of View and A Certain Point of View, Too.

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