You know, going into this whole naive endeavor a year and a half ago, I thought that having a blog would force me to keep my life in a long-term trajectory toward filmmaking.

It hasn’t.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not going to be a filmmaker - I will (I will be a filmmaker he thought in the cold New York black. I will! I will!). But which is to say that as I’ve discovered over the past year, maintaining a blog while working on my creative endeavors is rather challenging. Those times when I’ve been most involved in working on my scripts have been the times when I’ve neglected writing here, and vice versa - suffice it to say, there’s only so much writerly output in me, and I’m exhausting my creative energy right now on a long-term project that, in the end, is more important than working on a rarely read blog that’s turning more and more into some ongoing project about Carlos Saura movies and low-rated reality television.

The basic problem with this blog is that I’ve proven unable to maintain my stated goal of chronicling my creative work on it. What is there, really, to say about the writing process that hasn’t been said by more authoritative bloggers? I suppose there’s the personal experience of working on my particular projects, where my ideas come from, working through my own personal bugbears (as always, maintaining forward motion in the second act is the most challenging hurdle with Hey Jealousy). But I’m unwilling to post broad chunks of my own writing here, because this is the Internet. And I’m unlikely to change that policy any time soon - so what am I to do?

Do I continue making vaguely asinine posts about Carlos Saura movies and low-rated reality television, with the notion that I’m working on various projects somewhere in the background?

Do I minimize the off-topic content and post day-by-day diaries about my day-to-day and how that’s impacting my creative life?

To answer a question one reader put to me a few weeks ago: yes, I do have a five-year plan, though I haven’t really ever explicitly outlined it on this site and I’m not really on-track with it. I did sit down in April 2006, around the time of my 22nd birthday, and roughly sketch out when I would need to do certain things to get to where I was going.

Speaking of where I’m going:

I’m a little late to posting about this, but David Bordwell has a great post on his blog about the average age of filmmakers making their first films (30, and not 27, my intended debut age) that comforts me on an intellectual level but nevertheless makes me no less stressed out about the time bomb that is. I know that despite the numbers he presents for many of these filmmakers, they were well on their way long before they actually made their first features. Before Spike Jonze made Being John Malkovich at age 30, he had directed music videos for nearly a decade. Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs came out when he was 29, but he had made it when 28 and he had actually completed a (now partially lost, nevertheless horrible) film called My Best Friend’s Birthday half a decade earlier.

But then again, even this sort of navelgazing about When Certain Directors Did What is exactly the sort of self-defeating crap that allows me to put off making some movies of my own.

So let me tell you how that’s going. I’m buying a new computer in the next couple of months, a Macbook Pro, something I can do non-linear editing on with a degree of ease. I’m also bringing back my (hilariously old) video camera and will start doing little experiments with it. Nothing major - just little projects to see how various set-ups and ideas come out. Lighting exercises. Editing challenges. Just things to get me started back thinking about the craft of filmmaking rather than just endlessly scribbling in my pirated copy of Final Draft.

In the meantime, expect more posts about Kid Nation.

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