Homer’s Revenge

Well.

Chalk it up to bad luck or the petty whim of some minor writing god . . . but I’ve just heard that I’ve got got another year at least before the director who originally asked me to work on an adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ will be anywhere near ready to look at a script.

Another year.

I’m already four months past the original production date, over a year beyond when I first started writing, and nearly three years after I was first approached to work on the script.

I’m rounding the corner into the sixth draft this week. This was the big one, the “cut out everything that isn’t worth a second of stage time” draft before I sent it off to the director.

Six drafts. That’s a lot of words, a lot of pages, a lot of paper. I’ve gone through so many copies that the lumber industry has christened a logging truck in my honor.

More than half of me wants to bind it up in papyrus, dip it in molten wax, and bury it in the backyard: “Right, I’ll dig you back up sometime when hedgehogs start hibernating…” And then get to work on something else.

But there’s another piece of me that’s saying “If you don’t finish this draft and the next one, it’s just another failure on the list. And going back to it will feel like the worst kind of torture.”

Funny thing is, this second voice is the same one that’s been bitching and moaning and pissing the past few months about how much I hate what I’m doing, how bad the writing is, how it’s too long, too confusing, it’s over written and under developed . . . and so on, and so on.

Someone asked me once how I knew when a piece was finished, how I knew when it was ready to send it out.

And I replied that if there were no more typos and I hated it, it must be ready.

Well, I hate it a lot already. And, this time next week, I know I’m going to hate it even more.

Hopefully most of the typos will be gone by then.