Ah, well.

As for yesterday's entry, I'm in a better mood, but of course, the general feeling is still the same. Would you believe that before I came out here, I actually thought to myself that this was going to be easy?

In other words: It didn't occur to me that altering my entire life was going to be hard.

Oops.

It's a wonder that I've only been out drinking twice since I came here.

But!

I have a really good reason to go out for a drink tonight, if I so choose:

I finished the first draft of my screenplay.

It's exactly 120 pages of pure, $60 million opening weekend gold, baby.

Well, it's actually more like 90 pages of gold. I have a second draft to do, but that's fine. But, right now, I'm pretty damn happy, because I've got all my little plot points, deus ex machinas, denouments, and even my ducks lined up in a row.

We go to the Writer's Guild today to register them officially. Over the weekend, we're going to have a reader from an agency here look over them and give us notes. I'm excited for that.

Two summers from now, I'll let you know when and where you can see my name in 100 foot long letters across a screen.

Yesterday was great. We had a speaker who had written several films and created two television series. He asked us all to give him our first pages to read aloud in front of the class. He read mine, and I felt a little twinge of nervousness.

"FADE IN:

A teenager's messy bedroom. Clothes, books, CD's and trash cover the floor. A fishtank bubbles quietly in the corner.

In the fishtank, two dead goldfish slowly bob along the surface."

He stopped reading and looked up.

He said "This is great. I love it. Love it! I want to hire this writer!"

How good did that feel?

Pretty damn good, I must say.

Then he found a problem lower in the page, the fickle bastard.

Ah, well.

Everything gets fixed in the second draft.