Oh God this is ironic – I'm writing as a displacement activity for not writing, if that makes any sense.
Deadline for the Channel 5 sitcom script call is today, March 31st. I don't have a hope in hell of completing my submission because of the time I've lost to illness in the last week. So this evening I sat down to put together notes and summaries and character profiles and a whole lot of other stuff so I had something to send them, in the hope they'd bend the rules and consider that in lieu of a completed episode.
And what happened? I found myself writing the script.
That was seven hours ago, it's now nearly 4am, and I've barely come up for air since. I need to complete one scene – quite a short one – and I'll have written right up to the commercial break.
Which is fantastic, but also completely useless, as I can't just send half a script any more than I could send the less-than-quarter that I had last lunchtime. I still need the bundle of other material which, right now, is more important than the script itself.
And, of course, I haven't prepared one iota of that stuff.
You see – I'm writing as a way of avoiding not-writing, which is way screwed up however you look at it.