Day: October 30, 2003

“You didn’t really think it was going to be that easy, did you?”

“You know, for a second there…yeah, I really did.” — Kill Bill

Got turned down for an editing job in Austin, TX. Sigh.

From a profile of Tina Fey, head writer at Saturday Night Live in this week’s New Yorker:

“If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”

Peter remembers a drawing that Tina made when she was about seven: it showed people walking down the street holding hands with wedges of Swiss cheese, and the caption read, “What a friend we have in cheeses!”

Lorne Michaels waves off Fey’s classification of herself as a square, and compares it to the tendency of the show’s first cast to claim they were rebels. “This cast is young. They’re ambitious. They pride themselves on being less self-destructive,” he said. “But we didn’t pride ourselves on being self-destructive in the seventies. People were experimenting with freedom. The spirit was more fraternal than maternal.” He added, “I think that being geeky is just another way of being Holden Caulfield or the Graduate. Comedy people are always outsiders.”

I’m starting (or maybe continuing) to have second thoughts about this whole novel-in-a-month thing. It’s that 50,000 word limit that I’m having trouble with. That’s six to seven pages a day, every day, from November 1st through the 30th. That’s roughly the equivalent of a short story every day. I have a tough enough time just with writing at all, and on my best days I’m lucky to produce one or two pages. Add to that the fact that I have to be at work every day, have other writing deadlines, and don’t expect to get much writing done at the end of the month around Thanksgiving…

Well, I understand the point of Nanowrimo, and I do need to write more, every day. But I honestly don’t know where I’m going to find the time or energy to jump in and start producing anything that approaches that kind of volume in that short a time span. I have the shape of an idea in my head, but I don’t know if it’s enough for a novel, and I don’t know if I can figure out how to start writing it by Saturday.