I think I'm depressed because my allergies keep me up at night and I'm not sleeping well. It's hard to sleep when you can only breathe through your mouth.

I'm also starting to freak out about being a professional writer, because it looks that's the direction I'm going in. I've had a few opportunities before to write for a living, especially when I was doing the PR thing part time. But I've always shied away from having my writing turn into a job. Because I've hated most of my jobs, I didn't want my writing to turn into something I hated.

But if I want to make money at writing, I'm going to have to start treating it like a job and like a profession. I'm going to have to treat writing friends like colleagues instead of friends, which is what writing friends are really. I mean, the only thing you really have in common with your writing friends is your writing, which means they become like work friends, so you have to be professional at all times. After all, one of your writing friends might be your editor one day, you never know.

But I think I'm ahead of my own writing time time table. It usually takes five years for any artist to develop their style or in the case of a writer, their writing voice. I started seriously taking writing classes in 1998, so I've only passed my four year anniversary of writing. I thought I was already on year 5, but I'm not. I still have one more year to develop my writing voice.

Maybe that's what was freaking me out. I thought I was in year 5 of my progress and I wasn't measuring up to where I expected to be with my writing. But I'm only in year 4, which makes total sense because I'm only now discovering my writing voice and my style. I still have a year to perfect all of it.

Thank god I realized this, because I was starting to think that I was seriously behind in my creative development. I'm right where I should be.

This whole screenplay class is stressful. I think I'm in a class with people who seriously want to write screenplays for a living. It's like their chosen profession. And me, I'm just dabbling in it so see what it's like. Everyone in the class has gone out and bought the expensive screenwriting software. Now either money is overflowing out of the pockets, which hardly seems likely or they're really serious.

No wonder my screenwriting class reminds me so much of one of my acting classes. It's because everybody is deadly serious except me. And I'm getting the same reaction too, I really think they're all posers and I don't like them. I don't think they like me either so it's mutual. And what's so ironic is I have yet to hear one story idea that I'd pay $9 to see as a movie. No one in the class is that great of a writer and their storytelling abilities aren't that great either.

I know I can tell a story from my storytelling class, but I'm not sure anyone in the class can. If the can, I haven't see evidence of it yet. Two people are writing stories about teens and one is like that Jessica Alba show on Fox about the school for "altered children". Like how dervivative is that. That's been done before and done very well. I'm such a mean person, aren't I?

I really like everyone in my screenwriting class. They all seem like nice people. I just don't feel very comfortable speaking in that class and I feel kind of bad about that. I know I should contribute more to the class discussions, but honestly I don't really have anything nice to say about anyone's screenplays, so I stay silent.

I know I need to find something I like in each screenplay. A leader in a communications seminar I took said you have to find the gold in what people are saying if you want to communicate with them. I'm going to have start doing that in class and at least find one good thing to say about each person's screenplay. Everybody else in class volunteers their opinions very readily no matter how stupid or dumb the comments seem. I need to figure out a way to do this but not seem vapid. Most of the time, people in class just seem to talk to hear themselves listen and don't seem to really pay attention to what a person's screenplay is actually about. But whatever. At least it sounds like they're giving feedback. Never mind that most of the comments have no substance or weight ... at least they're commenting.

I'm going to bed early tonight. I'm thinking if I stay in bed longer, I might actually get more sleep even if I can't breathe half the time. You know, double the time of actual sleeping. My life is so miserable when I'm sleep deprived!