I went to a seminar tonight given by a literary agent/manager about how to get published and produced. Earlier in the evening, I was at the adjoining bar/restaurant to the hotel called "Le Scene" and sat at the bar drinking wine and having dinner. I felt very driven sitting there at the bar eating and working on my novel. My dinner was good but expensive, and cost about $40 with wine and tip and I just had one entree and no salad or dessert. It was fun and a treat, and it did feel fun to sit and write. I was able to start work on chapter 11, and wrote two pages. I might have to sit at the bar of an expensive restaurant once a month and write only because it's a wild experience.

There was a party at the back of the restaurant, and there was a guy at the table wearing red cordurouy pants, a white shirt and leather jacket. Come to find the guy in the red cords was the literary agent guy from New York. I only knew it was him because another guy came in and sat with the party, whom I recognized as the person I took a screenwriting seminar from last year. The screenwriting guy was the one who said in the seminar if you're going to write a screenplay, you need to know about film history. And you know he was so right! I only took the two film history classes because of him, and I think the classes really added to my understanding of how a screenplay needs to be written.

The literary agent guy confirmed a lot of what I've thought about the book publishing business was like. For a book, he said you need a completed novel and it has to be a good product. Publishing is a business like anything else, and agents as well as publishers are looking towards the bottom line and need to know if your book is going to add to it. Alot of agents are also looking at books with movie potential or series potential, and want writers who want to write more than one book.

Literary agent guy said his company gets 200-500 submissions a week. That's a ton. They look at everything, but they're very picky and they only take on people not projects, meaning they want a writer who writes alot and can produce books. I liked this guy alot, and I got an intuition that this guy is going to be my agent someday. I hope it comes true. I have no idea how or why this would happen, but I like that I got the feeling. It means I'm thinking ahead for my writing.

But I'm really getting that I'm going to have to work a ton harder on my writing. I feel like my screenplay is 75% there, and my Texas novel is 50% there, and the only way my writing is going to improve is if I do more of it. No, more like heaps and heaps of it. Literary agent guy said he has a client who's written more than 100 short stories and can turn out a novel in 6 to 8 months. Now that's discipline.

I want that kind of discipline and enthusiasm for my work, and I think I'm getting there. Trying to write every day this month has been hard, but I think it's like anything else. You get used to it and the more you do it, the easier it gets. I definitely have to get a laptop. I love writing by hand, but writing by computer is just so much faster. I'm determined to make 2005 a breakthrough year for my writing, but I have a feeling that like everything else in my life, I'll do it backwards and it will still work. I'm not sure why, but it's just a feeling I get.

So this is weird. Last Monday and Tuesday I was a little down, and the same thing happened this Monday and Tuesday. What is going on?

I was in meetings from 10:45 am till 3 pm, and trying to get a project out the door in between my meetings. I didn't end up eating till 3pm and was so nauseated afterwards when I finally ended up eating. By 5:20 pm I thought I was going to seriously hurl, so I went home and got in bed and didn't wake up until midnight.

This always happens when I don't eat for 8 hours straight like I did yesterday. I get sick, so sick that I have to go to bed. I didn't write or work out, which I kind of felt bad about this morning. But I hardly slept on Sunday night, and on Monday night the wind was blowing so hard against my windows I kept waking up hourly.

I feel much better today, and am determined to write before my 6:45 pm seminar. No workout tonight for me, and no workout tomorrow either because I'm having someone come over to look at my heater. My heater isn't working properly and with all this rain, my place is freezing. But I'm definetly writing on Thursday night.

I wrote on Monday night when the rain was just coming down in buckets, and ended up reoutlining the last the five chapters of my novel. I thought I was going to end up with 15 chapters, but decided to combine chapters 11 and 13 and then chapters 12 and 14, which leaves me with a new chapter 11, chapter 12, and a final chapter 13 and 14.

I wrote the outline for Chapter 11, started the outline for Chapter 12. Chapter 13 and 14 are going to be short chapters, kind of like epilogues. I thought last night I would just nap and then wake up and type up the rest of chapter 10, but that didn't happen.

Next week is going to be worse. Tuesday night I start my greek drama class, Wednesday night is the Board meeting that I've been working on and need to attend to help with set up and clean up, and Thursday night I have theatre tickets. I'm going to have fit my writing quota in somehow on those days.

I can probably write on Thurday before I have to go to theatre since the performance doesn't start till 8 pm. On Wednesday night the Board meeting gets out 7 pm, and hopefully I'll be home by 8:30 pm. Tuesday is the iffy day where I'll have to figure out the logistics of when I might have free time.

I've been in a weepy emotional mood since yesterday. I just finished reading the last book, The Amber Spyglass, in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and the ending made me cry. Poor Will and Lyra! I was surprised by the ending, and didn't see it coming, although I suppose the clues were there.

The ending just felt so heartbreaking to me. Love is such a fantastic gift, it changes life, it changes everything, it has the ability to heal the world, yet it doesn't always mean a happy ending like in a fairy tale and everyone lives happily every after. Sometimes you have to soldier on because it's the only way to make the world right again, and because you can't live in each other's world. It's just so, so tragic. And I'm like this is what my life feels like right now, so, so tragic!

I think I have a good workplan for my screenplay. I'm not really happy with it and it definitely needs a third and final rewrite, but I think I'm going to enter it into a contest just to see how it does. This guy from my screenwriting class entered a contest and he placed, and his script was not very good. I'd like to have the experience of entering a screenplay competition, and to see how my script ranks.

My screenwriting teacher Julie said my script was good enough into a contest and even pitch in Hollywood if I wanted. I wasn't confident about my writing or pitching ability at the time, but you know it can't hurt to enter a competition. I'd also like to send it to the screenwriting prof at UCLA, who said people from his seminar could send in their scripts and he would review for free. But the UCLA guy will get the third and final version, not this second version. Maybe I'll even get feedback from the contest. I hear sometimes they do that. One can only hope.