The only person stopping you writing... is you

Nobody will ever care as much about your career than you, so it's up to you to be take responsibility for that career. If you get an agent, they'll help - open the door, secure opportunities you'd likely never see otherwise - but they can't do the writing. You want to be a writer? You have to write. You want to succeed? You have to risk failure. A lot.

Confession time: my name is David Bishop, and I'm a lazy writer. Not all the time, but the first three months of 2013 have seen me take my foot off the gas. What have I done so far this year? Not enough writing. Used the Frank Deasy Award deadline as motivation to write a new project pitch - but I should have been writing a new script.

What else? Two opportunities that fell into my lap. Wrote a two-page pitch for a comics project that a friend passed on to me. I was happy with what I devised, but the go.no go decision depends on others, so it's out of my hands now. Might happen, likely won't - that's the reality of many projects. Scribes for hire suck it up and move on.

The other opportunity was a four-page treatment for a putative feature film. Had a blast developing that with a development exec. But the next step is dependent on decisions elsewhere [sound familiar?] I might try rewriting it for another medium in the meantime, to road-test the underlying narrative ideas and keep it active.

Those brief bursts of activity aside, most of my time has been swallowed by teaching and non-writing stuff I do for fun, like theatre directing. End result: not enough writing. No nearly enough. 2013 is a quarter gone and I got feck all to show for it on the writing front. So I'm getting my arse off the bench and back in the writing game.

To make that happen, I'm stripping away some distractions. This is my last written blog for April. the rest of this month I'll be posting Kiwi music clips, all of them pre-loaded and scheduled for release. I'm also swearing off my David Bishop Facebook account for the month of April. It's not my biggest time suck, but it doesn't help.

Lastly, I'm waving goodbye to Twitter for the rest of April [except once a day cross-posts for my blipfoto entries.] Anyone sees me on Twitter, feel free to call me out as a fraud and a weak-willed loser. I believe eliminating these distractions will help me focus on what I should be doing: writing. I'll report back in May. Onwards!