Please

I had a bit of a breakthrough the other day during a lull at work. I picked at the current scene and asked myself what purpose it served. Bar scenes can easily be cliched, and therefore highly entertaining, just not the way the authour intended. My problem lay in the structure. I have two punchlines in that scene. By reversing their order everything is much stronger. Writing is not the chore it was last week.

I'm still plodding along. Mostly because that's my internal speed these days. Writing, walking, thinking; I'm merely taking my time. I get every where I need to and that's what counts. I wonder if I've missed things because of rushing around trying to be all things to all people. So I'm practicing more mindful interactions with life.

As Alex is my hero, I'm turning much of my subconscious focus to him. I can do that, will who I dream about or think about beneath the surface. That technique helped me throughout university. Sorry, I have no idea how it works. It just does. It allows me to expand my conscious activities. Instead of obsessing about one issue, idea or Gerard Butler, I can now think about all of them at various times of the day without fear of losing brain cells.

With all that said, I decided to take Zingera's advice and watch this 15 minutes short,Please. I had a feeling before I watched it that it was going to set something loose in my brain.

In the first two minutes the old story that P.S. I love you reminded me of jumped forward. There's some weird connection between that old manuscript and Mr. Butler. One I don't want to pursue until after Hell to Pay is finished. I almost stopped watching the short then because the pull was strong. I took a breath, shoulder checked Alex and dove back in.

The ending was a little predictable and made me want to smack the characters but that could be because something similar happened in my neighbourhood when I was a kid. Cliches are so because they imitate recurring aspects of life. Even when life goes sideways, you can often see the changes coming.

The rest of Please? Wow. It's powerful. When he talks about being a novelist, I got chills. There are days when that's incredibly true. Go. Watch it. Even if you're neither a novelist, nor a fan of Gerard Butler's you'll understand the writer in your life a wee bit better afterward.