Call me a quitter, sticks and stones

This picture represents my life the past week - drafting Keys to the Garden and working on my cake decorating class. The cake is my final project for the course. The screenplay is a stack of papers I'd like to burn.

Just kidding.

I decided early this morning that I wasn't going to kill myself over the Nicholl. It's difficult to feel motivated when you wake up feeling like someone woke you up by punching you. All over your body.

Ok, I'm a little disappointed about not being able to finish in time but not much. (1) I'm leaving for a weekend roadtrip tomorrow. So that bumps up the midnight Saturday deadline to early Friday morning. Precious precious hours. (2) I'm finding more problems as I write. Namely that I seem to keep running into the same action sequence. I made some good changes, but it's still going to take some elbow grease to get the new changes ironed out. (3) I never thought I had a shot of winning. I wanted to use this year just to see if I could make it past the first cut. (4) I advanced my draft 35 pages this week alone. From Sunday through Thursday. I'm going to throw out most of the three pages I wrote today, but still I'm happy with the extra shot of motivation.

Here's to keeping it up for the other upcoming competitions.

Restful Monday

I spent about two hours today thinking about cupcakes. I need to make more friends so I have more people to pass my baking off to so my family and I don't get fat. I'm so glad I haven't been keeping track of the pounds of butter I've used these past few months.

Because I was intentionally super bored today (my weekend was craaazzy) and in an effort to distract myself from all things cupcake, I tried out our Wii Fit. Can you believe it kept telling me I was unbalanced? It even asked me if I found myself tripping frequently! Malarkey.

Script Frenzy starts in three days. I participated their inaugural year in 2007, resulting in a bottom-drawer script that I still maintain has a good premise, if terrible execution. I hadn't even considered it this year, really. ANOTHER script, COMPLETELY new? Seriously, why bother doing that to myself, especially right before contest season, when I'm trying to get Keys to the Garden through another draft and a TV script presentable.

But then I read Bitter's Screnzy article, and I started thinking, "3 pages a day? I could do that. It's really not much at all, especially at the first draft stage. And it's not like I'm getting much work done on the other projects anyway... I do have my 17th quirky drama idea that's been niggling in back of my mind. I could use it like a warm up. Sit down, write 3 and a half pages for Screnzy, move onto Keys, get some real work done instead of doodling around in that crap novel idea. Even if I got lazy and just wrote my Screnzy script, at least I'd be getting SOMETHING done. Yeah, maybe this could work..." Basically I will do anything to procrastinate on real work.

So maybe. We'll see. I'm going to think about a stellar idea. But the truth is, I love Screnzy and NaNoWriMo. They're fun and exciting and the closest thing I'll ever get to a marathon. I haven't done either in years. And first drafts are so much fun to write, unlike stupid rewrites. Also, I want a cool Screnzy t-shirt.

I came up with the most killer pen name. I figure I'll have to change my name, since Amy Butler is a queen in the craft world, and apparently it's more likely that I'll get famous before I get married. I've been trying to think up something firey, and it finally came to me as I was spacing out in the coffee shop this afternoon -- B.A. Butler.

Done and done.

A Piece of (Cup)Cake

Recent exciting things --

1) I bought a kitchen flame thrower. Well, it's more like a mini torch, but it's amazing fun. I used it yesterday to toast the icing on my s'mores cupcakes.

You wish you knew me for realsies now, don't you?

2) I applied for a job. It's a PA position for Game of Thrones, which I'm cautious of getting too excited about, but I was excited anyway. I thought I wrote a pretty kick-a cover letter, though sometimes it was difficult to convene how no one else is going to be as passionate about this project as I am without sounding like a pandering fangirl. In typical Butler fashion, I wrote my cover letter last night and woke up at 5:15 to do my resume this morning. It's just exciting to start applying for film jobs. This is the first of many (unless I get it!).

3) It was warm here. We had a picnic last week. Even though it's cold again, it's still warmer than Michigan.

4) This week's Lost was an episode to make all of us who stayed proud.

I hate how much I like Taylor Swift

I made s'more brownies last night. Uuhhmmmmmm yuummmmm. Why would I ever make anything else?