As I wrote recently at the Credo blog, we're in the in-betweens. We've finished CREDO and started sending it to festivals, but we're months from the earliest possible acceptance.

Such is the power of the written word that the casual reader may well have assumed this in-between period to be a state of minor stress but essential sanity--a period during which the writer/director affects a wry, self-aware neurotic persona for the sake of a few self-deprecating chuckles online.

Let me set this straight.

At this moment, the writer/director feels as though there's no reason not to give up on the whole deal. Sure, we'll send it out. Sure, we'll talk it up. But there's no way it'll ever get anywhere. All is lost. The technical issues are too massive. (These would be the technical issues I didn't notice until--literally--the two-hundredth viewing.) The pacing's wrong. The color's wrong. The focus is wrong. The sound is wrong. The composition is wrong. The shot flow is wrong. The digital format is wrong. Pretty much everything I had anything to do with is wrong--which would be everything but Larry's performance.

And gee, thanks for bringing up Larry's performance; even that would probably have been better if I'd just kept my damn mouth shut.

This is not Waldmanesque overstatement for the sake of narrative punch. Seriously, I'm completely nuts.

Sarah wrote me the other day and said it must feel great to have finished it! Finishing it did feel great. Not as great as being in the high-pressure zone of production, but still great enough. But we're past finishing it.

Actually, I wrote back, now it feels neurotic and upsetting.

Ah, like when you send a book out, she wrote.

Yes, I wrote, only you've spent thousands of dollars and dozens of people are counting on you.

An even better analogy would be that time when you were 14 and you wrote a love letter to someone and they didn't...

write...

back...

But wait... what's this. Hold on... Mid-blog-entry, the tide has reversed! My god--what a beautiful little gem we've made! Yeah, there's a nit to be picked here and there. Yeah, we didn't have the budget to spend three days in an expensive post house. Yeah, that's all true--but look at the magic! The power! Almost no one goes where we went with this film. There's honest beauty and anger in it, and if the budgetary limits keep us from cracking the Film Festivals of the Gods (Cannes, Berlin, Sundance...), who cares? It's going to get into the festivals of the mortals. I have no doubt of this--it's just a matter of time. People will see it and love it. We'll meet just the person we're meant to meet next, who happens to be there too because this is where the really cool films are, but everybody else doesn't know that yet.

But oh--

The tide washes the other way...

That dissolve isn't smooth as I want it, and surely festival committees will notice... and there's a little too much contrast here... and the wall color doesn't quite match here and here, and what if the CD-R won't play on their machine, and we never even know they couldn't view it?

What then?

WHAT THEN!?

TELL ME WHAT THEN!

This is why novelists say to start your next book as soon as you finish the last one. It's because yes, you really are a lunatic between projects.

And--why yes!--here's another short script, waiting to go! Let's start pre-production. By god, we'll do it! We'll shoot in July!

All of us cure our insanity by working. Novelists can work the cure for the price of a pen. Any time.

Filmmakers... not so much.

Twitch.

Damn novelists.

Twitch.

Oh god, the fade-in is too long...

Have to go.

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