I'm back from my Thanksgiving break and now find myself diving headfirst into the Christmas season. I've had my annual "look at the calendar and whimper" moment. I have a lot going on and a lot to do between now and the end of the year.
But I have a plan. I've mentioned in the past my minor addiction to the cheesy made-for-TV holiday romantic comedy movies and said that writing one is on my career bucket list. This year, I'm going to attempt it. I'm between rounds of revisions on the upcoming novel, so I'd rather not dive back into another book. A TV movie screenplay is about 88 pages, and most of the work comes in the plotting, which is the fun part of writing for me. This gives me something to keep me in the habit of working, it fits in the season, and it means that any seasonal fun I get up to counts as "research." It may not come to anything, and I may realize that screenplays are harder than they seem. I may end up novelizing it to self-publish for the next holiday season, and then maybe let my movie/TV agent try to get it optioned for a TV movie. Or, who knows, it will launch a new part of my career. I also want to write one of those SyFy Christmas disaster movies, but I figure they make one of those a year, while Lifetime, ABC Family, Hallmark and ION each make at least three or four new holiday movies every year, so the odds are better.
I had a good Thanksgiving holiday. There was much food, a lot of reading and some knitting as I played with various lace patterns. I introduced one of my brother's little dogs to the horse in the pasture behind my parents' house, and they bonded. It was so funny to watch the little dog and the horse touching noses and licking each other. My parents were clearing out a lot of our old stuff and having us go through it to see what we wanted, so I got a trip down memory lane going through my own stuff, plus had the fun of going through my brother's stuff with my sister-in-law, who now has lots more scoop on what he was like as a kid.
When I got home, I unwound from the drive and worked off some of the food by taking a long walk in the park that runs along the river. As I was walking down the path through the woods, I started hearing what I thought sounded like bagpipes. I ended up walking farther than I planned because every so often it seemed louder, and I was sure that it was bagpipes, but then it would fade. I finally discovered that someone was playing the bagpipes in the parking lot at the southern end of the park. I guess that's a good place to practice because it's across the levee from the neighborhood, so he wasn't really disturbing anyone. I don't know a lot about bagpipes, but I think he was really good. He didn't sound like he was strangling a cat, he was playing a lot of fast, complicated stuff very fluidly, and he seemed to be on pitch, in that he was playing real notes and nothing that made me cringe. I rather enjoyed walking through the woods to the accompaniment of the pipes. It kind of made me feel like invading something.
This week, the goal is to get my living room neat enough to put up my Christmas decorations, all while playing iTunes roulette to help me come up with a "soundtrack" for my holiday movie. I also need to do some shopping and get a start on some baking.
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