Finally! Down below 200 movies, a milestone I’d hoped to make last week, but didn’t. Part of that was, of course, watching movies; some of it was due to looking up various non-English-speaking films online rather than watching them. Outside of Japanese movies, non-English movies are strictly for the appendix unless they’re good or clever enough to be worth giving more space to. Ideally, I’d watch all of them, but two or three of them aren’t available in English (one’s Czech, two are Italian) so that’s not doable. And trust me, I’m going to be pushing my word limit as it is.
I also worked the text into what I’d considered a finished rough draft. I have all the movies assigned to one chapter or another and purged the various chapter-groupings that didn’t really work, such as thrilling Adventure and Time-Travel Horror Films. Both of which are viable subjects, but not the way I want to go.
Seeing everything that organized feels really good, though I may shift sections around down the road. This would be both to fit them in the ideal category and to even out the chapters—as it stands, some are quite long, a couple are very short. I think they can be made more even (it’s not essential, but I’d prefer it).
There will, of course, be much, much rewriting, but for the moment I’m satisfied.
I did get my forty hours in this week, though I found my mind wandering off quite a bit during work mid-week. Not a good sign; time will tell if it’s just an aberration or I need to do something to jazz up my schedule somehow. At the moment it’s 7-9am work; 9-9:30 am, snack and non-writing tasks; 9:30-10:30 writing; 10:30-11:30 exercise; 11:30-12:30 writing; 12:30—1:30 walkies and dog-training; 1:30-5 p.m. writing. That’s 37.5 hours, plus I squeeze in a couple of hours on the weekend or the evenings.
So far it’s working well, with enough breaks that I don’t overload. Possibly that’s changing and I need to adjust things again. We’ll see.
