Reflecting on progress for the week of February 22 through February 28, and previewing goals and tasks for the upcoming week.

Bonus edition: Let’s talk about the damn mouse in our house!

Alright, let’s get started with what’s been going on in our tiny ass apartment the last 36 hours or so…

Last night around 9:30 pm I was in our bedroom watching THE WALKING DEAD when I heard my wife scream my name at the top of her lungs.

Naturally I was absorbed in my show, so I didn’t respond right away…which prompted a second scream.

I ran out of the room and saw my wife nervously kicking the end table.

“It’s a mouse. I saw it. I saw it’s tail,” she said.

Now, a few days prior to this my wife and I were sitting on our coach watching TV and out of the corner of my eye I saw something scurry across the kitchen floor. I shot my ass up out of the seat so damn fast our dog pissed herself.

“What the hell’s wrong with you,” my wife asked.

“I saw something scurry across the kitchen floor.”

“You what?”

“I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was small, black and it was fast as hell,” I said.

“A water bug?”

“No, it was bigger than a roach.”

“Are you hallucinating,” she asked.

I’ve been so damned stressed lately because of work, writing, kids, and just living in an apartment during Covid that I really did think I was seeing things.

It took me awhile to calm down that night. But fast-forward to last night and my wife saw it. She saw the thing that I saw out of the corner of my eye…a small, black mouse.

Look, I’m a wimp. I hate killing spiders because I think they’re gonna come back to life and eat me like they do in the movie The Mist. So I was damn sure I wasn’t going to go after some mouse. Plus, what the hell am I going to put it in?

I called the emergency number for our apartment complex. No help. I called local rodent catchers. Nothing. So we decided to load up the kids and stay the night at a hotel. I ain’t fucking with no crazy ass mouse.

Needless to say waking up a 7 year old and 6 year old at 10:30 at night and cruising over to the local hotel isn’t as easy as one would think (and if you think that’s easy, then you’re single without friends).

After a night of our 6 year old talking about Roblox and Minecraft, we all finally got to sleep around 3:30 am. Only to wake up at 6:10 am by that same 6 year old talking about Roblox and Minecraft. (Take kids out of their routine, and you’ll have hell to pay, especially when it comes to sleep.)

My family and I slept-walked throughout the day. I laid a few traps around the place. Hopefully the Orkin dude will come tomorrow so he can catch this little shit. And I’m finally getting to my writing at 11:00 pm.

Oh, and it’s my wife’s birthday today. She ain’t forgetting this one.

Successes for the Week

• Met with accountability group (Thursday) to workshop some material.

• Finished a few more lessons in my craft course. I’m working on sequences and how to use them. Truthfully, when I was taking screenwriting courses at UCLA the instructors had a use focus on specific beats and act outs. It was good info, and definitely helpful, but in my own projects I felt like I was getting stuck toggling between the macro of an act and the micro, or beats, that should occur in it. Hopefully the sequence approach will be a useful tool for building acts that lead up to specific and purposeful beats.

• Watched a documentary on Netflix about Robert Johnson and the crossroads myth for my new pilot. I’m compiling all my notes on the crossroads myth and will do a big write up on here in a few days.

• I applied to the Screencraft Writing Fellowship. I submitted my pilot THE NOISE WITHIN. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the script and made a ton of changes/revisions. Hopefully I can at least get to the semi’s with this script.

• I updated my Coverfly profile. Still a bit of tweaking I want to do, but it’s a good start for now. I wish Coverfly had a better dashboard to track the analytics of how many times your profile was viewed and from where.

  • HERE is a link to my profile.

• Lastly, I did post a few more blog entries. I’ll get to the Seth Godin-daily-blog-post-thing soon…I hope.

Misses

• I missed the last meeting of my cohort for my writer’s group. Every two months our writer’s group switches cohorts since our group is rather large. It’s a way for everyone to really share their work and get more detailed feedback. Unfortunately I had to miss this last meeting because I felt like shit. The Santa Ana winds are killing my sinuses. Plus, stress.

• I didn’t work on my pilot as much as I wanted. My goal for the end of the month is to have a finely tuned outline ready for pages. This project is deliberately going slower than usual because I’m trying to refine some of my craft with a few writing exercises.

• Didn’t post on the blog daily. Kinda sound like a broken record now.

Goals/Tasks for the Week

• Write a few blog posts about the crossroads myth. Super interesting stuff.

• Lock in my characters and logline for my pilot.

• Finish my script analysis for CASUAL and then post it on this website under the new page I will be revealing - Frank’s Workshop. A dedicated page for all the stuff I’m learning about writing screenplays and short fiction.

• Meet with my accountability group on Thursday.

• Hopefully get this job I’m applying for. It pays a hella lot more. And a hella lot more money is a good thing.