Review Yourself

Had a few extra hours this evening and decided to whittle them away at the computer.
Mostly, I've been working on transferring a lot of old files into new formats.

For example: I have been a mac user since 2000 and the default word processing application on macs up until last year was a crappy little program called, "Appleworks." This was, of course, a meager rival to MS Office but so long as you were isolated to a mac computer, this wasn't a big deal.

That means that 100% of my documents that I have drafted over 8 years have been created using, "Appleworks."
College papers and thesis'
Resumes
Scripts
Short stories
Poems
Production Book notes
Everything I had to commit to paper, was with "Appleworks."

Sure, I ran into issues occasionally when employers told me that they could not open my resume.
Luckily, Appleworks lets you save as Word 98 documents so I was still able to send files to the rest of the world to read and enjoy.

Now it's 2008 and we bought a new Macbook Pro in January.
After booting it up and uploading all of my Smashing Pumpkins, Tom Waits, and Nine Inch Nails into iTunes, I started exploring and what did I discover?
I'm sure you have guessed by now.

No Appleworks.
Not a single lo-tech word processing program on the machine.
The only way I could draft a letter was through simpletext or a sticky.

It then became a mission of where to buy the cheapest copy of MS Word.
I'm no longer a student (more on that later) but eventually we acquired a very cheap AND LEGAL copy of MS Word and since then I've been drafting all new documents from there.

So...all of my old documents have been slowly getting the transfer treatment.

I started with a few of the active screenplays that I tell people that I am working on.
Then I got to the half dozen files of poetry that I have written over the last twelve years.

Today, I finally moved the remaining documents over to the MacBook and spent too much time transferring them to Word documents.

This is not as easy as it should be.

Locate the original file. Which has a .cwk suffix by the way.
Double-click to open.
Word launches but then asks what to interpret the file from.
A series of options is listed.
Choose: Recover text from any file (which is the last option in the list)

The file opens, only it's a mess of what looks like unicode and html had butt sex and conceived a butt ugly document.

But sure enough, the original document is embedded in there after a lot of code.

So, I merely have to strip off the top and bottom of my document.
Re-format the paragraph settings because everything is aligned left.
Occasionally reformat a few lines that end abruptly, mid-word.
Convert some ugly symbol back into the beautiful "'s" and ""s" that they are supposed to be and fix any other severe grammatical errors I made in the throngs of passionate higher education.

I've made it through the fiction folder.
What's left is the non-fiction folder but there is little to convert from there.
A few lists and abstract factoid sheets I have compiled over the years.
Nothing important.

In doing this, I've been able to review a lot of old writing projects that I haven't really thought of since I clicked Apple+S.

I've got about a dozen first acts...each one followed by an outline for the remaining second and third acts.
I've got a few shorts that aren't as bad as I thought they were.
I noticed that my script format is never consistent and downright incorrect in samples as recent as 2004..which is the year I took Screenwriting I and II.

All in all, I'm mostly surprised that I was ever able to write so much.
If only I could throw them all into a pile and stir it up with a large fork to make one real and decent feature length screenplay.

But then I would be robbing myself of a lot of effort that has gone into actually writing original scripts. Minor ideas that, if taken care of and nurtured properly, could grow into themselves and do what they want to do.

As Philip K. Dick inspired fantasies play out in my head, I wonder how I spent the last four years not writing and not being productive.
The huge gap of creativity says a lot about my character.

What was I doing?

Mostly struggling.

Mostly searching for direction and a career.

I still am.