If I waited two more days to post this, it would be one full year since my last update. Ugh. It's true that a lot has been going on in my life – a death in the family, lots of travel, other jobs and distractions – but those who visit this site regularly know that I've been diligently adding Movie Reviews and Lists of 9 all the while, so it's not like I've vanished off the face of the earth.
In fact, you will note that these list and review pages have been redesigned, with larger images and more relevant "If you liked this, you might also like..." links at the bottom. For years, those bottom links were automatically generated, and I couldn't fix them, no matter how unrelated and arbitrary they were. But thanks to my trusty developer Natalie MacLees, I can now manually curate those links and have them point to more relevant content. As you might guess, with over a thousand pages, it will take a long, long time to curate them all.
Time is something I seem to have in spades these days – except, apparently, to write the screenplay for my next short film Reprieve. It's been sitting on the back burner for well over a year now. Why? I'll be honest with you, dear reader: I don't have much of a middle for the story yet, and it's been frustrating. I have the first and last parts of the film all worked out, but in-between, it's just a bunch of images in my head. Although this is a short, so a tight dramatic narrative is not as crucial as it is for a feature, I still want to give it some structure. Because I haven't been able to flesh out the middle section yet, I've been using it as an excuse to not write the script. Bad Mark.
Now that I've finally dusted off this Updates section with a new post, I will try to keep at it. Thus my next goal is to write a first draft of Reprieve, even if it has an anemic second act, so that I will at least have something to work with – and something to update you on. It will not take me another 363 days to do this, I promise.