Good In Bed Again

There are lots of things I'm good at, and lots of things I'm good at in bed. Writing is not one of them. Not anymore.

I suppose I've always written. Early academia kind of forces you to. By high school, I was prolific...in writing notes. I would write up to five per class to pass on to friends in the halls. All day. Every day. Not just little passages. Massive missives went out. Some were well over a page. I owe the planet a forest.

When I got to college, I began to get more into creative writing, but the film bug bit harder. Off to film school I went as an experimental narrative director. Tuition was so high, and funding so low, that I didn't have enough money to make a film. "Well, you could always make a video," some of the faculty told me. My reply was, "Um, I didn't come to film school to make a video." That's when I said, Screw it. If I couldn't shoot the movie I wanted, I'd write one instead. A traditional narrative writer was born.

My first script was written just to see if I could write for 120 pages. And I did it the hard way. The screenplay format was so foreign to me, as was writing on a computer, that I couldn't do it at first, and wrote it out longhand with a Bic pen on yellow legal pads while I was working on a film set. I'd come home and transcribe it onto the computer. And this was before FinalDraft, so I would just tab-tab-tab, return, tab-tab my way through it on Word in bed, my 145 PowerBook sitting on a breakfast tray. GoodFellas or Citizen Kane on the VCR, or the Menendez trial on CourTV would play as I wrote in the sack. I suppose it was no surprise I ended up writing a character study and a dark comedy.

I would write until I fell asleep. Then, I would wake up and write some more. When I moved into my first apartment (second apartment, technically; first without a flatmate), I would do the same thing over long weekends. Thanksgiving was my favorite. Boyfriend out of town, the city quiet, I would write for four-and-a-half days straight in bed. Then, I moved in with Almost, and bed writing became a thing of the past, relegated to the living room. Sofa city, sweetheart.

Even after that relationship ended and I moved into my own pad again, the magic was gone. The bed was no longer a writing zone. The desk became workspace for clients and the couch became my personal creative corner. I longed for the bed, though. Back to those early days of comfort and flow. I want it to be good in bed again. Being so tired lately, I thought I would give it one more go and attempted to blog between the sheets.

No go.

Oh, other things happened. There was plenty of channel surfing and oodles of Twitter feeds to read. Bravo on the boobtube didn't really help inspire. WTF is up with that design show? Talk about a creative c@!kblock. I guess this is what it feels like to be frigid. The bed has become a dead zone. For writing, I mean.