Pain.

I'm 46 pages into my script and its like I'm having my spine ripped right out of my back. Torture to get this story out of my gray matter and onto the page. But it's got to get out. It burns deep down in my gut. Churning like a fragile ship on a reckless sea. Every day I sit down to write and do everything I can to make the themes and the ideas and the whole scope of it come together.

I've given some pages to writers I met online. They tell me its good. They tell me to keep going and to have faith. I don't know if I can believe them. I don't know if I can believe anyone.

What I do know in those moments when the fever breaks and I step away from the computer and get a drink -- what I do know is that I am trying to do something great. Trying to tell a story that digs deep into the things that truly scare us. Not a man with a knife. No, not that. The twisted cultural institutions that repress us and the mythic beasts of our imaginations that signify deep-rooted primal thoughts-- these representations of man's fear all designed to keep the beast at bay. These are my tools.

Milennia ago we huddled in caves, firelight flickering on our faces. We told stories to keep the darkness at bay. To keep our fear in check.

Thats what I'm doing now. Except the flames are the glow of my computer screen. I sit alone in my dark room, writing. Hoping that someday my words will turn into pictures and light the faces of lonely men and women huddled in modernity's cave: the multiplex. Stale popcorn has replaced animal bones, but the meaning is the same.

Last night I lay awake listening to the winds whistling through the canyon. Coyotes howled. I felt their hunger.

In the morning I ate a stale coffee cake.

And then I did what I had to do. I wrote.