I did it.

Before every golf match in high school I would get physically ill. Yep, every single time. I would be miserable. Riding the bus to the match, waiting for my turn to tee off, teeing off (don't even get me going on the day I whiffed in front of EVERYONE in Ann Arbor), all of it made me physically sick. Needless to say I don't like to put myself into stressful situations.

So why'd I choose a career in screenwriting? The NBA of the writing field? Because it's what I want to do. It's what I have to do. It's what I do for hour upon hour upon hour late at night, early in the morning, when I could be doing something, anything, else.

I say all this to announce something very stressful -- I have finished my latest screenplay. Yeah, yeah, I know, a script is never done, not even once it's shot and up on the screen. But I'm done for now. I wrote a blog back in March about getting the idea and first sharing it with a friend. And now, over eight and a half months later, I'm done. There's a stack of pages eight inches tall next to my computer (I measured) that indicates drafts done and rewritten in just the past few weeks. There are countless drafts on my external hard drive. But now it all comes down to one neatly bound (with three brads, yes, I know, there's synergy to those three brads) stack of 94 pages. Ninety-four pages that are basically me, standing naked, in front of the entire world.

Tomorrow Ang is going to take my screenplay to a co-worker who's husband is a retired agent. This wonderful co-worker insisted Angela bring it to her upon hearing that I was a screenwriter. So tomorrow I will stand naked in front of the world. I will bare my soul, my hard work, my brain, my creativity, my being, a good portion of my life for the past year to this stranger. And I cannot express to you what this feels like.

I am rational in realizing nothing may come of it. John Grisham had hundreds of rejections before getting published, yeah I know the stories. I know the odds are so not in my favor. But the fact is this: I wrote a screenplay. I didn't just talk about it like everyone in this town does. I didn't start it and never get back around to it. I wrote it. And then I rewrote it. And then I picked at the scabs and made it bleed and wrote it again.

And now I am done with it. I have to be. I have to move on and finish a "shitty first draft" (God bless you Anne Lamott) of my TV spec for class. I have to delve into this huge black binder containing my novel that I've been stubbing my toe on since I finished that first draft last December. And I have to start work on my next screenplay. Yep, that's write. Tomorrow I'll put away all my papers and notes and scribblings about "Operation Gold Digger" and I'll open up to the musings on several new ideas I've been playing with. And I'll begin again. All over again.