Sitting in an office, with 42 minutes on the clock. I figure now is as good a time as any to update this blog with the three years of events that have taken place since my last entry.
Just read that again. Three years. It's been three whole years since that last post - in January 2021. Well, technically it's been two years and ten months, if you consider that last post was published on the 5th January 2021 and it's the 16th October 2023.
But enough with the semantics.
Let's move on to the juice with Part One: 2021
What exactly happened in 2021?
January was a slow month, with not much happening that I can really remember. Working for ET and generally vibing in the 'new' house, as far as I can guess.
February, I believe, was much the same. We probably celebrated Ry's 26th birthday at the beginning of the month and then continued to be fairly chilled - working, settling in with Loki the cat, the usual day-to-day stuff.
Pretty sure that around this time, I was starting to get the inclination that Hermes was trying to talk to me - you know, the clever, charming trickster Greek God, Hermes. This had all been brewing from the Samhain meet up that I did with the AC - now retitled the Witchlets - where M had led us in a God-finding mediation and Hermes had spoken to me. From then I'd been getting signs, moments of clarity or questions and thoughts of what to do...
So in March, when I went to visit Dad on the coast - working from his 'home' for two weeks - I reached out to a low-budget film producer I had been following on Instagram for a while, and told him that I was a writer fresh out of my Masters and on the hunt for scripts to write.
Within three weeks, I was writing my first feature film... an erotic thriller, which isn't exactly my genre of choice and I will not be repeating the title here, but nevertheless it was something!
That was what I was doing in April - working full time at ET while plotting and writing GoL. I finished it around the Easter bank holiday weekend, because I was home at Mum's at the time. Then it turned out that they were actually planning to film the whole thing in May... and I thought, what the hell, maybe I'll ask if I can come and watch it turn from script to screen.
Which is how I found myself working as an Art Director on a micro-budget film set in the month of May. It was only a week (a full 7 days) of non-stop shooting; terrifying, exhausting and exhilarating. I would later learn that this was not the speed that one was supposed to shoot a film at, for multiple reasons, but at the time it was like Playing Pretend come to adult life - everything I'd dreamed about, watching these actors become my characters. I was enthralled.
It didn't stop there. The producer - Jeffries, I'll name him here - wanted other scripts from me. Horror films, mainly. One about a Ghost. Another about a Bunny. A third about an Earthquake.
It started getting a bit much, especially with the quick turn around time... and at the same time I had invited Hermes in, pledged my allegiance to him as my Patron God - and he kept sending me messages. Mostly through tarot. Quit your job.
I grappled with all of this through June - I was burning out from writing scripts into the late hour, then writing for ET during the day (even with my Mondays off). My life had gone greyscale after coming back to work from the GoL set - the set where it felt like everything was in technicolour, and the office job by comparison just so boring.
Which is saying something, when you consider that for a lot of people ET is like the best job ever, perks including luxury stays in hotels and resorts and fancy dinners out...
In July, I sat down with my ET manager and asked about the idea of going even more part time... He asked Big Boss and she said that it would mean that the money that I would no longer earn would be stripped from the budget - they wouldn't be able to use it for a second part timer. So it was either stay as things were, or leave.
I handed in my notice, and finished working for ET at the end of August. It was hard, I'm not going to lie, and a very heart-felt goodbye. I didn't realise how much I liked working there, working with that team, until I wasn't doing it anymore.
But now I was a freelancer, and I had many low-budget projects that I ended up working on. I'm pretty sure that there were about twelve Jeffrey productions that I worked across those next few months - in a range of job roles.
I was the assistant director for a bunch of them. I wrote another erotic thriller, Twins. I was a production assistant on what remains, to this day, one of the most hellish shoots I've ever worked on. I drove my car to Scotland and back (twice), to Norfolk and Devon and Birmingham.
I also had a few days work with Jarvis on an actual ITV shoot in Brighton, this was a highlight of that time. It also takes us to October.
Somewhere in there - could have been as early as May - Matthews got in touch and said she wanted to write a horror film around a basement. So we started working on that, too... slowly, in the background of everything else.
By Christmas, I was burning out again - but in a different way. I was loving what I was doing, but I was away from home all the time. I also was not making that much money, as is the nature with continuously working in the micr0-budget world. You almost need at least two a month to make any decent kind of dough (and that means putting a real strain on every other aspect of your life, including your sanity).
I was also getting kind of sick of being exploited by Jeffrey. But that's a story for Part Two: 2022.
Instead, I'll finish with this. We had my Clan's Christmas at Dad's house, by the Coast, and it was utterly spectacular.
