It’s 2026. So, what am I getting up to this year?
As I write this I’m housesitting. The two 4-month-old kittens want to stick their noses into everything, especially if it’s people-food they can’t have full of onion and chilli and dairy and salt, the spout of the kettle while it’s boiling, my laptop keyboard while I’m trying to write an email, or the lid of the toilet while I’m trying to scoop their many, many daily poops into it. I’m watching the weather forecasts like a hawk, because a 30-degree day means multiple sessions of watering different parts of the garden — especially the wisteria, whose leaves have been observed to shrivel up entirely in harsh sunlight.
To put this year in context, I’ve been spending the last couple of years moving toward a career change out of video editing and back into storytelling.
After COVID and the advent of AI, the last company I worked for downsized its video team. My options were to become an all-in-one editor (taking up things like graphics and animation) or pivot back to why I learned editing in the first place: to facilitate my broader filmmaking and, more importantly, writing. I took a two-year course to spend some time easing back into it post-burnout, rebuilding my ability and confidence to write at least a few episodes' worth of material per year.
That course is now over, leaving me at a turning point: either sink without the external structure, or learn to swim for real.
I have a few projects. Most of them are leftovers from the screenwriting course — writing assignments that had to hit a page count, without regard for whether that was the end of the story (it never was; it’s always 25-30 pages. For my brand of outlining, pacing, and scaffolding scenes that get cut later, 40+ pages are needed). Once the first drafts are finished, some of these will become portfolio pieces and others will become part of an ongoing development slate. Short films to produce, pitch decks to create.
I’ve heard it said many times that, as a screenwriter or producer, you should have a slate of about six projects at any given time, in varying states of development. I definitely have a longer list than that, but three-to-six is a good number for prioritising. The rest is officially ‘backlog’, to be reinstated only when items from the current slate are either formally deprecated, or done.
I’m not sure whether to include this stuff on the slate: the website, the portfolio, my spreadsheet systems as their own set of tasks. It seems trivially obvious that I’ll never run out of things to do.
The meta-task right now is to set up a bunch of spreadsheets I’ll need to actually use, whose functions include (but aren’t limited to) tracking progress on my slate (see above), managing my networks, and (perhaps, eventually) tracking how I spend my time and money. I think I’m ready to start reporting on and being accountable for my progress — not always to you, the reader, but at least to myself. And if I’m going to learn some basic coding (e.g. for interactive storytelling), then I might as well practise and expand on the coding knowledge I already have, which is specifically in the context of spreadsheets.
