Yesterday was hectic. Robert Florczak delivered a revised box art sketch. Rob Martyn and I spent half an hour at the Mac rewriting the back-of-box copy while Brian sat behind us and dryly interjected: “Five minutes… ten minutes… Can we print it?… Are we done yet?”
The moment it came out of the LaserWriter, Brian wrote the date and time on it and it disappeared into his folder. When he brought it to Nancy, she was too exhausted to argue. “You’ve worn us down,” she said.
Now Latricia is complaining because the girl in the picture has breasts and the guy is grasping her wrist. At this point, I’m counting on Brian to steamroll over any and all objections put forward by Marketing, Art, Sales, and anyfuckingone else.
Roland and I spent the morning trying to put POP on a 3.5″ disk, but for some reason we couldn’t get it to work. We’ll try again next week.
Spent the night fixing bugs, backing up, making disks, etc. in preparation for my early-morning departure. I haven’t gotten up at 6:30 AM in ages. Now I’m on the plane to New York, toting an Apple IIc in my carry-on, along with about eight pounds of CDs I grabbed off my shelf at the last minute (Scheherezade, Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Aida, Lawrence of Arabia, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Night in Tunisia,” and anything else that seemed like it might be useful).
I promised Brian a final version by July 26, a month from now. I showed him the schedule I’d made up. He read it through carefully, then looked at me with that amused smile that could mean anything. Brian and I have an understanding. Only, I’m not sure what it is.
Rob is a great guy. It was fun working together on the box copy under the gun like that. This project is still 90% solitary work, but I’ve really come to treasure that remaining (and increasing) percentage of human bonding.
The flip side of that is the incredible frustration of dealing with people like Latricia, who seem put on this earth just to make life miserable. (“It’s like we’re all playing in a sandbox and she comes over and wrecks our sand castle,” I told Brian when he informed me of her latest Anti-Bondage campaign. “Why does she do it? Because it’s there!”) But the flip side of the flip side is the bond of “us against the world,” which makes it all worth it.
Whatever instinct made me want to become a movie director was right. This is life the way it should be lived. Holing up alone in a room with my muse is half a life at best. Maybe some people are cut out for it, but I now realize that I’m not one of them. I’m having too much fun. My interpersonal skills still aren’t up to the level of my solitary work habits – I’ve got years of nerd-dom to make up for – but I like this road I’m on.
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