So, yeah, I’m working on another screenplay. I’m ostensibly writing it for a competition, but I’m mostly writing it so I can actually have a proper feature-length film screenplay that is not the property of someone else and isn’t so experimental no one will touch it.

And it starts in the usual place you’d think for me: in a Starbucks, drinking tea and writing it down on paper.

It’s an idea I thought of during the first five minutes of watching a completely unrelated film. It’s managed to stay in my head for weeks, changing and morphing and then demanding to be written down.

So far I’m about two-thirds of the way through my outline. It’s missing something—I think I know what it is and I’ll figure out some way to bolt it on. But it’s good to be writing the sort of things I love writing.

I’m writing a draft of a speech to be delivered by the president of the NGO I work for (it isn’t that big a deal: whatever I write will be rewritten by my very talented boss before it goes onto the president’s communications staff and then our president, who is no slouch as communicator, will no doubt change it all over again). And, as ever, I’m at adrift with it until I can find some kind of a hook which I can latch onto.

Finding the hook is the hard part about writing. The actual making words go into sentences isn’t nearly so difficult for me. Whether I’m writing a speech, an obituary, a review, a letter or a screenplay, I need to know what’s the big idea that makes it all work. Sometimes it comes to me instantly. Sometimes I flail around for a while. In this case, looking for the hook took longer than writing the actual speech. Go figure.

I managed to tie my workplace’s Oscar pool. I could have won it if I hadn’t picked Up In The Air for the adapted screenplay Oscar. Instead it went to Precious: Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire.

I have to admit, I should have called it. I liked Precious a lot (MoNique owned her supporting actress nomination, and this comes from someone who sighs every time Vera Farminga shows up on screen). I thought the adaptation (by Geoffrey Fletcher) managed to take what could have been (and arguably is) a melodramatic movie of the week and make it something bigger, bolder and more heartfelt than that. But I went with Up In The Air because I love the dialogue and the characters so much. The scene where George Clooney tells J.K. Simmons he’s fired is just fucking wonderful.

That said, I think the best adapted screenplay this year was A Single Man and that didn’t even get nominated.