This morning I came down with a cold. And I haven't had a cold all goddam winter until just the day before a little trip to Seattle I'd planned. Maybe somebody up there doesn't want me traveling, since, if you recall, I hurt my back badly just before I was supposed to go to New Orleans in January. Anyway, the people who were to host me in Seattle seem like very decent types, and they seem to want to reschedule, so this thing may happen yet.

I've been spending most of my leisure time over the past two weeks working on my feature-length screenplay for my script-writing class. I've never been so excited about a class. In fact, I'd say that I don't ever remember enjoying a class as much as this one, in my whole life.

Each week, most of my spare time goes into struggling with my screenplay. I'm now on the third complete rewrite of the treatment. A treatment is a fifteen page version of the screenplay; every scene is described, but in short, concise sentences with no dialogue. It's really the building blocks. I'm finding it extraordinarily difficult. Yet, at the same time, it's exciting to see your characters slowly assemble into a sort of alternative reality to your own. When I go running, I see images from my protagonist's life, and I come home and spend five minutes scribbling them down.

Last time I wrote about the screenplay, I was hugely dissatisfied with some of the goings on. I had my protagonist in meaningless business meetings with three faceless dot-com types, for example. Well, those dot-com types soon blinked out of existence, as has the entire office building. In fact, my protagonist has changed names, relocated from California to Massachussets, and, just this morning, has found himself a job as a pharmacist. I now have almost a complete feature-length story which hangs together. All of the scenes are part of the story, and there aren't any of those annoying hanging scenes which seem to exist only to make a plot-point.

Is it any good, though? I now worry that it's maybe a little too serious, and possibly a shade melodramatic. At any rate, I'm continuing to hammer away at it. The interesting thing is that I took this screenwriting class only to help me develop scripts for short movies. I didn't expect to get swept away into something else. But yesterday I signed up for the intermediate screenwriting class, so this whole thing is taking on a life of its own.

Another thing I love about the class is that each week we have to do a five-page mini- script as homework, in addition to our work on the feature-length screenplay. The teacher sets the parameters of the script, but they're set in such a way that each student comes in with something completely unique. And we spend the last hour of each class acting out each others' scripts. Last night, for example, I acted in two scripts; in one I was a british army officer in the 1940s, and, in another, I was (believe it or not) a Mexican hot-dog vendor. My own script ("Who Sent The Long-Stemmed Roses?") from last night went down quite well, also.

Unlike most other classes I've taken, where people have generally been rather distant from one another in true San Francisco style, in this class, there has been some conviviality generated between the students, and I'm finding that I'm enjoying the people very much. There is one woman in the class who is, apparently, a free-lance political commentator for MSNBC. She's a statuesque blonde woman with swedish cheekbones, whom I initially pre-judged, rather harshly, as being something of a self-involved bimbo. I couldn't have been further from the truth, and I'm finding myself rather fascinated by her.

Last night, in an exercise, she and I had to take turns describing each other to the class using only adjectives. It was a little embarrassing for both of us; on the one hand you had to hear what impressions you'd given out, and on the other hand to diplomatically state your own impressions of the other person. She, rather comically, posed and swivelled in her chair while I groped for adjectives. In fact, she was so agitated that one of the buttons popped off her tight, expensively tailored jacket. And the adjectives she chose for me were somewhat surprising, since some of them were so vastly at odds at how I see myself. It occurred to me that it would be a fascinating, though somewhat narcisstic, exercise to play a party game where everybody secretly and anonymously wrote down ten adjectives to describe each person in the room, and you then got to hear how other people percieved you.