Tuesday, 09 December 2003

I fiddled around just a bit with the screenplay I'm thinking about, writing the first scene based on what was in the story I'm using as a starting point.

I've got enough plot from the original story for a straight action-adventure, but a spy story needs a twist. Ideally the viewer should change his or her mind about who the bad guys are a couple of times. In my case, both sides are probably bad guys, so that's not so hard to arrange. I want the hero to come out on top, though, and that's harder to arrange. After being suckered a couple of times, I want him to turn the tables on the bad guys (both sides) and win.

There's quite a bit of thinking to do.

I'm busy at work. It's draining. I almost didn't write today. I went for a run then did some channel surfing. I was daunted at the prospect of working on the zeppelin rewrite and inclined to be lazy, but I didn't want to have to report that I did no writing. So, I started the screenplay instead. I wrote two pages.

This evening's run was 2.96 miles. It was dark, of course, but it wasn't too cold. I think I could run other evenings.

For the first time, I used the heart rate monitor system as it was designed--to pick a workout intensity and stick to it. My idea was to have an easy recovery run after my race on Sunday, so I set it to zone 3 (for me that's a heart rate between 123 and 140 bpm) and to sound a tone when my heart rate got out of that range. To keep my heart rate that low while I'm running requires running at a dead slow pace. Whenever I didn't concentrate, I'd speed up to a more normal pace and my heart rate would creep up over 140. Then I'd slow back down. My average pace was 13:01, average heart rate 134. Time in zone 3 was 31:14.