40 days or so later...

The season of Lent is 40 days, counting from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday. But that's only figuring in every day during this period except Sundays, so from between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday there is about an extra week that doesn't figure in Lent. On those Sundays, you can technically get away with partaking of whatever it was that you vowed to abstain from during Lent.

Lent is very much a Catholic tradition. It being that I'm not Catholic, I've never done anything for Lent before. Lisa did it once when she was in college. She says the experience was a good one for her. So I decided to give it a whirl.

I gave up on blogging for Lent, starting with March 1st, including not breaking my "fast" on Sundays. I wanted to use this opportunity to focus more on God and what He wants me to do. But I also wanted to step away from active online writing altogether. Having a blog is a lot of fun, but I needed to take a break from that. And what energy I've spent continuously writing here is energy that’s been kept away from other pursuits. I wanted to focus on those things, without the distraction that comes from actively maintaining a blog.

So here it is, a few days after Easter, and I'm finally blogging once more. And I can't help but believe that it was a wonderful experience to sacrifice something I really enjoy doing during these past 40+ days. I feel renewed, and a lot more creative. Almost like a new man. Giving up an activity I enjoy these past few weeks really compelled me to channel whatever passion and ability I have into more constructive endeavors.

One of those is my next film. Which has sorta been percolating in my head for several years now. It won't be a Star Wars fanfilm like Forcery was. I'm going to attempt to do something that, to the best of my knowledge, only one other person has done in filmmaking. Right now it’s the "pre-production phase", where I take a look at all the elements that I want to work into this, and how to use them. This is going to be a full-length motion picture... or an attempt at one anyway. I've set a goal of having this movie ready by the end of next year. There is a title for it, have made a concept "teaser" poster for it, and I've already written the beginning and ending scenes. Now I just have to figure out how to cram all this other neat stuff into it. I'll talk about this some more after a lot more pre-production work gets done.

(Well, there is this one other film, a short one, that I finished last week. But I'll share more about that in a few weeks, after we "world premiere" it on television on May 1st. Right after that we'll make the online versions available :-)

So if anyone had wondered where I was, it was just that I vowed not to blog for Lent, and now I get to say that I was able to do that. But one result of this period is that I'm probably not going to be blogging so actively for awhile to come. Like I said, other things need consideration as well. But I do promise that I'll try to keep this place interesting, thought-provoking, and of course a good healthy dose of humor.

Will write more later. There's been a whole month-and-a-half stuff going on that I can weigh in with commentary on, and I need to catch up :-)