Can I have my cookie now?

I'm so hungry.

Trainer is on me about my slackness. Apparently there is no RDA for cookies. He's putting down the smack. I'm now running 2 1/2 miles daily, half of them at a gallop, and I'm not allowed to eat bad things. Oh, how I hate him.

If he weren't so pretty there's no way I'd be paying him for this torture.

So instead of my usual chocolate snack during homeroom, today I ate strawberries. I now have pink juice all over my pink shirt because I am a slob. Fortunately I have a screenplay to revise to get my mind off my chocolate-starved stomach.

Partner read the boxing chapter and loved it, but he wants more. That's a hell of a note. "I like it, but I want more." What am I supposed to do with that?

Also he pointed out that boxers can't deliver a whole lot of clean dialogue when their mouths are stuffed with a mouthpiece. Oops.

But it's okay because he had a fabulous idea about how to play the mouthpiece issue for comic effect in what was otherwise a story kind of short on the funny. He turned a liability into an asset, which is always good. Anytime you back yourself into a logic corner you figure out some really creative moves for your story. Now when my shift comes from comic to tragic it will be that much more significant.

One of my favorite moments in literature is in Catch 22 when a couple of soldiers sit on a raft in the ocean in a pretty funny scene filled with the usual Joseph Heller cynicism. So I'm laughing and smiling and then all the sudden a soldier gets hit out of nowhere by what amounts to friendly fire and dies instantly. I literally went from laughing to crying with the turn of a page.

I aspire to that kind of emotional reversal. I'm not saying I'm there yet, but the more I can turn funny into tragic on a dime the happier I'll be and this chapter is my best attempt yet.

So I'm off to rewrite my short so I can get it to Trainer on Tuesday and get the actor's perspective since I designed one of my fighters around him. The best part about getting to direct Trainer in a boxing scene? He has to do the whole shoot with his shirt off. Because he doesn't have a cookie addiction problem.