There was a time where I couldn't get enough films to watch. I'd watch two, three times a day. The Alameda County Library has always been for me the poor man's Netflix, and I'd have them pimping out as many vids as I could carry home. I was open for anything: independant, foreign, Hollywood, classic, in all genres; I'd find a director to frequent and wear them out, then move on to another, and another. I'd watch two movies during the day, and then watch another with my wife that night. I was insatiable.
But I have found that one of the byproducts of where I am as a writer now is a cooling of my viewing lust. Now at the most I'll watch a piece of a film that I own - that I've already watched several times - when I'm eating lunch or folding laundry, so that maybe I'll get through a movie a week; most times I just reshelve it after fifteen minutes. Films by my favorite directors - films that I've had a request in on for months - get returned unwatched, and too frequently late and with a fine!
I'd like to attribute this to settling down, to the refinement of maturity. But I suspect it has more to do with an unhealthy obsession with my writing. Whenever the desire to watch a movie pops up, there is an unwanted word-count calculation of what I could accomplish during that two hours, or amount of revision time that would be lost, or research time on markets to submit my short stories or agents to query for my novel or publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts or inspirational reading that might catalzye a new short story or novel chapter or revisional path. The onanistic nature of my current writing regime has sapped my passion for film as a valid source of stories - of an equivalently influential medium to impel my narratives - and, most of all, a satisfying source of entertainment.
So, how does one temper an addiction to their own creativity?
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