The right movie at the right time

Last night, instead of watching poker, I watched the beginning of The Gambler, and just finished watching it over “brunch” (I don’t even want to get into how pathetic my eating habits have gotten lately but I’ll give you a hint. Two words: hot pocket).

This Village Voice review sums it up nicely so I don’t have to:

The Gambler, Hungarian director Karoly Makk's carefully crafted and richly atmospheric adaptation of Dostoyevsky's eponymous novel, interweaves its story of gaming and erotic obsession with a period of 27 days in the writer's life, when his hopes for future solvency lay in that work's speedy completion.

In the movie, he has to write 160 pages in 27 days. I’ll state the obvious: I could empathize. I got quite caught up in it.

I forgot to note in the last post, but one thing I did this week was look at the word count of the novella I wrote as part of my MFA thesis. I figured, well, I wrote almost all of that in three months, and that was pretty long, right? Wrong. It turned out to be 26,000 words. Which took me three months. And I didn’t work a full-time job.

But if good old, epileptic, Fyodor can do it, it gives a gal hope. Not lunatic hope that this is going to be Crime & Punishment, but just that I'll get it done in time.