I’m facing one of those rare situations when my plate is actually full. For the next little while, I’ll have just about all the work I can handle. Fries With That? starting up for a second round of episodes would have given me plenty to do between pitching and scripting as it is, but I also made the foolish mistake last month of telling the Writer’s Guild I’d be perfectly happy to act as a first round judge for this year’s Guild Awards.

Being a first round judge means I get to sort through one category worth of submitted fodder in an effort to weed it down for the judges who will make the actual decisions about who won what. It’s just like a nostalgic trip back to my days working as a reader, only this time I’m not getting paid fifty bucks a pop. The only real advantage is that my evaluation amounts to a simple ranking between one and ten for each script. Easy enough to fake if I were so inclined, but I’m too responsible to fob off on the job like that. Besides, some of the scripts actually look interesting, and there’s a few entries from my favourite Canadian TV show to go through. Confidentiality forbids me to mention which show that might be before the awards are divvied out, but I expect I’ll be biased in favour of those particular candidates.

My day job doesn’t end there, though. I’ve got some repair work to do on a feature screenplay I have in development, a major magazine submission I’ve been putting off for too many months, two other big jobs that might be on their way down the pike once some phone calls are made, and of course the final touches on this web site before we go live.

Look, I don’t wanna sound like I’m bragging or complaining here. It took years of work to get this busy and I can only hope it keeps up. I should be grateful, really I should.

But dammit, there are some video games out there in serious need of playtime. What are the poor bastards going to do without me?