Finally finished writing Green Lights Ahead, which completes my trilogy of short films on recent Asian immigrants. I’m naming these three films the Green Lights Trilogy. It will be the centerpiece of my five-film cycle I’ll be releasing as a shorts film compilation in 2008, prior to the production of my first feature film.

This is an ambitious plan, I know, but the thought of my actually achieving it keeps me going. Besides, although 2008 seems far away, in filmmaking terms, it’s a blip. Case in point: I wrote the first draft of The Long Drive Home back in September of 2004. It’s now April 2006 and I won’t be shooting the film until this fall, which means it won’t be seen by the public until at least the spring of 2007.

I try not to think of the time it takes to get a short film made, otherwise I’ll sink into a depression. Instead I think of how happy I felt while writing the first draft of Green Lights Ahead and how proud I was when I finished it in a week-and-a-half’s time. The story just poured out, probably because I had been thinking of the film since last summer when I was struggling with passing the California driving exam.

Now that the draft is done, my next step is revision. I take comfort in discovering this week that it took Elizabeth Bishop seventeen drafts to arrive at the final form of her nineteen-line poem, One Art.