I have been filming in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time every day for exactly five months now. It feels like so much has happened in that time, but it has also gone quickly. The platform has aged significantly, the varnish has worn off and today it was covered in ice. In a few weeks I will be filming in near darkness. But the speed at which the light has changing has noticeably slowed down and I have started to adjust to a winter routine.

So, the last month hasn’t been the easiest  (I think I say that every month!). I realised that I had slipped into fighting this project and it was making me unhappy. I got caught up with ideas of the things I was missing out on, a fantasy life not being led of time spent with friends, visiting places and having conversations, rather than just enjoying the reality of being here in this beautiful place enjoying the time with people who live here too.

The gap between fantasy and reality is an interesting place.  Sometimes it feels like that’s where I live balancing on the edge between the two. It’s a place of telling stories and dreaming up new ideas, of escape and magic but it’s a dangerous place to get lost in. It is the deep dark woods of fairy tales. . .  you don’t want to spend too long there on your own after dark. In fact you don’t want to spend too long there on your own at your desk. Fantasies can eat you up. And here, in internetland, is the best realm of all for merging fantasy and reality.

So, the healthiest thing to do is to bring them out into the light, name them as such and use them in some way.

I remembered a year ago I was fantasising about making this film. Literally fantasising. I hadn’t moved into this house (where I film in front of) or put in a funding bid but I imagined myself filming every day in the spot where I do and spending the rest of my time going out and make little film poems about nature, which I haven’t done so much of.  I didn’t imagine the project would be quite as hard in the way it is (an imploding inside your own head kind of hard). And I didn’t imagine I would spent so much of this time at my desk writing, which has been brilliant.

I have just finished a proposal for a new feature film  and the response so far has been  more exciting than anything I could have imagined. So I am going to keep dreaming stuff up and allow myself to drift sometimes into the depths forest, but under strict self -supervision and am going to stay away from the fantasies about all the good times I am having in some paralell universe which I think I am missing out on.