Save For Your Funeral...I'll be Broke When I'm Dead

I always accuse my girlfriend Katie of being the eternal optimist, the girl who still believes in the American dream. She likes to save pennies because someday they'll add up to a nice vacation. Me? I spend my upcoming check in full to take the damn vacation now. So, my electric may be turned off. So what? I'll get it turned on again. (a slight exaggeration...I usually pay it just before it's turned off) I am throwing my nuts out there to make a movie, and starting with what amounts to very little in terms of budget. I believe the budget will grow as I go. This infuriates her. How can I waste my time, and what will I do if midway through the budget hasn't received any bumps? What about saving money? I say burn baby burn!

Ah, Katie. You're saving for your own funeral. At least you'll have a nice golden casket, and I'll be stuck with a cardboard box. But I'll be smiling.
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I am very down on writing right now. In the past two years, I have seen two of my more well known screenplay efforts(to me, people around me and some on the left coast) end up as feature films. Only they weren't mine. You see, we get a very short window to get our shit out there while it's fresh. The problem being we have no outlet, no exposure, and all we can do is enter 30 contests a year with the hopes that one of the readers will be a fan of the genre we've chosen. And then it's gone. Then, as if smelling your disappointment and wanting to rub it in some, Hollywood releases 10 films that could just as well have been based on your screenplay. It's either A)everything is in production all the time, or B) a wave of certain genres of screenplays hit 2 years after I tried to market one just like the it. Either way, it's disheartening to try and sell your story, then 4 years later see the Best Buy shelves deluged with direct to dvd versions of the exact same premise. So now when I get the comment, "It's really good. Solid story, great twist at the end. But don't you think it's a little to close to ? " Well, I wrote this 5 years ago. "Oh, well it seems just like it." , it makes me want to lop a few heads off. Hence, I'm making my films from now on. I'll write them how I want to write them. And I'll make them how I want to fucking make them. If I don't get rich I won't care. I'll be creating a lasting legacy, something my children can see. Something to show I did something.