I Hate Celtx and/or My Laptop

I had a long day of training. A really long day. I didn't sit down to write until 10:15. I wrote furiously for 30 minutes. I wrote 5 pages! I saved them twice.

When I shut down Celtx, it asked if I wanted to save my pages.

Yes! I said, although I'd already saved them twice.

And then my pages were gone.

I am mad. And I am much too tired to type them all again. I am so far behind already, this makes me furious. I don't have the time or the heart to retype them now, and by tomorrow they'll be lost from my brain for good.

Away

I'm out of town at training, with long days and no computer. So I'm trying to cram a lot of writing into a very short time late at night.

The good news is, I think I'm to the point of not caring how bad this project is. I just want to get to 100 pages and finish it.

Total so far: 28/100

Need to Go to Bed Now

Got some good ideas while out walking today.

Watched The Office and 30 Rock. Great shows. Hilarious writing. How did they think up Dwight?

Wrote some pages. Now need to make lunches. Feed cats. Wash dishes. Stop talking like cave woman.

Page Count: 10/100.
Should be at 33.4 today.

Progress

Okay. I have an outline. I have a bunch of index cards with scenes, settings, objectives, and arcs written on them. And now I'm starting to work on writing the screenplay. Again.

I think I have a much better idea of what I'm doing now, though.

Page Count: 4 out of 100.
Should be at page: 30.
But it's okay, I can catch up. I think.

Oh Thank Goodness

For the past few days, I haven't been posting about writing, because I haven't been writing.

I've decided that the screenplay I started wasn't worth continuing with.

I got through NaNoWriMo and wrote a novel, knowing it wasn't very good but wanting to see it through to the end, to prove to myself that I could complete it. This time, though, I want to devote my energy to something that might, possibly, produce a finished product I'd be willing to show someone. At least to my husband.

Over the past few days, I read a lot of scripts. I read Blake Snyder's Save the Cat. And I pitched a lot of ideas to my husband, in between entertaining his mother, who's in town for the week, switching day care providers for Edythe (a trauma unto itself), continuing with bathroom repairs, and having more of our ever-popular "what are we doing with our lives?" conversations. It's been a fun week!

But tonight I had a breakthrough, I outlined a plot I really like, I have an idea I'm passionate about, and I think things will progress better for the rest of the month. I hope so, anyway.

Slogging On

I've been reading screenplays during lunch every day, on daily script. It's a fascinating exercise, because screenplays and stage plays are paced so very differently, with much shorter scenes and all the point-of-view and shot information included in the screenplay. I'm finding I really have to have a picture in my head of what the finished product would look like, not just what the dialog would sound like. It's a good challenge.

But reading really excellent screenplays every day can give a beginner a bit of a complex, a bit of a feeling that what I'm writing is real crap.

But I'm slogging on, there's no other way to improve.

Today's count: 4 pages out of 3.33 needed
Total of: 11 out of 100 written

No Foolin'

I wrote 7 pages today. Pretty good! Of course I'm suspicious as to why it's all going so smoothly (am I writing crap? I am! I know I am!), and I'm worried that I'm spending too much time on exposition, but that's what a second draft is for, right? Fixing things? For now, I'm just trying to get it all on paper.

Script Frenzy is a little different than NaNoWriMo in that the goal is a daily page count, not word count. With NaNo, I needed 1667 words per day to make my goal of 50,000 in the month. For Script Frenzy, I need 3.34 pages per day to reach my goal of 100 for the month.

So far, so good! This actually seems more natural to me than novel writing, for some reason. Maybe it was all those years of script reading. Or of movie watching. At any rate, I'm having fun.

Total Pages for today: 7 out of 3.33
Total Pages written: 7 out of 100

I have to say, it did help that Edythe is feeling better and did not spend 4 hours screaming like she did last night. A healthy, sleeping baby definitely helps with the productivity. Supportive husbands who do many chores while I write are extremely helpful as well.