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.

All Ready?

Script Frenzy launches in a little less than 8 hours. Let's see how I'm situated to begin the process, shall we?

Basic plot synopsis. Check.
Outline. Not done.
All characters named. Uh, maybe I'll do that tonight?
Locations finalized. Sort of.
Sick daughter well again. I hope so. I called Christopher this afternoon, and he said Edythe's doing better than yesterday, and she doesn't seem to have the fever that's been plaguing her for the past week. So that's good.
Home remodeling projects from the great flood of December finished. Almost. There are still some pieces of wall missing in the bathroom. I need to paint the other half of the shower room tonight. Aaaaaand there's that whole plastering thing going on in the WC, with the dust and the yeah, it's going great.
Caught up on other home projects so I can focus on this. No.
Etsy shop up and running. No. Will have to wait until Script Frenzy is over, I fear. Plus, that will give me more time to obsess over my items being Not Good Enough.
Read other screenplays for sense of style and structure. I read one during lunch today, that counts, right?
Script-formatting software downloaded onto computer. No. And Christopher's in class tonight, so I guess that will have to wait until tomorrow night.
A sense of confidence that this project will be less crappy than the last one. Definitely not.
A sense that I'm going to charge ahead anyway. YES!

Work It Out

Having a sick baby is no fun. I feel like she's been sick every other week this year. But it is spring now, and surely the warm breezes will abolish those germs, right?

Tonight she had a fever of 101, for the second day in a row. I'd had her cooped up in the house all day, so I took her for a walk tonight to show her the trees blooming in the neighborhood. And while we walked, I worked out my plot for Script Frenzy. This is a pretty good tool, actually. I kept talking to her, trying to tell her the story in a way that made sense and was compelling, and that act of relating it through the spoken rather than written word seemed to make a big difference to me. Fortunately, she doesn't have the vocabulary for criticism or embarrassment yet.

After she went to bed I jotted it all down, so I don't forget what brilliant thoughts/incoherent ramblings I just had. There are still some plot points I'm trying to work out, and I may change my mind about all this tomorrow, but tonight I'm pretty excited about it.