Hey kids. Remember me? Of course you don't. I'm the guy who sporadically runs this place.
Yeah, I haven't bothered to post in over a month now. The guilt eventually got to me. This site is my browser's homepage so I get a daily reminder that I'm not posting here. But time has been an issue, which means something has to give and as usual, it's the blog. So let's get back to speed, shall we?
I finished NaNoWriMo successfully. With one day to spare I hit 50,095 words on my novel Straw Nation. And then I stopped for a couple days, picked it back up, stopped, picked it back up and then stopped. The story isn't close to being finished but I am putting it aside for now. This was a great experience and I learned a lot from it. And I do intend to finish the novel. Just not now. Novel writing was an experiment. I wanted to know if I could do it. I can, so now I can move on.
And for anyone keeping score, Sam Brady beat me to the finish line. I thought I had him but over Thanksgiving I stopped for a few days and he shot right past me.
So at this point, it sounds like laziness to put the novel down. Why not finish after putting in all this work? Because other things are burning in my brain. I tend to have several ideas churning in my head at one time. They pick up little bits and pieces here and there, gaining mass and interest over months or years. And then suddenly they hit a tipping point and I have to start writing immediately. That's what happened here. One script idea came to me about six years ago and I started writing it but because it hadn't gone through that churning process, it lost steam and died quickly. When my mom died earlier this year, that idea started churning again. I'm not exactly sure why. The idea is for a horror movie, which involves death, so maybe that's what it was. I don't know.
Over the course of the year it has been simmering, picking up stray ideas here and there. In the course of writing the novel, this script idea crossed the tipping point. One last idea hit me, a direct result of writing the novel, and it was the perfect last piece of the puzzle. Suddenly that story idea bloomed, coming fiercely alive. I kept putting it off, because I was already writing something else but it keeps pestering me, demanding my time and attention. At last it seemed for the sake of sanity, I needed to start working on it.
That's where I am now. For a change of pace, I'm going to outline this one completely. I've never successfully managed that before. Being a card carrying member of the just wing it school of writing, outlines are generally anathema to me. But I want to give that process a chance, if for no other reason than so many writers use it. I'm going to couple that with another new method. The reason that I free write most everything is because that's how I find my characters. I let them talk to each other in my head, writing all of it down as they go. That's how I figure out who they are, by listening to them talk. I have to go back and chop out most of it later but it's a useful method. Outlining makes that process difficult. So I will write dialog with no intention of using it in the script. It will be off to the side, completely unrelated, just so I can hear the characters talk before letting them walk around in the story.
The plan is to spend another week on this process before starting the actual script. Then I want to write as fast as my fingers (and time) will allow. I tend to enjoy my work more when it comes out at top speed. At least for the first draft.
For now at least, I'm calling this script Unholy. I'll try to keep you posted.
