The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 123 - Fears Abated

Last week, I was nervous as hell about having sent the most recent draft of my script to my producer. Sure, I'd hashed out an outline that everyone gave the thumbs up to before I sat down to write any pages. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off with it. On Wednesday, I decided that it was time to get another set of eyes on the pages, and off it went.

On Friday, I got a call from my manager. He was checking in, seeing how the pages were coming and what my time line was. I let him know that the pages were off to the producer. We started talking about ideas for other scripts I could work on in the meantime, when we were interrupted by an incoming call he was getting from the production company we've been working with.

He popped off the phone for a few minutes to let the exec at the prod. co know that the draft should be in to them in a couple weeks. When my manager called me back, I let him know that I'll be going out of town come this Friday, and will be essentially MIA until the following Friday. With this new timetable, we decided to make an effort to get the script out by this Friday (the 14th). In the meantime, I would begin hashing out some notes for my follow-up project.

Not 45 minutes later, I was on the phone with the producer. She'd just finished reading the draft, and much to my pleasure, was incredibly pleased with the results. Of course, she had a few notes, I was expecting this. She sent them to me that night. Most of what I was concerned about was working for her. On the other hand, she brought up some logic points that hadn't even crossed my mind - mostly small things, mind you, but important points nonetheless.

With the new timetable (i.e. aiming to get "finished" pages out in a month), my plans to begin work on a new idea went out the window. Saturday and Sunday were spent laboring over the re-writes to the post-Apocalyptic spec (I wound up being quite surprised by the note that I got hung up on the most, something I hadn't anticipated at all). In fact, there was one smallish part that I was having so much trouble on, I actually submitted two versions of the sequence to my producer. They're marginally different, but each addresses a logic issue in a unique way.

So what's next? My producer's doing a final read. She'll edit some of the descriptions and look for any gratuitous scenes or beats, then send her markup to me. I'll go through and sign off and actually implement any and all changes. Hopefully, that will all be done come Thursday. Then, as I board a bus for DC (and then later a plane to Florida), the script - ideally - goes out to the production company. I'm on vacation for a week, and will hope to come home to word on where we go from there and any notes the exec has for us.