The Writing Week part 29

Another week down. Like recent weeks, though, this one has been pretty stellar. Besides the still lingering high of The Dark Knight, I've been making some progress in my post-Apocalyptic spec.

Before I go any further, I have to take a quick detour to talk about... PAGE NUMBERS!!! I don't know about the rest of you out there, but those of us in the League wind up doing a lot of talking about page numbers, as in, "I'm aiming for 105 pages" or "You should really cut about 7 pages" etc. etc. I don't know why that's become such a frequent topic of discussion, but it has. Kind of like asking a fellow fan about sports stats, we'll ask one another how many pages we're at, what we're aiming for, how many we've cut. The reason for the tangent is, I'm about to do that now.

Onyx and Zombie suggested to me that my 112 page script would be an incredibly tight, solid 105 pager. So, among other things this week, I've shaved off 7 pages. I don't miss anything that's gone, so I guess that's a good sign.

I'm pretty sure I posted before about a late night discussion Zombie and I had where we worked out a lot of the kinks in my draft. Springing off of that, I was able to consolidate a few scenes, and make those that remain flow into one another much more naturally. Overall, I think that the pacing is much more effective, and I'm desperately hoping that the themes are much clearer now. There were a couple of things I had wanted to convey in the script that simply weren't coming across yet, in part because I wasn't exactly sure how to make them work, and therefore, wasn't really trying to. I think they're there now. At least in spirit.

I still have a ways to go with this. That much I know. But I think I can see the horizon. Once I do a read through to make sure everything that should be in there is - at this point, I know the world and the ideas behind the script so well that I could very well just not even be seeing the holes in it anymore - it'll be time to send this latest draft out to the League again. I just have to make sure it's different, yet effective enough to make it worth their time again.

Vacation coming to a close...

I'm leaving the big apple for the next week on a stint of (fun) work-related travel. July has been the busiest time of the year for me at my day job, and it's just been taking it all out of me. I've been getting home and having the hardest time putting words to the page and it's been very frustrating.

I finished a first draft of a new screenplay in late June and have only really been picking at it with a fork since then. I have a good feeling that after this little hiatus I'll be starting something new rather than going straight into the full-blown rewrite.

I'm hoping that after a week in sunny San Diego, when things start to slow down at work, I'll be refreshed enough to get back into the game. It's probably good just to take it easy for a couple weeks.