Twenty six. That's half of fifty two, by my ever decreasing math skills. That means we're halfway through 2008. Halfway. Halfway...
Hmm.
I suppose it's fitting to do some kind of mid-year recap at this point. (But first, let’s get that weekly blabbering out of the way.)
This week was, in fact, a writing week. I wrote. I did. I wrote a page of a play that I had no idea about. I wrote the first two pages to a script just for the hell of it, a script that won’t go anywhere. I wrote a lot of notes about ideas that I didn’t follow up on. I wrote general ideas down here and there. I may have written a poem somewhere in there. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, with little to no direction at all. Which is why, now, I have an extra half dozen project folders on my computer. I’m trying to zone in, to focus my writing, but I’m still in this place where I’m just not feeling lit by anything at the time being. I even had a brief “wow, I gotta write this right now” moment last week, but that passed by the time I had dinner that night.
The goal, though, is to do a rewrite (more like rewriting the first half of a script and writing the rest from scratch), while working on something original. With competition results coming up in a month and a half (we just found out that the five leaguers who submitted to PAGE International Screenwriting Awards are up against 3,860 other writers), I know that I need to have as much polished material by the end of August as possible. Just in case something happens, something good, like someone interested in my submission.
As for the year recap… let’s see. Two scripts (first drafts) written in the first four months of the year, followed by a lull and some minor re-write activity the last two month of the period. (I did get some good notes this week, though, from a few Leaguers regarding my post-Apocalyptic spec. The consensus is that it’s on the right track. There’s a lot of work I have to do, but I think I can see the horizon, and, after letting it sit and build on itself for about a month, I’ll get back to it and hopefully finish it in a fury of re-writing during the month of August.)
The one thing I will say for the year, though, is that, probably two months ago, I wrote about not wanting to just sit and wait for these competitions to happen. I wanted to make something happen. Well, I’m doing more sitting than I would have liked. But, it’s a tricky situation. I don’t really want to push forward without competition results, and I need to do rewrites until then. But, I also have another month and a half of “inactivity” when it comes to trying to get my material seen. What do I do? Do I push ahead and send out query letters, before receiving the competition results? I think it’s a better plan to make sure I have as many scripts in my arsenal for after the results come in, rather than try to sell one thing and not be able to back it up with anything else. So then how do I shake this inactive, waiting feeling?
