A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Frenzy

One hundred pages in thirty days.  And I’m happy to report that I DID it.

(Sort of.)

I won’t say I went into this year’s Script Frenzy thinking it would be easy, but it did seem doable since I’ve done it a few times before.  But, it ended up being a challenge for me.  A big, friggin’ frenzied challenge.  Why, you may ask?

THE LITANY OF EXCUSES

  1. It didn’t help that I spent most of April traveling.
  2. I was adjusting to iPad-friendly screenwriting software where the overall page count was a not-so-educated guess and my cursor seemed to enjoy jumping to random new positions on the screen, making it a demonic, infuriating “Where’s Waldo?”
  3. You know the NHL playoffs are happening, right?
  4. I saw thirteen films at the Wisconsin Film Festival in five days.  My eyeballs were on cinematic overload.
  5. How exactly is one supposed to muster creativity after enjoying a basket of carb-crash-inducing fried cheese curds?
  

A little ranch dressing and you're set!

Yeah, it was no surprise (yet still soul-crushing) when, with four days left to the Frenzy, I finally figured out my progress.  I was on page 48.  Oof.  That meant I needed to churn out at least thirteen pages a day to get to 100 pages and “win” the challenge.

Now I’m really liking this new feature script I’m working on.  It’s a little weirder than what I usually write and I’m not entirely sure it’s working, but I have every intention of completing it.  However, I knew on 4/27/2012 that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it per the Frenzy-allotted clock.  Too much of it was still fuzzy in my head and I wasn’t going to have enough time to problem-solve and think things through.

But I had to finish the Frenzy!  I committed to it!  I blabbed to my friends and my esteemed blogship that I was doing it!  I was ACCOUNTABLE. (Grrrrrr…I hate it when that happens.)

My New Enemy

So, I turned to two short script ideas that have been percolating in my brain for a long time.  One is a comedy and one is a drama – both are under half-an-hour.  The only thing that kept me from writing them earlier was sheer laziness.  But now I had the perfect excuse to plow through them – and because I knew their worlds and their respective beginnings, middles, and ends I could do it quickly.

So fueled by a combo of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, Mom’s yummy cooking, some lovely Pinot Grigio, and the stash of Jellybeans Dad keeps on hand for my nieces, I set to work purging out the two short scripts.  It made for four bleary-eyed days and nights and brought about a mucus-machine of a sinus infection, but it felt good to generate some new material.  Material that now has to be combed over and rewritten, but new nonetheless.  AND the combined total of script pages written during the month of April – half a feature plus two short scripts – amounted to 102.

I will gladly consider it a win.

Now it's *your* turn, Kings!

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