60 Down, 50ish to Go

It's that time of year when the Hollywood train comes to a screeching halt because of the holidays.  Everyone is sick of everyone else, so they head out of town to spend quality time with their families. Then after a couple weeks, they can't stand them any more either so they become anxious to get back to the industry and started on the looming pilot season.

Yesterday, I think one breakdown was released that I could be kinda/maybe/sort of/barely be right for.  It is S-L-O-W.  But that's great news for me because I am 100% in writing mode.  I am determined to get this screenplay draft done before the end of the year. Then my story partner (let's call him Sin Nombre) and I will team up to do the "real" writing in 2015. 

So I'm sitting at my computer in my jimmy jams, typing away for hours at a time.  It's excruciatingly slow, but there is a long way to go.  I feel like I'm bringing a baby to full term and birthing the bastard. Part of my DNA will be in this script. At times it screams at me and wants more but I don't know what it wants because it's a baby and can't talk yet so I pull my hair out trying all sorts of different things to try to make it happy. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Is it teething? Ahhh!!!  It's my first and I feel totally lost at points and wish it could just write itself so I can go have a glass a wine and watch the Newsroom finale.

Okay, enough baby metaphors. It's a challenge, to say the least. I recently just completely threw out what I had written for the second act. Threw it out. Like if I had written it on paper, I would have crumpled it up and thrown it on the floor.  Possibly burned it.  As I was explaining my newest plot points to Sin Nombre, I just hunched over, mid-sentence and defeated, "This sucks," I said, "It's boring as hell." 

He laughed, but I figure if it's boring to write, it's going to boring to watch. So I cut that shit out and went a different direction.   I think I've written 150 pages of screenplay by now for the modest 60 I currently have to show for it.  Still, that's 60 pages more than nothing and well on the way to having a feature film script.  A bad ass feature film script that I would die to make because I love this story. That passion is truly the greatest motivation on the planet. I could write forever on a story I'm passionate about. 

Here's to the next 50 pages. Let's write them.