Writing, Writing All the Time, Nor Any Drop to Drink

Things what I'm currently working on:

• A rewrite of a script I've been working on, in some form or another, for ten years, called "Flesh and Blood."  It was my primary script in grad school; my first year was the first draft, and then the second year, I did extensive workshops in two different classes.  It went through about four various iterations in those two years.  The protagonist went from being a mid-30s nurse to a late-20s cop.  From 2007-2010 I went through a few drafts on my own, finally settling on the protagonist being a senior in high school.  The central premise stayed the same, but the bulk of the story changed quite a bit.  I didn't do anything with it from 2010-2015.  Last year, the producer who optioned one of my other scripts gave "F&B" a read-through and liked it - modest budget, thrillers always sell - but felt it needed work.  So I did another re-write, sticking with the high school millieu but shifting to a more psychological, kind of "Hannibal" (TV) vibe.  My unofficial agent and manager (we're all working on developing stuff, but I haven't signed anything) were into it, but thought I'd gone too far in the psychological direction, needed to come back a bit and hit a few more of those thriller tropes.  So I'm doing another draft, this one almost a full rewrite in the first half, with more of the pages from the previous draft sticking around for the second half.  I'm shooting for getting through Act 2 at the least by the end of March, and I'm making really good time.  At this point, I've been working on it for so long that doing different drafts and iterations is easy-peasy.  I never feel like I'm killing any darlings because I've killed them all at one point or another.


• A new script idea, still in the outlining phase.  I'm not usually an outliner for a first draft, preferring to find the plot and learn who the characters are as I go.  What that means is that my first draft usually gets either tossed or extensively re-written.  When I'm just writing on my own, it's no big deal; now that I'm working with others with development, there's more pressure to not waste time and energy.  So I'm having a hard time going through a part of the process I usually never address until I've gone through the whole script - I sort of do the whole thing backwards.  I'm watching movies for structure paradigms, but I need to get my ass in gear.  I'm so much more interested right now in "F&B," it's hard to stop and work on something else.  My goal was to have the outline done today; I'm just at the end of Act 1.  So, this weekend, then!


• My novel, "The Orphan Queen."  Always and forever. I'm at 400k words now, so obviously it would never be published as a single novel (not that I ever worry about publishing, to be honest; it's not why I'm writing it).  But I know where the story ends, so I'm writing to that point, and I'll figure out the rest as I get there.  I started it in the summer of 2012, so coming up on four years.


• Trying to complete old B5 WIPs.  I'm almost done with the next chapter of Alma Mater, and I just started the next and hopefully last chapter of Cells (which as far as I can tell, exactly one person read chapter four, so this is clearly just for my benefit, haha).  Over the past month or so I actually re-read all my own B5 fanfic (is that really self-indulgent?) and I just super-miss the fandom as it was here in 2010-2012, and I hate that everything's moved to tumblr because tumblr's a pain in the ass.