this machine will not communicate

• 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.

Saw this meme today in attempting to begin to catch up on my flist maybe just a little.  I cheated a bit, in that I used the first two or three lines for a couple.  Also, this represents the first lines of the last few chapters from my novel, as I haven't been writing much - if any - fanfic lately.

1. JENNY ADAIR (17) never stops moving with a boundless, jittery energy from room to room.

2. I believe we've been here in Transoceanus for four months now?

3. JOHAN (V.O.) Heinrich, tell me a story.

4. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but Hermann didn't think so.

5. Calisia was a charming little town northeast of Omitaqua, built on bluffs overlooking the ocean.

6. A clearing in the woods. Green, birds singing, like a poem or some shit. Daryl made it no further, dropping to his knees.

7. Evenfall Hall, like any castle in the Seven Kingdoms, was filled with many particular odors.

8. It had been their last night together in the wild, though of course neither knew it at the time.

9. The walls were thicker at the bottom than at the top, like an old pane of glass.

10. Shouts at the end of the corridor. Shouts that were coming their way. Claudia slid her right hand up her left bracer, drawing out the dagger there, spinning it free of the linen.

As far as writing goes, for the last year I've been writing primarily on my novel The Orphan Queen, as well as two screenplays.  Rewrites and edits on a screenplay I optioned last fall (my first option!), which is ostensibly being sent around to directors right now?  I don't know; I haven't heard from the producer who optioned it in about two months.  The other is a script that I started literally a decade ago, that the producer read and liked the concept of, but he had a lot of good notes and said that it felt a little dated.  And it totally did; even though my last rewrite of that script had been 2010, it's amazing how much technology's changed and such.  So I'm currently about two-thirds through a page-one rewrite of that one.  I've been pretty consistently writing every single day, and it's become so much of a habit that I don't even really think about it anymore.  It's like, what else would I be doing with my time?  It would be cool if something happened with the first screenplay (The Dead House, which I think I wrote about on here once upon a time), but that's just a bonus, and not the reason why I sit down and write.