Serious multitasking

The WWII novel is coming along now.  It has gotten a little bit easier, but I'm only managing a page a day.  That has become the goal now, every day I need to get a page done.  I'm hoping that I'll have this finished by the end of the year.

I finished the latest draft of my Family Archaeology screenplay.  It was a little long so I had to make some tough decisions about what to cut out.  One was particularly heartbreaking since it had a key character moment.  It was hard to replace it with something shorter, but the scene will survive in the sequel.

We gave our Animated Halloween script to a couple of readers so we can get some good feedback on what works and what doesn't.  I always tend to fill in the blanks in my head and not on paper, so it's always nice to have someone look at it, and point out what they don't understand.

I did another quick draft of my Horror Trap screenplay to clean up some of the formatting and started on another draft of my Sci-Fi Horror movie.

Met with Mr. G.

I had trouble getting a hold of my Hollywood screenwriting contact, who I call Mr. G., so I decided to just go to where his office is to talk to him.  Luckily, he was there and had some time to talk.  We spoke about a low budget horror film that he was directing and was getting close to finishing it.  I pitched the screenplays that I have been working on over the last three years.  He said there were three that stood out to him, and possibly a couple more that could work, but needed a better log line and pitch.  Since he was busy finishing his movie, he didn't have any more time and said to contact him again towards the end of the year.

Screenwriter's Bible

I finished reading the Screenwriter's Bible, by David Trottier.  It's a complete guide to writing, formatting, and selling a script.  I received the book as a gift quite a while ago, but finally made the time to read it.  There were a lot of things that I already knew and help with getting started which I didn't need.  But there were some excellent formatting tips that I didn't know about.  So it's time to go through each screenplay for yet another revision, this time focusing more on the format of it.  It's an unbelievable amount of work (especially since I've written so many screenplays now that I have to go back to) but this should make each screenplay look like it's supposed to and give it a better shot of being read.

A week of novel writing

It's been a week now and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.  My wife and Lannie believes it will get easier and some days I'll have multiple pages written and others not so much.  I hope so because I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever finish this beast.

WWII Novel Begins!

That's right, I've finally begun my first novel.  It's an adaptation of a screenplay I wrote that takes place in WWII.  It is completely different from screenwriting.  When I'm writing a script, there are a lot of details I don't have to worry about.  The script is just the blueprint and there are many other craftsmen working on it.  So the details will be figured out by the costume department, the production designer, etc.  But in the novel, I have to figure all of that out.  Now there are a lot of details that I'm sure most people will just gloss over, but I would like to make this as accurate as possible.  For instance, I spent some time trying to figure out a type of tree that would be found in England.  I didn't want to have one that couldn't grow there.

I thought this would be pretty easy since I already have the screenplay to go off of, but with the different style of writing, and the more in-depth research, I don't think I'm going to complete this in three months like I had planned.  I wrote only a half a page today and it was a struggle.  What am I getting myself into?

So I'm writing the novel in the afternoon and working on another re-write of my Family Archaeology screenplay at night.  This presents a unique challenge going from novel to screenplay.  I'll be glad when this is over.