A Long, But Good Day

I woke up this morning, all ready to dive into summer writing, and immediately realized that I’d foolishly scheduled three meetings for this morning. Oops.

Thankfully, all of them were willing to reschedule, so I was able to clear the decks for writing this morning. I got through three scene adaptations, walked over to the Y to do a few laps (trying to get back to swimming at least three times / week), then came back and did two more scenes. Very productive, yay me, why I spent all of last week stressedly avoiding doing two hours of work, I do not know!

Well, I do know, it’s fear of doing it badly, but the only way out is through. (That feels a little like the story of my life right now, in various ways, but that’s probably a subject for another post…)

Anyway, I finished a full draft of my screenplay pilot (which was due to my class on Saturday, sigh, but at least it’s in, and hopefully some people will have time to read it before tonight’s class). Yay, finished draft!

It continues interesting adapting a short story to this form — I do a lot of internal work in my fiction, and with a screenplay I have to either just delete it and hope the director / actors will find way to make that characterization visible, or try to find ways to add new dialogue / action to replace it.

I’m mostly trying to avoid narration and voiceovers, although I had one that I just couldn’t figure out how to do any other way. Well, we’ll see what class thinks. (The pics show two bits of a scene — the first in prose, the second adapted to screenplay format.)

I also broke the whole thing into acts — it’s currently 5 acts, which feels sort of goofy given that it’s only 28.5 pages, but I think that’s pretty short for a TV episode, so I’m probably going to end up adding some more scenes and/or dialogue throughout, and these feel like natural breaks for the acts. I think. I don’t really know, but my teacher sent me this resource, which I thought was pretty clear and helpful, especially since I’ve actually seen the Grey’s Anatomy episode they walk you through at the end. 🙂

Interesting article too for its delineation of the transition from episodic to more serialized format in TV…and hybrid variations.

https://www.wgfoundation.org/blog/2021/10/18/episodic-drama#

Plan for the rest of the day:

• eat some quick lunch
• get my car from the shop (all the way out in Naperville, sigh)
• meet with Meghan @ 2 re: starting to sketch out the 6 week Intro to Fiction lesson set for the SLF’s Portolan Project
• break for two hours of tea and rest and gardening
• meet with Darius at 5 to sketch out at least some of season 2 of the MRAH podcast recording
• quick dinner, while reading and writing notes on classmates’ work
• screenwriting class from 6:30 – 9.

At some point in there, I’d like to do a more substantive post about the Portolan Project Kickstarter, but just to note, we’re now at $4409 of the $5000 goal, with 9 days to go, so I think we’re likely to hit that, I hope? I’d really love to get to the first stretch goal, when we add a lesson sequence on Black Futures, and I think offer an online screenwriting class too, if I can talk my teacher into doing one for us — well, we’ll see.

https://www.kickstarter.com/…/portolan-writing-project…

Long day, but a good one, I think.

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