My Ideas: I'm Writing Another Screenplay! Yay!

For the second year in a row, I'm planning on doing the Script Frenzy. And for the first year in a row, I give a damn. Well, that's not fair. Last year, I wrote for the experience of writing a screenplay, and in most senses, I succeeded. Technically, I failed to submit it in time due to a misunderstanding of when it ended, but I did write 100 pages in 30 days, so in theory it worked. However, it didn't really work as a screenplay. I didn't know enough about the design of a screenplay, to start with. Oh sure, I got the right font and an approximation of the correct layout, but before long it just became another novel with the occasional stage directions. More importantly, I didn't really care. I had a very novel idea, one I wouldn't mind revisiting, but the characters, the plot itself, and every complex detail was figured out as I went, with no outline or even assumptions going in.

Part of it was the timing, though. At the time, I was early into a horrific project at work that ate up much of my free time and more importantly my creative energies. This time around, I'm able to make unemployment work FOR me.

But that's not the important difference. The main difference is the topic of the screenplay. Like most of my novels and notably not in my first screenplay, I used characters, settings, and ideas that I developed for years. But this is different, because it's not just some old concepts. This screenplay is adapted from the pilot and a few other episodes of a television series I wanted to make since approximately high school. Based on characters I made at twelve.

This is different from my novels. This isn't about myself, or because I have something to prove. I think I accomplished this over the years. This is the fulfillment of a dream. At the minimum, this is getting a story out of my head after years of contemplations, maturation, and reconsideration. And hopefully, it could be more. I see this involving agents, and friends offering rewriting suggestions, and even selling this to a publisher. And in the wackily optimistic part of my brain, it involves sharing it with the likes of Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman (yeah, it's an animated film) and having them vouch for me, or even doing the direction! Hey, you can't write fiction without having fantastic dreams.