It’s been a while since I posted…
Things have been kinda hectic. Again. So this is just a short post, to say that I’m currently working on two projects in parallel:
The first is the Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia sequel that I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. That one’s going a little slower than I’d like, mostly because it’s so long since I wrote the timeline, it’s actually a bit difficult to work out the story.
That sounds weird so let me put it another way. Start with a story – any story. As you tell it, everything fits in place, right? Something happens, and that leads to the next thing that happens, and it all makes sense. There’s a overall Big Picture – a beginning, middle, and end, and the things that happen – the scenes – are the bricks that make up the story as a structure.
Now take that set of scenes and stick it on a shelf for three years, then look at it again. At first, all you see is… a set of scenes. No continuity – it’s as if you can’t see the thread of the original story; it’s hidden away behind the scenes.
That’s kind of where I am with that. It’s as if I’ve forgotten the Big Picture of the original story and I’m having to reconstruct it from the individual bricks of the scenes in the timeline. At this moment I’m reading and re-reading the timeline scenes to get my head around the Big Picture. Once I’ve got that clear in my mind, things should go along much faster.
The second project is a screenplay…
I’ve written a handful of screenplays, but it’s been a long time since I did one (I just checked… the last one I did was in 2006). Something I was reading a couple of weeks back got me thinking about screenplays again, and suddenly I felt the urge to do another one. My old screenwriting software died when I “upgraded” the old laptop to Windows 10 (“All Your Software Is Compatible!“*) so the first thing I had to do was find a new program for that, and I ended up getting Fade In.
At the moment I’m working on the timeline of the story, which is a Science Fiction thing (as you can probably tell from that title: Box Made of Gravity). That’s coming along nicely and I expect to be able to start actually writing a spec script in another couple of weeks.
It occurred to me that I could/should create a new site page with the PDF versions of those old screenplays… they’re WGA registered, after all, but at the moment the only place anyone can find them is on the Zoetrope web site. So I’ll be doing that sometime soon. Watch this space.
∗ snarky reference to the earlier post about Microsoft
Pete Ford 