We've Got Ribs

Okay, I've written about 20 pages of the new script I've been working on and plotted out the remaining 45 or 55 pages that still need to be written, which means it now exists in skeletal form. It still doesn't have a working title and I'm still not ready to show it to Pete, Patrick and the rest of the Nosedive gang. (Yes, the folks at Nosedive Central get first crack at the rough drafts. I know, I know, you're bitterly envious, aren't you?) I'm nowhere near finishing a readable draft (like I said, I'm only about a third or a quarter of the way there), but the story has been put in place and the main characters have been established.

I got the characters. I got their voices. I know their world.

True, I know the world a little more than all the characters, but they're catching up very, very quickly.

So, for all intents and purposes, I have a decent enough sense of what the play is and what it's going to end up looking like.

Skeletal form.

I'm happy to report that my brain isn't letting this one go. Ideas are...well, percolating isn't right. Rattling around my brain every waking moment is more like it. I'm not being hyperbolic around that.

Mac Rogers once pointed out to me that a playwright's job is never finished, since even if you've finished a new script or are producing a play based on a script, you always think that you should be home working on something new, regardless of what sort of schedule or down-time you have (very much a "got time to lean, got time to clean" mentality). Right now I now exactly what he meant. I need to write this down so I can at least stop thinking about these characters and what they're doing.

Whenever I write something new, I get to the "high endorphin" stage of the project early on, just after I get out of my own way and start writing the damn thing and again just before I come to the end and realize I can send my friends a readable draft by the end of the week.

I finished the stories I need to write for work today, so my hope is to write another 10 or so pages today before my enthusiasm wanes. Very soon, the high endorphin stage will be coming to an end, which means I need to work at getting to page 40 before that happens: 10 pages today and 10 tomorrow.

(Once I've written 40 pages of something, i.e., more than half, I realize I can't just "walk away" from it and will have to finish it for good or for bad to stave off going batshit as a result of my obsessive-compulsive behavior.)

Anyway, I just wanted to give you all a kinda sorta update as to what I'm working on. Again, we'll see if I can finish this damn thing anytime soon (although there's no real rush; Nosedive's already slated to stage Suburban Peepshow in February or March of 2007 and I've written a handful of one-acts as a "backout clause" if I have nothing to show Pete or Patrick by then, so in the worst-case scenario, Nosedive isn't in any danger of being behind schedule unless I can't come up with anything by the fall of 2007).

I think/hope that I'll be ready to actually say what the script is kinda sorta about for my next entry, which will either be tomorrow or Monday. Again, this all depends on how much progress I make on it today and tomorrow.

Getting back to work,

James "Compulsive" Comtois