My August Challenge: Finish writing a screenplay…!

Sharp-eyed readers of this blog and website may have noticed some movement in my “2013 Word Count Goal” over there in the right-hand sidebar. Yep, I’m getting some writing done again — new words! It feels GREAT.

My current project is a new one for me. Instead of a novel or story, I’m writing a screenplay.

I think I’ve got the basics of the formatting down (I’ve been reading a lot of screenplays from the IMSDb and raiding the library of veteran screenwriter John August for assistance, as well as reviewing the latest version of Screenplay on my Kindle). Luckily I have some experience with the odd formatting of screenplays from my work on the script for our digital comic a few years.

But screenplays, yeah… They can be a bit weird to draft.

Image by orchid | morgueFile

I figure I can go back and fix the formatting issues later. Right now I’m just chugging through the story. Getting the dialog down, letting the characters get into trouble, keeping up with the action, and so on. Figuring it out as I go.

And I’ve been having a blast. So much so that I want to keep at it. And that’s why I’m going to push myself.

As a writing challenge, I’m setting a firm deadline of the last day of August to finish this screenplay.

As of today, I’ve got 23 pages of script written out. That gives me 31 days to knock out the rest, which I’m guesstimating to be about 80 or so more pages. So about 3 pages a day. I can do that!

(Each page in a screenplay equals about a minute of movie time, and this feels like an hour and forty-minute movie to me, more or less.)

I’ll be tracking my progress here, of course, over in the word count thingie. And I’ll also keep up with what I’ve done each day on my Facebook “Author” page. So keep an eye on that page, too! And don’t forget to click the Like button on that page if you haven’t already.

Maybe on my Author page I’ll share a snippet or two from the screenplay that I worked on that day. Maybe I’ll post pictures of myself acting out a scene or a character’s expression from that day’s work.

Or maybe not…!

So wish me luck, hold me to my deadline, and thanks for following along! And thanks for reading.