I know, I know

Almost two years? Wow. What happened? Eh, life. You know - you miss one week of blogging...that turns into a month, which turns into a year. From now on I promise to post once a week. Deal?

Where have I been? I'm still writing; still sending things out. But, life again. Problems that arise that don't so much derail you but cause you to lose 100% focus. You still write every day; still e-mail queries...but not quite with the same intensity. Suddenly, a year pass, and you realize...that a year has passed. ANYWAY.

Like most writers, I have a hard drive full of partial scripts. It's 10 pages of this, 30 pages of that. For some reason this had begun to bother me. It never had before. Some of these are as old as 1999 - and written on MS WORD to boot. But, for whatever reason this had become a point of irritation. Like a progression in music left unfinished, they need to be finished.

Fueled by this sudden and mysterious OCD-ness to finish these scripts, I decided to spend a month on each partial script and write very rough, "ball-of-wax" drafts. These drafts are just to get the general idea/story down in 80-90 pages, to expand, fine tune and finish later.

Oddly, this is a very freeing writing exercise. Your subconscious isn't constricted to a strict outline - so there's no "pressure," for lack of a better word. You already know points "A, M and Z" of the story, and the themes, and the general mood or vibe, so the ideas that flow fit what you're doing...not like stream of consciousness just to fill pages. Some ideas may stay in the final draft, many might be replaced; right now it's just to get that very rough draft down.