A New Year

Feeling a new attitude becoming necessary to cope with a rapidly changing world! To that end, I've been able to quickly write a first draft screenplay. Since the Aurora CO theater shooting, I have been watching this gun debate gain in intensity and had been scribbling thoughts and scenes. Then, when Newtown happened, a rush of new ideas arrived with a strong urge to take a break from novels and write a screenplay. As is always the case, I wasn't sure what it would be, tonally, until I started and found the deep levels of satire possible. I can always tell when it's going well if I laugh out loud at something outrageous that I have committed to words. Add an outrageous debate - make that flatly insane - and the potential for satire explodes.

Since I've been concentrating on novels, I haven't attacked a screenplay in a while, so it was fun and even a bit exciting to "pop one out." I say this because the amount of work involved in the first draft of a screenplay as opposed to the first draft of a novel is minimal. I don't guess I ever realized that. Now, looking back, I feel silly. Most of my novels have taken at least a year to write and edit, even if they were based on an existing screenplay of mine. Sometimes two or three years to get to a place where I am satisfied enough to start letting it out there. Some novels take 5-10 years. I still have my first, from 21 years ago, yet to edit! At one time, I was writing 3-5 screenplays a year. I couldn't write two novels in a year if my life depended on it!

To be clear, I am not talking about finished, polished scripts; each of those takes 6-months to 2-3 years, depending on the subject and how many other people have "input." (A gracious Hollywood term for "no ideas but a need to pretend.") So I embark on another journey into lala land where everyone has an opinion based on the pure knowledge that neither they nor anyone they know actually knows anything about what will or won't make money; but where everyone knows that everyone else is afraid.

I HAD to pick a controversial topic. Jeez. On the other hand, I get to laugh out loud when I read it, and get a break from the ongoing, intense, depleting labor (joyous as it may be) of fiction. Unfortunately, I don't even have time to reread this, much less edit it right now - so I apologize for any and all errors and typos.