A Winner Is Me!
Apologies for the nerdy-ass post title, but I'm psyched. Yes, this has not been me ignoring my blog and not posting because I'm flaky, it's been me ignoring damn near everything and not posting because I've been writing 50,000 words of a novel. Turns out I'm only about two-thirds done with it, but that's fine by me. 50,000 isn't much of a novel anyway. I intend now to have the entire thing done by New Year's.
When I made my last post, over a month ago, my intent was to shake up my writing habits, and man did it ever work. The combination of a completely self-imposed deadline, the sense of community with thousands of other people (and a couple personal friends) doing the same thing, and the fact that I was working in prose all came together and led to success.
Now, the blog description says I write screenplays, and I do, but Jesus H. Christ fighting ninjas on Mars, did it feel good to write nothing but prose for a month. Part of the attraction, the mystique, and the fun of a screenplay is that it's such an insanely tightly-restricted form that it makes you work muscles in ridiculous places. To mangle Robert Frost's metaphor, it's like playing tennis with the net up, a tight three-piece suit on, barbed wire all around the edges of the court, and angry monkey hurling feces at you. If you can play tennis that way, it's safe to say you can play yourself some damn tennis. Screenplays are like writing 115 pages of consecutive villanelles.
But then there's prose. Prose, where a paragraph can go more than five lines. Prose, where scene breaks and act breaks happen where you think they should go, regardless of what page they're on. Prose, where going over 120 pages is a good thing. Prose, where you can take it as slow as you want, including setting up a sexual metaphor that you subvert one clause into the sentence. Prose, where you can use words just because they're beautiful, even if they're so obscure they'd start a fight at a Scrabble game.
More on my self-satisfied sense of accomplishment later. Right now I need to get away from the keyboard for a bit.
