Actually, I didn’t go anywhere. But I’ve been busy with two writing projects, and they’ve kept me from writing for my blog. One is a joint writing project I’m working on with a friend, which is loads of fun to work on. The other is Script Frenzy.
Script Frenzy is Nanowrimo for scripts – you write a script (movie, TV, play, whatever) in 30 days. The event is held every April, and this is my first year to try it. Anything is fair game, including adaptations of your own, or someone else’s, work.  So I decided to get a better handle on the key parts of the novel I wrote last November by distilling it into a script. It was a fun and educational process.

The goal is to write 100 pages, which actually isn’t much once you apply the formal movie script format to the writing. There’s lots of white space in a properly formatted script. My script wound up being 118 pages long. I made a point of getting my story wrapped up, and had the fun of writing a montage of “where are they now?” scenes to cap off my movie. It’s not a work of art, but it is a complete draft, and should be useful when I get around to editing the book.

I highly recommend giving this a try if you have any interest in writing or happen to love movies. It gave me a whole new perspective on the challenges of telling a story on film and I now watch movies with added appreciation.