Cats and Kittens

This is a picture of kittens my husband saved from a forest fire. They have nothing to do with the following essay except I was thinking about cats and who doesn’t love a kitten picture? I especially like the WTF look on the kitten on the right.

I recently finished the first script I’ve written following the advice in Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT. The STC method is to get all the beats and scenes down before beginning to write, thus saving yourself the agony of staring into a blank screen wondering, what’s happens now.

It usually takes me six weeks to write a script. Six weeks of butt in the chair, fingers to the keyboard, writing. I may think about the script forever, research for a year, goof off for months, but in six weeks, I can write a screenplay. Every one I’ve written has taken six weeks.

I wrote this script in 25 days. Boy, was I surprised.

I had been thinking about the story for a while, so I didn’t keep track of how long it took to do the prep work. And, of course, I don’t know how it will fare once I send it out into the world. The point is the prep work dramatically decreased the endgame workload.

Put me down as amazed. I am such a dork. I have a learning curve that looks like this.

My next project is a Romantic Comedy even though I wonder if I’m romantic or funny enough to accomplish either. This time I’m keeping track of the prep work too – which you can follow along with in the sidebar because:

1. HTML is so much fun.
   
2. Procrastination makes us all look busy.

This next one is also the project I learned Gaelic for, God help me, so if you come back next year and the status bar still looks like this –

You’ll know it’s because I’ve taken up deep sea diving to learn why the ocean is wet.

Sláinte.