Ready to be accountable? Post a comment with all the work you got done this week. Then do the same next week.
And the week after.
And so on.
You’ll be astounded at how productive this makes you.
It works because it’s embarrassing to show up here empty-handed week after week. Avoiding that embarrassment is a powerful motivator to get things done.
Social pressure is powerful.
I’ll go first. You reply in the comments.
Another Screenplay
I finished the rough draft of my other screenplay this week. It turned out to be more pages than I thought. It was 35 instead of the 20 I predicted. This means I have to start cutting. The script is 114 pages, and conventional wisdom says that’s too long for a screenplay.
However, news broke this week that a 190-page first-time spec script sold in Hollywood this week. This is unheard-of wackiness. Everybody’s talking about it.
By the way, the reason I’m writing this pen name script is this: It’s a good idea to have two spec screenplays:
One that’s a movie that you really want to see but that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing genre category—it merely serves as a showpiece for your voice. (That’s Patrick Stoodle’s Completely Awesome Army of Killer Robots, which I finished and posted here last week.)
The second that’s a strict genre piece. That’s what my penname script is. The genre is sci-fi action thriller. The subgenre is paranormal/superhero. It’s an adaptation of a novel I wrote 10 years ago. The evidenced 35 pages are below.
Novel
The progress on my new novel (Nothing Civil About It: a farcical saga of the 2nd war between the states (I keep changing that subtitle because I can’t seem to settle on one I like)) was much slower than I’d hoped.
I wanted to finish up the last dozen or so chapters and do a first pass this week, but I barely got through a first pass of chapters one and two.
That’s painful.
I need to turn up the heat. I’ll never get the book done at this rate. Ideally, it would be done now. It’s an alternate history story that starts early November, 2026. Time’s a-wastin’!
Those two chapters are below.
Previous Screenplay
I also spent some time getting some feedback on the Patrick’s Robots screenplay. I’m excited to get enough beta-reader notes to improve the shit out of this one.
That’s all for me this week.
Don’t forget to post your work in the comments!
