Royal Wedding...again...

Well I got up on Friday morning and watched some bits of the royal wedding on YouTube. It was pretty awesome. Kate was so pretty and the dress was perfect. They looked fabulous and the whole thing went off without a hitch...except theirs of course...they got hitched! Now we just have to wait for them to make some beautiful babies!!!!

Other than that, nothing very eventful has happened. I didn't do much all weekend but now I'm going to try to send out some more query letters to agents today.

Screenplay update and looking for an agent!

So I finished the screenplay! Yes, it officially took me 7 days to write and is 121 pages long. I already know that I have some serious editing (rewriting in the screenwriting world) to do but its good to have the gist of it all on paper...or on computer as the case may be.

So now I'm on to project number two which is to try to find an agent for Finding Innisburg, my NaNo novel for last year. So I have written up a query letter for it and so far today I have found four agents which take email submissions (I'm waiting on the snail mail ones until I have a printer!) and sent them my query letter plus a couple of them requested sample pages of the manuscript. I'm planning on querying a bunch of agents over the next couple of weeks and then starting in on outlining my new book.

Project number three is a novel currently entitled "St. Dorothy's School for Girls" which will be about a private school that is actually a sort of cult/club to train girls to become suitable princess candidates.  The goal of the "school" is to marry their girls off to the eligible princes and other royalty of the world. Right now I'm kind of thinking about it like you know those "pageant mothers" who just go nuts and are super hardcore about their daughters participating in beauty pageants? Well this is the same kind of thing except that the parents want their daughters to marry a prince. The parents and the school are really hardcore and as our heroine gets older she realizes that this is not what she wants but she's so ingrained in this brainwashing/cult that she can't get out. Sort of a dark novel about what happens when parents try to control their kids.

So wish me luck in getting an agent! I've never gone this far in the process before with a book so its kind of exciting! Also, I've decided that I can probably watch the whole royal wedding online tomorrow morning at a more reasonable hour so there is no need to stay up all night!

Royal Wedding and Screeplay Progress

Ok, so the Royal wedding is on Friday. That would be two AM on Friday if you're on the west coast of the US like I am. And I am in a dilemma. The wedding will be broadcast live here starting at 2 AM and part of me wants to stay up all night to watch it. I am unemployed with nothing to do the next day so I could sleep all day. This will likely be the biggest wedding in my lifetime except my own of course :P and I LOVE weddings so I would love to be able to say that I watched it live. But on the flip side, I know that Aaron would think it was absolutely ridiculous to stay up just to watch someone else's wedding and in a way he is right. The wedding doesn't concern me at all, I just think it's kind of cool. So I would like to do it but I also feel kind of stupid staying up to watch it. So, I can't decide what to do...

The screenplay is coming along well.  I had a couple of issues which I have more or less worked out.  The book, Rilla of Ingleside, is full of both letters between Rilla and her brothers that are serving overseas, and diary entries by Rilla. In an effort to maintain the feel of the book as well as convey the innermost feelings of Rilla which would be difficult to put in a movie without some voice over, I have put pieces of Rilla's diary entries into the screenplay. The form that they took were visually just Rilla writing in the diary, with her voice reading the entry in a voice over. But I was unsatisfied with this. It seemed boring and lazy but I couldn't think of a way around them. So then a couple of nights ago, I was watching the French film "A Very Long Engagement" which also takes place during and after World War I and in there, she reads letters aloud with voice over but the visuals show clips of what the voice over is talking about. So there is something for the audience to watch as well as listen to. So I've decided to do something similar with Rilla's diary entries and her letters from her brothers.  The voice over is necessary both for the feel of the book and to convey emotions and explanations but this makes it less lazy and boring than without any visuals. The only issue I'm having is that I'm not sure how to format it, whether the descriptions should come before all the voice over, or after or interspersed in where it is relevant. I think that I'm leaning towards interspersed it in. 

The second issue I had was that screenplays are supposed to be written in Courier font. However, Microsoft Word 2010 doesn't have Courier as a font, only Courier New. I did some reading online and found that although it is acceptable, Courier New takes up more space on the page than Courier and since I need all the space I can get out of my 120 page allotment, I downloaded Courier and switched the document over. It saved me about six pages so I'm still at just 100 pages now. But it is nice to have the extra leeway.

Other than that, I'm just enjoying not having to work and just puttering away at the screenplay. I'm also brainstorming for another novel since I want to write one after I finish Rilla, My Rilla (the screenplay) before I go back to work and/or school. I fill you in on some of my thoughts for that later.