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.

Through the muck and the mire...

So first off, apologies for the down time between posts.  Between Christmas, work and the fact that I've had a terribly bad, weird face headache thing for the past several days that has had me all hopped up on meds and unable to sleep most nights, blogging has been one of the last things on my mind.  But it's almost New Years and then I mean to buckle back down on my somewhat neglected writing and get to work.

So "The Plan" has me finishing my editing of Runaway Train by the end of January but it is very difficult going right now.  I don't really know how to edit and it is much too short so I'm still trying to figure out what to add.  Some of it I have figured out but I'm fighting every step of the way not to get drawn into a shiny new project that would be much more fun than the muck and mire of editing this novel.

But on a slightly brighter note, I found a novel I want to adapt into a screenplay.  I've been hunting for sometime for a novel in the public domain that I could write a screenplay from, and I finally found it.  The book (*shakes a bit with fear at the thought that someone might steal her idea*) is "Rilla of Ingleside", the last of the Anne of Green Gables books.  It follows Rilla Blythe, Anne's youngest teenaged daughter, through life on the home front of World War I Canada.  It was always my favorite of the Anne books and I think it would make a fabulous movie.  I don't know where adapting that will fit into my writing schedule, but we'll see.

Well, I'm off to heat up some leftover green bean casserole for lunch, so fare you well.

Inspiration

So first off, I'm a day late in saying this, but yesterday was December 7th.  Now for all you non-Americans and/or people who don't know your history, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and effectively began the US's direct involvement in World War II.  President at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt said a very famous quote the day following in his speech to Congress while asking for a declaration of war:

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

On a lighter note, I think I finally figured out what I want to write my screenplay about.  Now, I'm not usually real paranoid about people stealing my ideas, just because for two people to write the same story, it would still be substantially different.  But this idea is a true story about a little known historical figure and I'm a little nervous putting the idea out there, in case someone else writes a screen play on this person, because it would probably be very similar to mine.  So I'm going to keep exactly who it is under wraps for now, but I'm pretty excited about it, and just working on finishing up "Christmas at the Holiday Inn," so I can work on that.

Script Frenzy and All Nighters

A quick blog entry, and then I'm going to work on my novel.  For reals.

Two things I wanted to share with you, dear readers.  The first is that I am planning on staying up all night to work on my novel/do other things unrelated to working on my novel.  Aaron has inventory at work tonight; he left about two hours ago and won't be home until 6 or 7 AM probably.  So being the supportive girlfriend that I am, I'm going to attempt to stay up for as much of that as I can, puttering away on my trusty laptop, so that I can sleep in with him tomorrow.  Not that sleeping in is usually a problem for me.  So as I embark on my own Night of Writing Dangerously, my word count stands at 22,660 and at bare minimum, I would like to hit the halfway point of 25,000.

The second thing I wanted to tell you about is that I am seriously considering doing Script Frenzy in April.  For those of you who do not know what this is, it is a sister operation of sorts of NaNoWriMo and is for writing screenplays, plays, TV scripts etc.  I have never participated in Script Frenzy but I've recently become intriegued by the idea of writing a screenplay.  I have a couple of ideas that wouldn't work great in a novel but I think would make a great movie.  So I'm bouncing that idea around in my head.  We'll see.

Well, Aaron just called and he forgot something here that he needs for inventory, so I'm going to run that down to him.  Then I'll start on the nightly word count when I get home.