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Yes! I did it! I won Script Frenzy!

I validated my 2007 Script Frenzy script, How to Weave an Epic, on Thursday, June 28, 2007. The validation function on the website counted 20,105 words. After I validated it, I went and told two of my friends who knew I was participating, and it was fun to have someone with whom to share my joy. I am very happy that I was a successful participant in Script Frenzy.

I didn't work on my script every single day in June, but I worked on it the majority of the days. Even though the minimum word count per day was only 667, to me, it still felt like work to get that many words out per day. That was partly because, in acts 2 and 4 of my play, I was working with characters who were brand-new for this play and who I didn't know very well. I also definitely noticed the loss of the ability to write a lot of words by describing scenes and other things.

This was my second play script. My first was much shorter, less than 10,000 words. The script format suits me very well. Whenever I go to write a story of any kind, it always ends up being mostly dialogue, so I have no problem writing extended conversations in plays. I had a bit of difficulty making the sacrifice of the ability to write descriptive passages, but I kept at it and completed the challenge.

My Script Frenzy experience ended in the same way as my 2005 NaNoWriMo experience: I won, but my writing project is not complete. While I was writing my play, I followed the standard Office of Letters and Light advice to follow whatever ideas spontaneously came to mind and see where they took me. Those ideas ended up expanding Act III from five scenes to eight. They were a heck of a lot of fun to write, though. Right now, I'm very slowly working on finishing up the last scene of that act. Only the first of four or five scenes of Act IV is complete, and V isn't even started yet (it should be shorter than all the others, though). I've got plenty of work ahead of me this month.

I'm glad I did Script Frenzy because it was a lot of fun, and established writing every night after dinner as a habit in my mind. This is a very good thing, because I've always been terribly undisciplined in terms of commitment to writing regularly. Script Frenzy changed that, at least for a while. As a lasting reminder of this month, I have a Script Frenzy T-shirt and thank-you gifts waiting for me at my parents' house. :-)

The thought of writing about a war between two sets of numinous beings (and having to think of a reason for them to even meet each other, much less go to war) was just too daunting for me. I also thought that plotline would make my play way too complicated, so I changed it for a simpler one that would be easier to stage.

The new plotline is this: Keria is still sent into a fictional re-creation of ancient Greece and still has to play the role of a minor member of the pantheon, but there is no war. Instead, there is a poet trying to write an epic tale of the deeds of men and gods, and it's Keria's job to inspire him and keep him on track... but it's really hard to do that when said gods keep popping up to complain about how they're being portrayed. This is a problem for two reasons: One, nobody likes to be told how they should do things when they're working on a creative project, and two, Keria's ideas about how to be a good Muse, i.e., how to have a good relationship with one's Writer, are different from those of the other Muses, because the thinking on that has changed a lot between the age of ancient Greece and the present.

I am so looking forward to this. :-)