Elementals - Prologue

I realise that I promised you writing and I have insofar not uploaded a single extract. Consider this a start.

The following is the prologue from a novel I'm beginning to write called 'Elementals'. I'll not give away the plot because that's not cool, but I shall say this: What occurs in the prologue does impact later events, but not directly. All shall become clear later. Trust me. After all, you really have no other choice. Muhahahaha...

*          *          *



It started in the night. It began as a whisper at the back of his mind, increasing in volume until it was a roar that rocked the very core of his being. And then, very suddenly, it stopped. And he opened his eyes.

                 The room was on fire. Everything – the pale wallpaper, the wardrobe, the bookcase and its load of paperbacks – was burning fiercely, flames leaping up from the hardwood floor to lick the painted ceiling. The bedcovers were alight, the fire devouring the soft fabric.

                He reacted instinctively, kicking back the covers and springing out of bed and to the floor. More by accident rather than design, he managed to land in a patch free of flame. The heat was searing and the smoke thick, catching in the back of throat. He had to escape. He glanced at the door. It was succumbing to the inferno, its white paint peeling away. The brass doorknob glowed menacingly. There was no way out.  But wait - the window.

                Moving like lightning, he picked up a lamp and hurled the heavy object at the glass. It smashed through the single pane with a crash. He turned to it and backed up several steps. He killed the seeds of doubt in his mind – he didn’t have time to question the wisdom of what he was about to do. Grimacing with anticipation, he ran to the window and leapt.

                The cool air was both a shock and a relief to him as it rushed past. The cold wind flowed over his loosely-clad body and outstretched arms. Then he made contact with the rough bark of the tree, and his flight ended as abruptly as it had begun.

                Hooking his arms around the thick branch of the old tree, he hauled himself up into the foliage. Leaves still damp from the night’s rain wiped water across his forehead, mingling with the sweat. Twisting around, he looked back at the house. The whole building was lit from the inside by the glow of the fire, shadows dancing on the neatly mowed lawn. The crackle of blazing material and the crash of a collapsing roof filled the air. It was a symphony of destruction: The booming bass drum was the jerry cans in the garage; the xylophone’s tinkle was glass breaking; the trumpet’s fanfare replaced by the wail of sirens.

                When they found him, he was sitting at the base of the tree, fresh burns colouring his skin an angry red. His expression was blank, wiped clean by shock. But it was his eyes that caught the attention; held them rapt. They burned with the infernos of rage.

                The fire fighters may have extinguished the flames, but the fire blazed on.

*           *          *

There is more, but that's better left for another time. There is an actual plot behind this and there's a reason behind everything that just happened above. I just need to find it... Heheh.

Adios muchachos.

Scriptwriting for Novelists

I'm not sure if anyone else has realised this (blatant sarcasm; forgive me), but there's quite a divide between scriptwriting and novel-writing. Where in novels one must write great big long descriptions to satisfy the reader's potentially interested mind, in scripts descriptions must be as concise as possible. The director decides what the set and costumes look like rather than the screenwriter in a script, because the ultimate aim is to sell it on to someone else so that they may produce it as a movie, play or audio play. This is a key difference between the two that I am finding difficult to deal with.

As a novelist and storyteller at heart, I have grown accustomed to describing scenes in subtle and often lengthy fashions. One of my personal rules is to pour as much description in as possible without deterring the reader from reading on, something that is not always easy to achieve. Therefore writing scripts is difficult for me, because I have to cut down an entire paragraph to a few key words and phrases. Where in stories the bulk is description and action, scripts are fleshed out with dialogue and have little action blocks just to tell you where you stand.

Making the transition from noveling to scriptwriting is an unusually turbulent one, and I've found that the way to deal with it is simply to write my scripts as I do novels: pile on the description and intersperse it with dialogue. Then, when it comes to the rewrite, I go back and blitz it. Waging war on one's own work is often difficult, but it tends to work - it cuts down the unnecessary stuff and generally betters the entire experience. And, as I do this more and more, I find myself having to do less and less editing. The moral of the story: if you're a novelist, you're going to write scripts like a novelist, so rethink your entire approach before you start. Still, perhaps some things are better learned firsthand...

If any of you out there are novelists going into scriptwriting, just remember that it's an entirely different ball game. In fact, I think the ball may have changed shape as well as size... Good luck to you, people. I now have a novel to be writing. I bit you adieu!

Pisces

Dead Fish Productions

It was late last night when I decided that I was going to start up a production company. (Not a real, official company, but you know what I mean - it sounds better than 'group'.) Together with my friend Bill, we formed Dead Fish Productions, a group with a single purpose: to create short films, audio plays and animations (perhaps; only 'short films' is confirmed).

So it is that we exist: Professor Pisces as director and scriptwriter, Bill as the one-man camera crew and digital artist and now my own brother, Bod, as an actor, stuntman and continuity editor.

To deal with documenting the process of producing such films, I've set up a new blog - Dead Fish. On the official Dead Fish site, you'll see the production process followed through, bit by bit, from the conception of an idea through to the end credits and evaluation. When we eventually manage to produce something, we'll post it on YouTube over our as-yet nonexistent channel as well as linking it to the Dead Fish blog.

Head over there now and join us for the journey - it's bound to be a good show.

Writerly Commitments - It's Never Too Late

I may or may not have said all this already, but I feel I owe you all something.

People make New Year's Resolutions, yes? Well I don't. I hold to the philosophy that if something's worth doing, you do it now - usually. But Script Frenzy's shown me that sometimes we all need a jumpstart to get us going. A timeframe and a deadline works wonders on my work. This is why I've made something new for myself: Writing Commitments.

Before Screnzy, my creative drive was all but dormant. I wasn't writing anything and I felt sorta guilty about that. But Screnzy gave me the energy, that impetus, to start up again. The goal of a hundred pages made its mark upon me. When I completed Script Frenzy I set myself goals that I wanted to achieve throughout the rest of the year (only seven full months remaining, oh dear). The goals were (and still are) as follows:

1. Write a novel.
2. Write a short story (or five pages of a story) per week; this excludes the novel.
3. Enter at least five writing related competitions; these exclude events run by the OLL.
4. Partake in NaNoWriMo.

Now these, I believe, are goals that I can manage - at a stretch, no less. The novel is already in progress - a week in and I'm at 3,000 words already (Prologue and Chapter One inclusive) - and I've started one short story and resurrected another within the past month. (I haven't actually finished the short story, which seems like cheating, but I'll get round to it.) As far as competitions go, I'm writing a poem for a particular competition presently. Considering that the deadline's literally months away, I'll be happy to mull over the lines slowly for a while and create some really nice stanzas. The other four competitions are yet to be selected. However, I have one tiny problem - NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo, for those unaware, occurs in November every year. It's an annual event run by the Office of Letters and Light (OLL), and the aim is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Now the problem is not the challenge itself - after all, I completed it last year, albeit with only a couple of hours to spare - but the time at which it happens. My schedule for November is loaded, so much so that it may just be too much to take on the challenge of novelling. However, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. NaNoWriMo is months away, though rest assured, it'll leap out at me when I'm unawares.

With these commitments in place - and now several dozen people aware of them and able to keep me on track - I'm sure to do much more in the way of writing. Those several dozen people know who they are. If I stray, I'm sure they'll beat me back into shape with sharp rebukes. After all, keeping my honour and my word are great incentives if nothing else is.

Off to devise a way of keeping myself on track, this is a rather tired and beleagured Author signing off. Now where are those Hayfever tablets...?

Finished the Frenzy

Well, Script Frenzy is now officially over, and has been for several days now. And guess what? 101 pages!

While I may have completed Script Frenzy, I'm nowhere near finishing off my script and am going to have to ax 45 pages immediately. It sucks, but it's the truth. Thirty days and 101 pages just isn't enough space, unfortunately. However, this being the first script I have ever written, I think I've done pretty well.

So what's next? Well, I have other aims for the rest of this year. I want to participate in either or both of NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWrimo, the difference being that one occurs in June and the other in November. I'd also like to enter at least five competitions in the rest of this year - if I win money, I can officially say that I'm a professional writer. Asides from all that, I think I'll try and write a short story each week.

Now you pretty much know what my plan is for the rest of 2012. I'm off to get some sleep - Screnzy really takes it out of you.

With tired regards,
   A Rather Satisfied Screnzier

Transcribing: I Hate It.

It has been a good Screnzy so far, and now that we are over halfway through the month, I'm two thirds the way towards finishing Script Frenzy. (Yay!) However, the past week has seen me going on holiday without Celtx (the scriptwriting software I'm using), so I've been forced to write by hand on sheets of low-quality lined paper. This has also forced me to estimate how many pages I've written on paper, which totals approximately 20. And now I need to transcribe those 20 pages from the paper onto the computer. Lovely.

Transcribing is simple, but incredibly irritating. I simply keep my sheets beside me and type what I read. Unfortunately, it's very time consuming and not all that satisfying. It feels counter-productive - stealing away precious time I could be using doing other things, namely writing more new pages on the computer.

However, just like anything else, it has its benefits. Reading it through and transcribing it is, in a way, multi-task proof-reading. I can locate and edit out typos and suchlike as I go, and modify speech to flow more smoothly. On top of this, it means I can mentally edit everything, working out which parts will make the second draft and what won't survive the extensive editing I have planned.

As well as the obvious editing taking place here, it seems that I may have underestimated just how many pages I've written. At present, I'm calculating that each handwritten page is equal to 1.25 Celtx pages - which is good, as it means that I'm not actually losing as much time as I might think. I'm actually increasing the page count (marginally) as I go. Yip-dee-doo-dah to me, I guess.

So, to recap: I hate transcribing, but it's reasonably productive and is helping with the editing process. (I should really leave editing until after Screnzy, but what the heck! I'm ahead. I deserve to be allowed to deviate slightly.)

And now I'm off to do some more transcribing, and maybe write a guitar solo after that...

Regards,
   A Reasonably Happy Transcriber

Halfway There...

Wahey! I'm a day off being halfway through Script Frenzy!

 At this point in time, I have exactly 59 pages. Unfortunately, twenty of those pages are on lined paper and must be transcribed to Celtx so that I can be sure that I have what I think I have. The problem with writing by hand as well as typing it up is that there's no way you can actually tell how many digital pages you've written on paper. Currently, I'm estimating that one and a half lined paper pages equals a page of Celtx goodness. I hope to the Lord on high that I'm right, or better still, have overestimated and have written far more than simply 59 pages.

This aside, the story is going very well. Now almost 60% the way through my grand masterpiece, I've decided that around seven scenes need axing from the program. That means that approximately two thirds of what I've written is now moot; that is to say, obsolete. This is, no doubt, simply the best thing to realize when you're halfway into a long month of literary abandon. However, I've made the (intelligent) decision to carry on as if nothing's happened. The editing comes after the Frenzy. I tried deleting and rewriting a section a few days into Screnzy, and that didn't turn out so great.

So, I'm not actually following the Script Frenzy approved plan of writing 3.333 pages a day. Instead, I've been writing four, which lands me with a projected total of 56 pages by the end of today. Needless to say, 59 is more than 56 and that means I am almost a whole day ahead of my plan. If I can write five more pages today - which is what I want to do, BTW - I'll be two days ahead of the infernal beast of Screnzy. Great.

Hopefully by Tuesday I'll be past seventy pages. As it is, I can write at a rate of three to six pages per hour (3-6 pg./hr). It's unusual... I appear to write more quickly by hand than on the computer. Maybe that's because I get distracted by the Internet.

Speaking of which, I should really get back to writing now. So allow me to bid you farewell now - I have an episode to write!

Regards,
   A Tired Scriptwriter

Keeping Track of Screnzy

This is republished from my main blog, 'A Whole Different Kettle of Fish'.

Well, Script Frenzy begins tomorrow and I'm not going to have time to say this during the event, so I'm saying it now.

From here on in, I'm in The Zone. This means that pretty much everything I do over the next month or so shall be Screnzy related in some way or other. Seeing as Screnzy's going to take over my life for thirty days (assuming I don't simply burn out and die), I'll talk a lot about what I'm up to and all that good stuff. Alternatively, I'll chuck it over to my other, sideline blog, 'Journal of an Insane Author'. (Note: That's this blog.) However, in each post remotely to do with Screnzy, you shall see this thing below.

 

This is a widget. If it's not working for you, then to heck with your computer.

This little gadget's purpose in life is to show you my stats. It'll tell you how many pages I've written so far. At the end of Screnzy, it'll stick and be stuck forever. (That was a clumsy sentence, but oh well.) It shall act as a marker. I'm sad to say that it's quite likely that this blog shall be overrun with these widgets before the month is out. So now you know what they are.

If you want to look at my stats without the easiness of the described widgets, you can find me on the Script Frenzy site at: http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/eng/user/896055

Have fun with that.

And now, I have some last minute planning to do...

Convincing Characters

Characters are fickle creatures. They like to take you on long journeys, telling you they'll be great. Eventually, they simply flounce into oncoming traffic, though, and that's the end of it.

Finding the perfect character for the job is actually one of the most difficult things to do. It's all very well to plop a carefully shaped human being into a situation, but it's quite another thing trying to make them do what you want them to. The more like a real person you make a character, the more traits the idea takes on - if they're rebellious little so-and-sos, then you can expect them to rebel against what you want them to do.

Take, for the sake of argument, a grumpy goat. Goats are unusually stubborn at the best of times, and they eat all your clothes while they're at it. The only way to force a goat to go anywhere is to either drag it along by a rope, or pick it up and carry it to wherever it is you want it to be. This tends to be a bit of a problem, because if the place you want it to be is, say, insecure, the goat will simply gravitate back towards its original position. Such are characters: If they don't want to be somewhere, you can't force them to be there, otherwise they'll eat through the walls to get out. In short, you have to go with what the characters want.

Unfortunately, this tends to be a bit of a problem. If you put a stubborn character in a situation where what they choose is a turning point for the whole thing, then if they go for what you don't expect, then you may have a difficulty at hand.

I'm aware that I may be confusing some of you. Allow me to explain myself. When I say 'choosein relation to a character, I don't mean to say that the author actually allows the character in question to choose - more that an author should be able to locate the path of least resistance, or what a character's personality would want to do, and just go with it.

The great thing about a path of least resistance is: It has very little resistance attatched. That's why it's so called. In writing terms, it's simply easier to write the character into the story if they follow the path they want to. Events come to mind much easier, as do situations in which the person/thing may be put. That's why going with what the character wants is so important.

The alternative to all this is, when your character gets annoyingly stubborn and doesn't want to go where you wish them to go, you simply kill them. It's surprisingly good fun to kill off characters, and therapeutic too.

This post is winding down a bit now, so I'll round it off by saying: Characters, beware! If you don't bend to my will, then you'll die. Muhahahaha...

Two Weeks to Screnzy...

There's around two weeks to go until Script Frenzy begins, and I'm slightly more unsure as to what's happening with my script than I was yesterday. Unfortunately for me, that happens to be rather confused indeed.

By this point in time, I actually have an idea as to what's going to happen in the TV series that I'm attempting to write. That's certainly more than what I had at the start of this month. Allow me to outline my plan, or give you a brief synopsis. Whichever occurs to me first.

OK, synopsis it is, then.

The Gates of Tomorrow
In the middle of Tower Bridge, a net of crackling blue energy opens in broad daylight during the rush hour. In the chaos, the government send in a squad of elite troops. When one crosses the threshold of the portal, a fascinating discovery is made: The portal leads exactly twenty four hours into the future, and vice versa.

The Gate, once deemed safe, is seen as an excellent advance for the nation: Suddenly, thousands are flocking to London to go sightseeing tomorrow. But there are consequences of every action, and London's about to feel the full force of them.

As personal day-to-day time travel becomes an everyday occurrence, problems arise. What happens when you get a serial killer who hasn't tried to kill anyone yet? What happens to people who die today, but are still alive? How can the newspapers keep making money if everyone knows tomorrow's front-line news? Everyone is impacted by the potentially paradoxical outcomes of every action they make, and not everyone thinks the rules of time apply to them.

Enter the Gatekeepers, a special breed of military personnel and expert researchers devoted to keeping the Gate strictly under control. Yet they face problems every day - yesterday, today and tomorrow at the same time, sometimes - and all must vbe overcome. Because, as one person is very fond of saying, paradoxes cannot be allowed. In fact, they can't happen. Because the Gatekeepers are there to stop them.

Over the course of the series, they shall face some very real threats - terrorists trying out a triple-exploding bomb, serial killers to come and even people who know when they're going to die - but there is a greater foe out there, hiding behind the blue veil... He who opened the Gate is coming, and he's got a higher agenda.

Well, that's a brief synopsis. Maybe a little longer than brief, but alright. So that's the basic premise of my Screnzy for 2012, not that I've done Screnzy ever before, but oh well.

I'll definitely be posting about Screnzy in the coming month, so watch out for that.

Until next time, I bid you adieu.