Verbosity for a Good Cause

I've ended up taking an unplanned break from the Root Hill video edit over the last couple of days.  I was away from home yesterday (as per the blog post about demolishing Godalming), and today I ended up writing my monster movie script instead.

If you've been reading this here blog for any length of time, you'll have come across my ramblings about Megastropulodon Attacks! - and some of you might also have gotten wind of my plans to write a TV mini-series using a hugely expanded version of the same story.  By 'hugely expanded', I mean that the events shown in the existing short film will be stretched out across the whole 6-part series, to become the ongoing narrative arc which ties the different episodes together, rather than being condensed into a single lump as per the current form.  The existing characters all appear, with a few new additions - some who stick around for the whole series, others who only appear in one or two episodes.

I've got the basic ideas planned out for what will happen in each episode, and I'm currently working on first drafts for three of them.  I'm hoping to rope in other writers to do some of the mid-series episodes, but I'm doing at least the first one and the last two myself.  So I've completed the first draft of Episode 1 (29 pages, 6700-and-something words), and I'm currently beavering away on Episode 5.  For several days, if not weeks, it got stuck around page 11, and I thought I'd written myself into a cul-de-sac, and would have to scrap half of what I'd got and write something different.  But yesterday, I suddenly had a few minor epiphanies, and added together they pretty much got the storyline back on track.  After having one more spark of inspiration shortly after breakfast this morning, I spent a lot of today writing, and came up with over 2000 words - 8 or so script pages, or more than quarter of an episode.

The evening has gone downhill a bit, and the successful-writing-spree euphoria is already wearing off, but at least now that I've blogged about it I'll be able to look back later and bask in the retroactive smugness of having made so much progress before the day soured.

And if you're one of the Root Hill crowd, don't worry - I'm sure I'll get back to the digital scissors soon.


- The Colclough