A week without a blog entry

There are a couple things disturbing about that. First, I’ve been trying to maintain a routine of writing these blog entries at least two or three times a week because it’s good exercise, and I guess, entertaining for some. More bothersome is the fact that it actually seems like only a couple days ago that I wrote the last entry. Where did this week go? Seriously, where did it go?

I have been getting feedback from several people about the screenplay. There have been a few reoccurring criticisms and the inevitable adamant feelings about certain aspects. All opinion must be weighed carefully, pondered as objectively as possible. There is always a point when everybody, including the original writer, thinks they are absolutely correct about what needs to be done to make the script perfect. The thing is that two entirely opposite opinions about the same thing can be right – or wrong. I actually had two different critiques of the exact same line in this last set of readers, one commented on it being great, the other on it being crap. It’s also important to separate what people’s personal desires in a story are from what the actual story is about. And you must do all of this through the searing pain that is inevitable when asking people to honestly tell you if they think your baby is cute or not.

Feedback. It takes a scar-tissued ego to not get knocked down. Even for the experienced, it’s difficult -- and that’s when the people giving you the feedback don’t have an ulterior motive that has nothing to do with the script. However, good feedback – Gold, I tells ya. Pure Gold.

Bottom line: as expected, I will be making changes to the screenplay. I think some will be quite significant too. After looking at it and the various notes for the last week, thinking about various levels of reworking, from junking it, to saying “it’s done” – I think I may be on my way to having a new map. For several days I felt as though I had just climbed a mountain, only to see an entirely new and equally brutal mountain range ahead. In the end, while there is quite a bit of work ahead, much seems as though it will remain the same.

I’m hoping it’s like a well designed car that has a bad clutch. Yeah, you gotta rip a lot of stuff apart to get to it, but once you fix that part, all the rest of it runs well.

At least the readers have generally been agreeing that it’s not a Yugo.