CodeNameSarahToo many secret identities for just one person.

“Tonka on Toilet Paper”

Quilted, soft, or rough,
The fate of the unspared square
Is always the same:
Circling its porcelain grave
An unmourned, frail paper wraith.

I recently watched “Run Lola Run” for the umpteenth time (I have lines memorized in German…and I don’t speak German — that’s how many times I’ve seen this movie), and this little senryu came tumbling out:

Suppositional
Rashomon, only German
With a chick running.

Do I get bonus points for using up an entire line’s worth of syllables on a single word? I should.

I am wearing my candy skull print shirt today, and contemplating this year’s NaNoWriMo. I actually made my wordcount yesterday, and I feel pretty certain that I will do it again today.

I’m trying very hard not to develop the sort of overconfidence that plagued me in earlier attempts. I know that I may feel very differently tomorrow, or next week. I’m not sure what causes the disconnect — why I’m filled with stories that I just can’t seem to write down. I mean, I’ve been writing since I was 9 or 10 — actual stories with plot and everything, even at that age (not that they were, ah, good) — but I seem to have lost the ability to follow through somewhere along the way. I haven’t even finished a decent short story since 1996.

I…I blame poetry.

After about 1996, I came to focus on poetry, and I think that’s where I sabotaged myself. I came to value image over story, and brevity most of all. My mind is filled with stories, not stanzas, but I wrote stanzas for so many years that cohesive narrative is no longer my native tongue.

However, I have written less poetry in the last two years than I used to write in an average week. (Seriously.) Although I didn’t set out to abandon poetry, that’s sort of what happened, and in retrospect I think it was a good thing.

I’m hoping that it will lead me back to prose.

We’ll see, as my Mom used to say…

Man, I am already regretting choosing my oldest vampire story for NaNoWriMo, and the month hasn’t even started yet.

Vampires are just so…done. Everybody and their dog has a vampire story. And my vampire story? I made it up when I was 13. And why the hell was I writing a lesbian/vampire love triangle story when I was 13, anyway? (Let’s refrain from examining the Freudian implications of that for the moment.)

But…I know how the story is supposed to go. And I really think knowing that will help. The first year I started with some notes and a little backstory, a couple of character sketches, and some good enthusiasm. I got past the half-way mark. The second year, I just jumped in with a vague idea of where I was going and who was along for the ride, and barely made it past an incredibly disturbing opening scene. (It was a good opening scene, but it was so demented that it disturbed me too much to go on. In fact, I did something very similar on my screenplay for the first Script Frenzy this summer — when you start a movie with a dream sequence involving child rape…you pretty much come to the conclusion that you as a writer are seriously fucked up.) So, I’m thinking that knowing a lot about the story at hand — characters, plot, and all — might work better for me than the NaNoWriMo standard of just jumping in and seeing what happens.

At this point, I just need the discipline to sit down every day for 30 days and just write this stupid story that I have had clanking around in my brain for umpteen years.

And that’s what I intend to do. It’s just that it may be the lamest vampire story ever. Sigh…

I seem to have lost my mind again, since I just signed up for a third round of racking failure at NaNoWriMo. I may not be very successful, but at least I am persistent, right?

I’m not really breaking the rules this year, although it sounds like I am. I’ve decided to revisit the very first novel I ever started, a vampire story called “Stained Glass.” I started it when I was thirteen years old, which was [unintelligible coughing sound] years ago, but I never quite let it go. I’ve picked it up again at least twice, and rewritten entire sections of it — but I never came anywhere close to finishing it. So…I’m going to make it my NaNoWriMo project. However, before anyone starts crying foul, I would like to point out that I am not using any existing material for this draft. I am starting from scratch, apart from the stuff in my brain.

In fact, I am changing it to a more modern story — it originally took place in a turn of the (twentieth) century boarding school — even though I am keeping most of the original plot as I imagined it.

I have no idea if I’ll get anywhere with it, but…I’m going to try. I don’t know, this might be my year to complete the challenge. My work schedule is under control, and I should be able to schedule adequate writing time (which I really couldn’t do before). Plus, I’ve had a sign, I think. One of the pivotal plot points involves a very specific sort of chapel — a chapel I imagined almost twenty years ago, when I lived in another state. We recently attended a wedding that took place in a chapel that could have been the exact chapel from my novel…except I had never been there before!

And that, my friends, was a pretty freaky coincidence — particularly since I started thinking about using “Stained Glass” as my 2007 project a full month before that wedding.

So…wish me luck.

Okey-dokey. Script Frenzy has begun.

And I gotta say, so far at least, my predictions of sheer ease have been coming nicely true. I already have over 1300 words, and a good handle on on the plot. My biggest difficulty has been naming characters — how sad is that? Sure, I could run out of momentum, I suppose. But I don’t feel that it’s likely.

I mean, this feels great. I’m not even intimidated by the formatting, because — dude, I can always change that later. And from what I understand, screenplay formatting changes seasonally in Hollywood, mostly to separate insiders from newbies. So it’s not likely that my format will be fashionable, even if it’s correct. I chose a British format, for one thing, because I’m used to writing BBC standard radio scripts and it was fairly similar.

And it’s so…easy. As fun as NaNoWriMo is, it’s kind of torture — even on the first day. I love that it makes you consistent with your writing, and it really gets you in the habit of writing every day. But I’m never 100% comfortable with it. I actually like to edit as I go (to some extent), and it’s really hard to just aim for word count over everything else.

At least the script I’m writing, bad or not, has a full plot already. Also, it’s a movie I would actually pay to see, if it were real.

Maybe that’s the key. Maybe I’ve never chosen a novel idea that I would really like to read, if it happened to be a “real” book.

But that’s an idea for next November. In the mean time, I have a tense conversation with the editor scene that I need to write, so I need to, ah, fade out this journal entry.

Heh. Fade out. I am such a loser.

Perhaps today we will have a lesson in “not writing when your brain does not work.”

Perhaps not.

I am very excited about Script Frenzy. This will, of course, wear off — and probably soon, possibly even before it actually begins. But for the moment I am running with it. I have gathered two different sets of film script templates, and will be trying both to see which I like better, and I have doctored the NaNoWriMo progress tracking spreadsheet for the new process. Believe me, 667 words a day seems a lot more reachable than 1667. I’m still feeling those cakewalk feelings — along with a terrible disappointment that the daily word goal is not 666, the word count of the devil.

You feel me?

Did I just type “You feel me?” Wow. Bad sign.

Anyway, I have an outline for the basic plot points, and a good background on my main character. She’s gonna come to a bad end, I’m afraid — but it is horror that I’m writing, so that’s to be expected.

I think the best part is remembering how much I really enjoy writing scripts. Sure, I like prose (and I love attempting to write novels), but scriptwriting feels nearly effortless — at least compared to other things. You know, things like getting out of bed or going to work…

To close, I leave you with a quote from the song “PJ + Vincent & Matthew + Björk” by Rasputina:
“If hopping into a live volcano feels right, I say do it!”