Breaking the final (round) frontier!

Contrary to appearances, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I haven't been blogging here mostly because I was concentrating on real life stuff while also maintaining my 500 words a day quota (which I'm happy to say, I've been meeting).

Also, I'm preparing to start a "real" author's blog soon, one that is a lot more focused on establishing a platform than this rather inward-focused tool has been.

At any rate, the word count stands as follows:

Yay! I'm almost 37% finished with my first draft.

In other news, I learned late last night that I'm a finalist in the NYC Midnight Screenwriter's Challenge 2011! We started with about 425 screenwriters divided into 25 heats. The top five from each heat were chosen and divided into another five heats, and the top five of of those were selected as finalists.

I was really happy with the second script I wrote because, unlike the first one, the genre prompt was fantasy rather than--ugh--romance. Now I wait until 9:00 pm Pacific tomorrow for the final prompt, which will give us a genre, a required subject, and a required character type. I will then have until 9:00 pm to turn in a five-page screenplay. Yes, that's a 24-hour turnaround! Sounds terrifying, doesn't it?

All 25 of us will be writing to the same prompt this time. Please join me in praying that the randomly-chosen genre is NOT romance.

And just in case you're interested, feel free to check out the screenplay that got me into the final round.

"That's it?"

As I predicted, I spent most of the weekend working on my new entry to the screenplay competition, so I didn't write as much on the novel. I did, however, add a new 1083 words, which puts me over the 19% mark for completion of the first draft.

I tore my hair out for the first part of the weekend. Literally no concepts were coming to me for the screenplay prompt (genre: fantasy, subject: a natural disaster, character: an airport security guard). I eventually realized that the reason was that I was attacking it from a scenario and plot angle instead of letting the plot grow from a character. So I finally picked a concept and just started writing a character walking into the situation, focusing on who she was.

Thankfully, the writing flowed after that. I finished the first draft Saturday, polished it a little bit Sunday, and turned it in with hours to spare. Now I wait for a confirmation that the competition received my entry without any issues, and after that, I wait until July 18 to hear if I made the cut to the final round. I feel pretty good about my chances; I really like what I turned in.

More progress and some good news

Okay, folks, I'm officially closing in on the first plot point, and at just about the right time (according to plotting experts), because after writing an additional 2,081 words yesterday, I now have my first draft 17% complete!

As part of my never-ending campaign to derail my own progress, I've been worrying a lot the last few days because the writing is coming so easily. Not that it doesn't take me a lot of hours to come up with each day's words--it does--but I'm not actually struggling, and it seems like I should be. After all, didn't Gene Fowler say, "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead?"

Well, so far, I'm digging deep for what I'm writing and I like what I'm doing--a lot--but I'm nowhere near bleeding. And yes, I know this sounds stupid, so please feel free to make a doll with a lock of my hair and stick pins into it to your heart's content. That might at least provide me with something legitimate to complain about.

In other news, I just found out that I have advanced to the second of three