Plotting

In theory if I do enough planning, I won't suffer writers block in the middle of my screenplay.

So, so far I've worked out two characters, who'll form the main focus of the story. James Maddox is the leader of a religeous cult who believes that the events of the book of Revalation have come to pass, and leads his followers on a pilgrimage to Meggido. That's tel-meggido, a settlement in israel near to har-meggido. And sometimes I wonder why I could never grasp hebrew...
Aaaanywho. T'other character's Ayman Farrakhan, a somewhat inept terrorist who really just wants to be accepted by his peers. This is one of the screenplays that'll never be picked up by a studio. (¬_¬)

What's really tricky is that, if there's a clear protagonist at theis point it's Ayman. Trying to convicne the audience to support a bastard who wants to kill lots of people isn't exactly easy. So I'm thinking I'll need to come up with some more characters to sort that out. Not sure exactly how it's working as of yet.

I reckon if I can work out what's gonna happen this week, get a treatment written by next week, hmms. COuld work, i guess.

Stephen gets his site stolen by the Iranians

So I log on to winterrevolution this morning, and get a 403 error. That's "you do not have permission to view this site", for those folk who aren't big on netspeak. My immediate reaction is "good grief, some idiot's gone and fiddeld with something", so I log in to the ftp only to be told the NTFS definitions are out of date. And a quick check at entfirms tells me my ftp's empty. At this point I'm beggining to wonder.

So, I go to a quick check with some of my resources and find out how pinging works: every country that pings gets a 403 with one exception: Tehran.
Oh hells yes. The nutters who sent me death-threats have finally managed something. I'm now the proud owner of some sorta jihad site or somethign! Yay!

...or not. Someone from the US was ncie enough to let me know she gets not a 403 error, but "site down for maintenance, will be back at 11:03 EST". Which is kinda odd to say the least. So either it'll beback to normal soon, or I'll find out what the Iranians have done to it.

Two years I've been with netfirms, and this is the first time they've put me down for maintenance and given me a 403.

Script Frenzy

So, I decided to enter Script Frenzy this year. I mean, I was planning on doing so anyway pretty much from when I heard about it. Which was some vague mention of a possibility somehwere iirc...

Anywho. by my reckoning writing a screenplay should make two weeks tops, which gives me an extra two weeks oif planning if i need them, although that';s liekly to end in disaster if I get too overconfident about my writing ability. Goodness knows I need a plan of the whole outline to get it to work properly.

Which is where the problem comes in - I honestly haven't a clue what I'm gonna do. So many ideas floating around, most of which are completely stupid. Is it a sci-fi? Set in mdoern times? Fantasy? Historic?

Well I have a vague idea it'll be set in the UK. And be something of a surreal dark comedy. And possibly be ridiculosuly offensive to folk who don't see the funny side of nutters who blow themselves up in the name of their god.

So, yah. Islamists will feature. Be trying to avoid being overly-political about it, mind. Just seems that having terrorists as the target for jokes oculd be interesting. Other than that, I don't really know.

Im part of group TPF this year, just like with NaNoWriMo
although this time there's jsut three of us. Myself, yamPuff and vicious. And Yams has exams and stuff the first two weeks, so shes in a worse position than I am. Hmms. We've set a rule that everyone has to use the phrases "SPARTA!" and "Tonight we dine in hell!" in their scripts, and on top of that I've set the optional challenge of using "I'm Spartacus" at some point, so I'm not sure how that'll work out. Have to fit them in somewhere, and try to keep them not standing out as obviosu references. Not easy.

This is gonna be fun.