Well this is inconvenient

Ever have one of those weeks you have ansolutely no memory of whatsoever, and're only vaguely aware that you manged to do an unhealthy amount of work?

Yeah. So from what I recall, I spent the last week finishing off a huge amount of colelge work I was seriously behind on, culminating in my staying up until 2AM on tuesday, failing to actually fall asleep for more than an hour before i had to get up at 6, and then, for various reasons,
being totally unable to catch up on lost sleep. At all. Carn't be healthy. I also had a scare partway through the week where I thought I might be at risk of a heart attack, but it turns out it was jsut stress.
Oh, and my script's been untouched since last sunday as a result. Not cool.
So anyway, if anyone happens to reads this and knows of something important i've forgotten, tell me. ASAP.

Talking of scripts, I believe I have wandered into one of the greatest cases of word padding yet. Y'know when y'suddenly decide that jokes are good? And that turning your script into an excuse for lots of jokes is ewasier than actually having a plot? Yeah?
Exactly. Prison jokes and airport jokes are in, actually bothering to work out where the whole thing's going is out. Even been coming up with my opwn variants on some classic sketches in the hope that it works. Fan-bloody-tastic.
Worst bit is, some of them are actually quite funny. And most of those are the bits I came up with myself, which is just wrong on so many levels.

The plus side is, I had a dnetist appointment today to get some fillings put in. And it was a bit nasty. Horrible experience in fact: came quite close to having a panic attack a few times. Nasty, naty. Now that's great inspiration for a scene...

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.

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.