ScriptFrenzy. Such a strange name. At first, the mind conjures up…nothing. Then this image comes of a writer bent over a desk, pen scratching marks into paper, frenziedly writing pages and pages of script that fly off the desk as they pile up higgledy piggledy. Well, last year, I chose to be that kind of writer, except not with pen and paper but keyboard and computer. This year, I’m not sure.
ScriptFrenzy is the screenplay sister of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It’s held every April, and fewer participate in it than in the November NaNoWriMo challenge. So one doesn’t get the inundation of daily Twitter updates and musings of NaNoWriMo, yet its different form of writing appeals. We all know what prose is but not the formatting and conventions of screenplays or plays. It’s different.
I took the time last year to learn the conventions of screenplay writing (though apparently, according to one miserly contest reviewer — miserly as in person of few words, which was effing useless — I needed to read up on how screenplays are written). And I converted Lifeliner into a screenplay. That is now filed away in a virtual drawer as other writing projects have taken over, but I still intend when opportunity presents to do something with it.
But it’s almost April again, I’ve done no prep, I’m working on the edits of my first NaNoWriMo novel She, revising my second one Aban’s Accension, planning on publishing both as eBooks, and I’m wondering if I’m mad even contemplating writing a stage play in the midst of all this, although I do have an idea for it. I don’t have a lot of energy, although ever since I deep-sixed the beta blocker, I have much more and better sleep and a suddenly new writing regimen that spontaneously put itself upon me. I wake up; I put on my CES device for the morning session; and I write on my iPad then rest some more till I’m ready to get up. I’m in week three of this strange new regimen. And I wonder, if it’s gone on this long, if maybe, just maybe it’ll last, and if so, then perhaps writing a play for fun while also writing my serious work — the novels — is doable. I wrote my screenplay pages so fast last year that I didn’t have to write every day to meet the 100-page script challenge by the end of April. So maybe I won’t have to write every day this time either, and those days I don’t work on the play, I blog.
You see how good I am at rationalizing an impossibility?
So….
Hmmmmm….
Ummmmmmm….
I’ll do it.
I’m nuts.
