...and the writing continues!

Yepperooni, the script writing is coming along nicely. It's been a week now (typing away in spare time amidst other things to do) and I'm approaching the 30 page mark very, very soon.

It's going well, I'm just writing the ideal zombie movie in my mind, tapping away on the keys what I see in my head and getting it onto the page. There's a lot of description abound, so many of the pages are quite heavy at the moment, there's a lot of visual information to be laced in. It's important to convey as much of that information as possible, I'm even loosely editing how it would look if it was on screen, creating a loose rhythm to certain scenes or moments to help further illustrate what I have in mind.

I'm rather chuffed with it so far, and just as a zombie fan myself, I'm chuffed with some of the stuff I'm writing in - I'm getting to 'see' things I haven't seen yet on screen, and I'm getting to 'see' crowd-pleasing zombies (and zombie kills), I'm 'seeing' a world which hasn't been explored before (or far from properly anyway) in the zombie genre.

Yes, it's going well, even though I've still not got fully into the groove - such as operating Final Draft (still getting used to which keys to press at what point, and getting a real fast flow going on - it's been a while since I was last writing anything you see).

Currently one of eight segments (I did a basic brainstorm of the entire script as part of my copious planning and mapping out) is done, and the second of eight (which will constitute the first act) is about half way done.

I'm writing it long at the moment, partly due to additional information that the reader will need to know to understand what's going on, but mainly due to the sheer amount of visuals I have in mind - and the detail of said visuals. What I'm seeing in my head is mostly quite clear ... so yeah, once that second-of-eight segments is done, I'll pause - go back to the start - and sweep through that first draft of the first act and tidy it up - tighten things, add things, remove unnecessary things, clarify things, and give it a general tidy up.

This is what I did when writing "Generation Procrastination" a while back (in fact that was about a year ago now), and by the end of it what I had was a first draft that was in fact a second draft, ha! Plus it really does help to clarify things in your own head, and you get to catch up on what has come before in a far more condensed space of time - say over a day, rather than possibly two or more weeks (depending on available time, writer's block etc) that it took to originally hammer the keys in the first place.

One thing I will say, the current segment I'm on involves a lot of characters, and I'm having to learn fast about how to deal with so many characters at once - as well as realising that there's only so much you can do too - I even came momentarily a-cropper when I realised my detailed notes for the segment (all segments are fully laid out in note form) didn't include character names (e.g. "one vehicles goes here, the other stays there") - I had to figure out who was where and who dies when, etching in their names at every instance throughout my notes - but the momentary crisis was averted and the segment made a lot more sense to me.

Mind you, on the soon-to-come sweep through, I'll be looking to add a lot more dialogue and get the myriad of characters involved a lot more - even something as simple as finding an opportunity for the characters to use each other's names at least a couple of times (so a potential viewer of the potential film would know who is who by name), is in itself a task.

But aye - it's going well, I'm seriously digging the script when I step back and fully engage 'zombie nerd mode', factor 9, full speed ahead with The Gonk as the anthem in the background.