We won - at least, the All Blacks did, after making an entire nation sit with their hearts in their mouths for rather too much of the final game. so now the Rugby World Cup (or RWC as our acronym mad newspapers keep shortening it to) is over, life can get back to normal. That's the theory anyway, except that we have currently put the house on the market, so writing is having to take yet another back seat. Or is that just me procrastinating?
What's happened recently? I finished the script for the screenwriting course I'm taking. A terrific exercise in terms of exploring story creation and how to cut stuff. I managed to get it down to exactly 35 pages - the maximum allowed, and had to concede that most cuts did improve it. But not all. It probably needed to be about a 50 pg script - in other words, a 1 hr TV drama, rather than a half hour skit.
It also got me looking at screenwriting books. And discover the terrific information in them. Most particularly, they include brilliant hints and tips to sharpen up the editing of any piece of writing. And writing a script forced me to more clearly visualise the scene I was writing, and to focus only on those details in a scene which work to move the story along.
Now back to editing my 2nd NZ historical. Then I must get in to the new scifi novel I have preliminary notes for. I think that is going to be my forte - scifi with a romantic element.
My scifi short stories are currently not getting much success - more rejections this month. Possibly because they are generally quite miserable and dark, emotionally. Maybe I need to vary the emotional tone of them - rescue my poor readers from the depths occasionally.
But now back to 1862 Otago, New Zealand. And the music of Eric Church, my latest favourite discovery. A US country singer with decidedly un-PC lyrics. Such fun. Of course, his CD's are not released here - typical. Thank the stars for the internet.
