Tuesday, June 30, 2009

HIATUS SUMMER 09 - OVER

I have finally returned from Europe. In actuality, I returned like a week ago, but I haven't got around to updating this until now. While in Europe, I was actually able to write a lot, at least while I stayed with the French family. I started two projects, one that had been in my head for a long time and really I just have to sit down and write it, and the other started from a distinct image that I thought of.

One, entitled the Gangster Project for now (because I have no idea what I want to call it), is about a girl who gets kidnapped by a drug cartel and her boyfriend tries to save her... but as with all movies, things are not what they seem and it turns out to be bigger than either of them. It is a feature-length screenplay, and I hope to finish it by the end of summer for production either sometime during the schoolyear or next summer. It is similar to Brick and is also a 'summer' movie, in that it starts out on the huge optimism that every teenager and kid has when the summer starts.

The other project is called "Nick and Joseph," and it is a short film screenplay that I'd like to finish this week and start filming it ASAP. I have three scenes left to write, but they're the three most difficult. That's no excuse though, that's simply another challenge. Neither of these two projects have happy endings, so after I finish them I plan on writing something lighter, or at least with happier endings.

I am also planning on doing "Write a Book With Me" with Holly Lisle, a sort of laidback writer's group to finish the small town project... the real problem with that project is that I need to write the most depressing scene in the novel first, to really understand what my characters are feeling after it. I also have no idea how it starts, because the depressing scene is in like the fourth chapter.

My friend Kara and I are also writing a feature-length screenplay called The Ditch for fun to film at some point, about three kids that find a body in a ditch and get in way over their heads ... Las Cruces provides some great locations for desert chase scenes.

And with all that, and summer reading and swimming and movies coming out and keeping my sanity, I have a very busy summer ahead of me.