I must polish a script called, The Amateur & the Professional and I must write a sci-fi drama pilot script…from scratch.

It’s not a bad problem to have however Let me backtrack for a moment.

Last weekend’s Pitchfest has yielded some decent results thus far. My pulled-it-out-of-my-ass pitch for The Amateur & the Professional has invoked some interest from Cubevision. I got a call from the development executive yesterday who asked me to send in the script. At the pitch meeting he said that Cubevision is moving away from it’s tradition film themes and Ice Cube wanted to move into different stories. My story fit the bill. Now it all comes down to the script.

Last night I got an email from the InkTip.com preferred newsletter. There were many call-for-submission listing. One caught my eye. It was a sci-fi drama. After some consideration I decided to pass because quite frankly I didn’t have a sci-fi drama in my stable of scripts.

Then I wondered: Can I transform an existing script to a sci-fi drama? Easier said than done; however, when I decided to abandon most of the story and stick with the theme, I came up with a pretty novel sci-fi idea. I boiled it down to a simple one-sentence logline and sent it in. I didn’t even bother to write a synopsis.

They contacted me this morning saying they wanted the script. Uh-oh Once I receive the release letter I can submit the script. Which means I need to have the pilot script (approx 47-55 pages) done fairly quickly, like less than a week.

It’s going to be a busy weekend, but it’s very exciting

THEN, I made a rookie mistake –

I lost four pages of my script today. For some reason Final Draft stopped making backup copies of my script around midday yesterday. Today the application froze.

thankfully the information I’d written was still fresh in my mind. The biggest pain in the ass was that I’d made changes throughout the script so I had to go back to page 1 and recreate the dialog and action I’d just written.

preventative measures: I changed the autosave feature to “every 5 minutes,” changed the backup folder to “keep 30 files” and I am now manually saving as I go. Also, I no longer leaver the application open when I walk away from my Macbook. I manually save and close.

THEN, Success!

UNTIL NEXT TIME is done

My first sci-fi script (one-hour sci-fi drama) is finished. I started it midday on Friday, and today, two days later, I’m finished

I haven’t written a TV pilot script in over four years. After I send it in, I’m going to continue writing and change the script into a feature film, you never know.

Damn — I’m sort of, kind of, super excited right now

THEN, on to the next challenge

The sci-fi script is done. Even though I’d like to add 50 more pages and turn it into a feature film, I’m putting it aside for now. i heard back from the production company, they sent me the submission release form — and the script will be in snail mail very soon

On to stage two: cubevision. I didn’t do a bloody thing with my script, “the Amateur and the professional.” shoot, i didn’t even look at it over the weekend. I’m glad I didn’t becuase then I would have gotten some [signals] mixed up between that script and the sci-fi script. focusing on the sci-fi joint allowed me to finish it so quickly.

[note to self: tv writing is FAST writing. we should definitely consider it]

Now it’s about action, adventure and comedy. the script is 128 pages. I’ll need to chop it down to about 95-100, so that’s a good thing I’m dropping the existing B-story (sub-plot) with the amateur character, so that’s about 10-15 pages gone automatically, hell yeah!!

luckily the script is THERE. it’s 128 full-full pages. But the script shows my inexperience at the time I wrote it. Thus it’s not really “editing” that I’m doing. I’m “rewriting.” And in some cases, I’m writing from scratch.

New goal is to have the finished script by Friday, polish over the weekend and submit on Monday — one week from today.

well folks, here we go again

THEN, Senator Barack Obama became the 44th President — and the first African American — in the history of the United States. I often wondered if it would happen in my lifetime. It did.

November 4th, about 8:30pm: I’m at a lost for words — and if you know me, if you really know me you’ll know that’s hard. Just look at how long my blogs are.

But it happened in my lifetime — we elected a President who was of African descent. An African American. A black guy.

It took me all of about 20 minutes to vote today. That’s going from my door, to the polling spot and back to my door. There were no issues. No supposed “Black Panthers” blocking the polling area for non-blacks and no picketing. My community is 60% Asian, 20% white and 20% black & hispanic.

My daughters and I started chanting “O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma” when ABC projected that Senator Obama had won the Presidential election. We were overjoyed. I immediately grabbed my iPhone and started texting my friends.

And here’s something interesting:
I sent and received a total of 10 text messages. Three of the recipients were black. Everyone else was not.

What do the numbers mean? They don’t mean shit. Zero. What matters is that history was made today. What matters is that millions of people who once believed that their voice didn’t count, now know that it does. Every voice matters. Every vote counts.

On a more personal note today was nerve-wrecking for me — I realized that I ‘d forgotten to contact a literary agent last week because I was working overtime to finish a script — then I realized I still had to assemble materials for my TV pilot pitch; luckily I’d had a conversation with my friend Mary up north and she gave me some much needed information — I had to drive to pick up my long overdue money — then I couldn’t deposit it right away — finally I was able to deposit it (I live on the west coast and my bank is on the east coast) — but in the final crucial moment of the day I realized it was more $$ than I originally thought (whew) — and…

THEN, we elected Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Guess what? It was a good damn day

AND when I woke up the next day I was happy to discover that it wasn’t all a dream

November 5, 2008 — Today I woke up and things felt different. I wanted to write. I don’t usually want to write in the mornings. My mornings are spent reading other blogs, commenting, searching for interesting news, etc. But today I wanted to write.

I wanted to write anything and everything. I’m in the midst of a spec script for Cubevision so I wanted to write that. I wanted to jump onto my blog and write about the election, I wanted to text the crap outta everyone in my iPhone. I just had all this energy. For me having an energy boost like usually means either I’ll be writing like crazy or I am psyching myself up with Red Bull, vodka and coffee to get ready to make a film!

However, I didn’t want to write a blog of accolades and adulation for President-Elect Barack Obama. You’ll be able to read hundreds of those elsewhere, so why should I jump on the bandwagon? I wanted to do something super special. Some that said more than, “hooray” or “yes!” or “we did it!”.

Then it all became clear. I woke up in a good mood because of the significance of the election. That’s obvious. But today when I called to wake my girls up I said something different. Something new. Something inspiring — to me more than them. I usually try to say something to get their minds out of REM sleep. Today I said, “Wake up so you can go to school and become the first female black President of the United States.”

And there was no tongue in cheek whatsoever — because if they asked me, “How?” all I’d do is turn on the TV switch to the news, and then point and smile!

Soon after, my good friend and composer sent me a text message (He too is up early to get his son off to school). The text said I’m finally proud [again] to be an American after a long time of being ashamed

That’s it! That’s where my energy boost is coming from. That’s why I woke up in such a great mood. I feel proud. Very, very proud. And today I’ll be writing like crazy

AND then I recalled memories of my broken heart

I think it was John McKee who broke my heart 20 years ago when I heard about his “Story” seminar on writing. I could be wrong, so keep that in mind, but I’ll continue writing as if I am correct.

He said something like, “Rewriting your script isn’t editing it, rewriting means trashing the old and writing a new script on the same idea” — or something like that.

Ouch. Who the heck wants to write a script twice? I didn’t. But years later I would come to see his point. There’s so many ways you can go with writing action and dialog around a central concept. One little degree of change on page 2 and by the time you’re at page 90 you don’t even recognize your story anymore.

I’ve just renamed my script, The Amateur & The Professional to The Escapists because in the short time I’ve been working on a rewrite (four days) the script as become something else. Which is good. The old script was horrible. Uggh.

Even though I was adamantly against it from the start due to laziness, I am currently rewriting the old script. There are certain things that remain, pieces or dialog, concepts, context, but the action sequences had to be tossed and rewritten. The work is why I am behind. I thought I could do 20-25 pages a day of “editing” but since it turned into “rewriting” the page count is more like 7-12.

Now I’m secretly happy that not many people ever wanted to read the script after I sent a logline. Ugh. What was I thinking? Thank God for the change that came in my life in 2003!

…but maybe it was Hemingway, not McKee