whoo hoo!

Two posts in one day. I know. It's a bit uncool. But I'm trying to work through a block. And sitting here listening to my boyfriend commentating on the Man U v Celtic match on the telly from Manchester isn't really doing anything to help me. So maybe writing about it will.

My latest script is getting bigger and bigger... and it's not moving forward. I'll get it fixed. It just might take a little time. Why don't I tell you something about it?

The Near Catastrophe of James Street

James Street needs a change.
Suicide is too permanent.
Accidents cost too much.
A near miss could be just right.

"James Street is a coward. He is sick of his life as it is and hasn’t the courage to do anything about it. He’s failed to find the woman of his dreams, he’s failed to find a purpose in life, he has even failed all three of his suicide attempts. James is in danger of simply disappearing... and then one day he sees the jet on fire in the sky... "

The premise came to me when I was laying in bed in my parent's house, post surgery, in a painkiller induced haze. Their house is under a flight path of SEA-TAC. It was night in November. Not a nice night. And feelings were high in the house because my mama was having a hard time with teaching children for not enough money (welcome to a teacher's world). And whatever about that night put fanciful expectations of disaster in my head. If anything bad was going to happen, the stage was all set. I heard a plane rotating overhead and from the sound it made, I expected to see, if I were to draw back the curtains, that the engines were on fire. And I did look out and there was the plane flying away over the house and, thankfully, no signs of distress.

But it got me thinking. Suddenly I saw a scene where a man is sitting at a table in a restaurant across from a woman. And catastrophic things are happening which are all imaginings in the man's head, but they reflect the date, the state he's in, and what he thinks he needs to make his life more fullfilled. Of course I am not going to give it all away, however much I want to. Not here.

I find myself struggling with the format of screenplay and what I'm writing has taken on more of a novel form, which is fine because it would serve as a treatment from which I can work. But my god do I find a lot to distract myself with.