Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Dissociation...

...defined as..."the splitting off of a group of mental processes from the main body of consciousness, as in amnesia or certain forms of hysteria."

Well, I wouldn't go THAT far in describing what I'm feeling, right now, but it's a light form of it.  And it deals with "The Lyons' Den."  This is the first script I've seriously gone about making into a novel...and in doing do find I don't like the script, anymore.  It's quick and silly and no longer makes sense, not without the emotional connections and background that have developed during this draft.  Daniel, Ace, Tad and Van have become more real than I could ever have imagined them on film, and the rest of the crew have become honest characters...some of them VERY off the wall but (hopefully) delightfully so.

I now see that the earlier version of the story was still too connected to the script and its surface reality.  I'd initially written it to be shot for very little money on film...and then to be done on-stage to test it out, but the best test of it's been this whole process of transformation.  Now that I've begun seeing LD as truly narrative, I'm no longer making excuses for it in my mind. I can tell where I held back on the script, mainly out of laziness.  I had it done and didn't want to invest the time it would take to make it a hundred times better.  My fault; maybe even my arrogance...whatever it was, I didn't do right by it.

BOY...no wonder no one was interested in doing LD.  But now...now I'm as proud of it (so far) as I am of anything else I've done (well, excepting POS).

I guess I WAS meant to be a novelist.  What a thing to find out at my age.

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