Derry, Northern Ireland

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

Sunday, December 20, 2015

This is what happens...

Well...We Come is a grand total of 75 pages long. NOT feature length. So...I need to go through and figure out how to make it at least 88 pages, and do it without padding and in a way that will keep me engaged in the story. That's the hard part...and most dangerous, for me. If I get to where I care too much about the characters, I stop trying to please the market and just tell the story as it wants to be told. Which tends to piss readers off. They're looking for Save the Cat's plot point on every age, these days, and it just flat ain't gonna always be there.

I've been trying to figure out a way around this, all day, and everything points to deepening the characters in ways a SF-Horror film doesn't really go. I guess I'm just not cut out to do quickie one-offs...unless I get drunk.

That's how I wrote the first draft of Find Ray T -- buzzed on Corona, or something like it -- and got it done in 8 days. Even crazier, the basic structure of the script hasn't changed. I guess the booze lets me have a don't-give-a-fuck attitude and put anything down I damn well want.

That said, the details have changed dramatically, over the years. Damon grew more proactive. Tara built into someone any straight man would want to be with. Celia became more important. And oranges became a recurring motif, in that Damon doesn't like them but they keep winding up being in the middle of everything.

What I'm thinking of doing is truly screwing around with the SF-Horror genre. Make the script totally existentialistic, extrapolating Sartre into the realm of George Pal. Having Danny, who comes from an abusive family, reach an understanding with an alien that has killed a dozen people because it wants to get home to its family.

I wonder if the SyFy network would go for it? Some human characters on BSG came to terms with the Cylons, even though the latter had practiced genocide against the former. And Gravity is really that sort of film. So that might make it fun to do.

Hmph, not much self-aggrandizing here.

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