Typical...

I spent half the day working Zeke's back story into Carli's Kills...only for it to explode in my face. I wasn't paying enough attention and started adding in details that didn't belong there. Making Zeke half-Indigenous and half-Anglo and complicating his estrangement from his family in silly ways...so I hit a glorious bout of writer's block.

Took me a couple hours, a bit of depression, some serious banging of head against wall time before finally just removing everything I'd done to get to where I could hear him, again. Simplified the background, a lot. He's adopted. Doesn't know who his birth mother is. And the people who adopted him act more like his guardians than parents. A very strict Calvinist upbringing in central Minnesota by the Reverend and Mrs. Lindstrom...and that is what he calls them. Not mom and dad. It finally leads to an overwhelming sense of dislocation and he rebels. And things went downhill fast.

I've got just over 14,000 words left to write in seven days in order to make this month's challenge. Hopefully, there won't be any more days like this, because those put me way behind. I just have to keep listening to the characters...and staying true to them. It's when I work at making things cute that I fuck things up, but that's the screenwriter in me.

All the books I read on that style of writing emphasized character traits instead of human beings in scripts. The hero is a good man but flawed and has a personal tragedy in his background...and his dog or snake or parakeet loves him, anyway. She has a past filled with secrets and trauma but finding the right man will unlock them and help her heal. That kind of shit.

Small wonder I never made it as a screenwriter; I don't know how to make such nonsense work. But something I am proud of? Every actor who ever read one of my scripts loved them. I gave them people to work with, who weren't easily categorized.

Just trying to keep it real with CK, too.