Nick Bryan

Script Frenzy

Script Frenzy 2011 – Postamble

by

Tonight, I finished Script Frenzy. As I did with NaNoWriMo, I think it’s time for some kind of blog in which I look back on the experience, before I forget about it forever and move on to a new writing project, like the cheap no-attention-spanner that I probably am.

To keep this structured, I have once again broken my learnings down to three points, which I’m going to number…

1) Script Frenzy is easier than NaNoWriMo

I’ve done NaNo a few times now, and it has always been a huge, life-consuming experience. Every time I’ve missed doing my NaNo words for a given day, it’s with the knowledge that the next two or three days are going to be crap as a result.

Script Frenzy, I did 25% of the page count on the last two days, and it wasn’t particularly hard work. This isn’t because scripting is easier than prose, I stress, just that 100 pages of script in a month isn’t as hard a target as 50,000 words.

Not sure what we can learn from this going forward. I could try 200 pages next year?

2) I rather miss comic-scripting

I wrote a lot of comic scripts in my early twenties, and then kinda stopped, mostly because I didn’t have enough money to pay someone to draw them, and the networking and praying involved in getting someone half-decent to draw them for free was a bit much.

Of course, I now have savings, although I was perhaps going to save them for buying a house or something, rather than vanity comic publishing. But I did still enjoy doing it again, so I might look into whether it can be made to go somewhere.

3) My new netbook works just fine

In that NaNo post-game blog, I mentioned that it was time to pension off my huge elderly laptop, and I did indeed manage to upgrade it to a nice netbook, that was donated to me for free by someone from Twitter. Score.

So I’ll mention here that a reasonable chunk of my Script Frenzy was written on it, the battery runs for a good two hours, and I am quite happy with that. Hoorah.

Script Frenzy 2011 – Preamble

by

Yes, it’s time for a non-story blog post. I am (probably) going to be doing Script Frenzy in April, so I thought I would do a nice intro to it. After all, Script Frenzy is the scripting equivalent of NaNoWriMo, and I did a preamble blog for them.

Script Frenzy requires I produce 100 pages of script in a month, which doesn’t sound too hard. After all, I wrote a sitcom script a couple of months back, and ended up producing 35 pages in less than three days, so I’m going into this primarily with the attitude that it’ll be a fun aside that won’t dominate my life.

If it does take over my writing time completely, I will probably ditch it and focus on the novel, but I have found a scripting project I actually want to do, so hopefully this won’t be too futile. I have a novel I wrote for NaNo a few years back which I thought might make a decent comic book. (Or “graphic novel” if you’re unwilling to admit you read comics.)

Thus I’ll be attempting the adaptation process. This carries the added bonus of not requiring a new idea, only a bit of re-planning.

Fans of this website will be sad to hear it may stop me producing Friday stories during the month of April, sorry about that. I may attempt some blog posts about Script Frenzy; if not, there will definitely be updates on my Twitter. Oh, and if you too are doing Script Frenzy, feel free to add me as a “Writing Buddy” or whatever people do.