Day 61: October Wrap Up
All in all, October was a pretty good month. I achieved 56 pages of new material plus all the written and video blogs. 28 new articles were posted to the News Page and a new ScriptTalk™ interview went up. I also ended the month with 49 new Twitter followers despite pulling back on my online presence during the last week and a half of the month.
On the negative side, however, I did not write the second episode of Everyday Clowns that I had hoped to complete. I have a reading for that episode tentatively scheduled for around November 15, so I have to complete in the next two weeks. I also had to curtail my daily blogging as it was starting to interfere with my daily writing. I opted instead to do updates every 2-3 days.
My monthly page count, though far exceeding my monthly minimum, would have been greater if I hadn't hit that stumbling block in Come Ups with Shep being a rather poor excuse for a protagonist in the first act. I did manage, in the last days of the month, to begin addressing that problem, and so far it seems to be working fairly well. I have completed the initial pass through the first act and will rework the first half of the second half of the second during the first week of November. Following that, I will have to look for and address all the ripple effects that occur throughout the script as a result of these changes.
It's frustrating because the end seems so close, but then I identify problems that need, in some cases, considerable work. As a result, I keep pushing back my other goal of working on the pitch. It seems pointless to work on pitching a script that is not ready to be pitched. I'm still hoping to have this script ready for some preliminary marketing by the beginning of 2016, but the clock is ticking and I've got other projects lining up, including the NaNoWriMo challenge.
One thing is clear though, if the script isn't ready, I won't send it out. While January is a good deadline for having a marketable script in hand to work toward, it is still just an arbitrary line in the sand. You only get one real chance at marketing a script, so it's best to extend any deadline until you are comfortable that your script is perfect.
