And The Winner Is...

Me! I won Script Frenzy, anyway. I took my Spanner script and story ideas, and wrote well over 100 pages. In fact, I'm well on my way to 150 and beyond by the end of the month! Furthermore, I have a script for Spanner #1 that is in effect the shooting script for the series pilot! Now all I need is to completely reorganize what comes after the end of #1, and improve my drawing skills to an acceptable level by the end of May, and I'll be ready to start actual production work on Spanner for the first time ever, starting during NaNoMangO this June! Now to acquire the champagne and expensive chocolates, and I'm ready to celebrate my victory! Finally, last year's abortive script project, The Jennifer Theory (from my '06 NaNoWriMo novel), is avenged at last!

I didn't learn this lesson during Script Frenzy, but my relatively easy (if still come-from-behind) victory has reinforced something I seem to have known for a long time: I am a natural with a comics or movie script. By contrast, I am not a natural prose storyteller at all, which is why I have so much more trouble writing novels than I do writing scripts. The reason is that I am a primarily visual storyteller: I write in pictures, not words. So though I can pour out a barrage of words during a WriMo, only during Script Frenzy does it become a real pleasure. That's because I'm putting pictures on the page, descriptions of pictures that I will later draw — my usual technique when composing scenarios for my Project Notebooks.

The big surprise is that 58-64 pages (comics pages, not script pages) of #1 came together so coherently, with so few needed rewrites, that by the time I finished that part of the script and had written the description of the last panel of page 58, I had tied up loose ends that I didn't realize were loose at all! What I have now, after a couple more minimal rewrites, is no less than the shooting script for the series' pilot episode. I'll post a plot synopsis or treatment of #1 later.

Writing #2 didn't turn out to be so satisfying. In fact, I'm going to have to cut it up, rearrange it, and turn it into two or three separate issues. After the pilot episode that is #1, my plan is for Spanner to become a serial with a running continuity. I didn't realize this until today. However, I'm going on with the script plan I'm currently writing until just before midnight on May 30.

So Spanner's transition from wishful thinking to ink-on-paper reality has begun with a bang (and I don't mean the explosions that begin the story, either). My next WriMo challenge is MayNoWriMo (at NaNoPubYe), doing a complete rewrite of Black Science (except, of course, for one witty scene). But the next step I need to take toward my longtime goal of bringing Spanner to reality is to do all my character designs, improve my drawing skills to publishable quality, and get ready for NaNoMangO.

And thus it begins...

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