Script Frenzy 2010: Hey, It's Panic Time Again...

It's the last week of Script Frenzy, and for the first time I find myself faced with the dreaded Panic Time. In most novel writing months (last year's NaNoWriMo being the exception), I find myself with 30,000 words left to write when the final week begins, and I have to write all that in one week. If I want to reach 50,000 words and therefore win, I have to forcibly shift myself into Panic Mode. This time, I've got 58 pages to go to reach 100 and win Script Frenzy, and I've got one week to do it. I'm not going to ask myself the question "Can I do it?" because I've come back from worse deficits.

Now here's the problem. I normally have zero trouble writing scripts. My one Script Frenzy win so far, in 2008, consisted of 171 pages of Spanner script. Never mind that I found shortly afterward that I'd have to completely rewrite #1 and ditch the three later issues; I wrote them, and easily.

The problem is that I'm adapting. And what I'm adapting is my troublesome 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, Bad Company, which continues to try to keep me from finishing it no matter what I do. This adaptation has proved much harder than I thought. Maybe that's because I've been focusing on all the new scenes that aren't yet in the novel, particularly when Dictel invades America in the final third or so of the novel. What's more, the movie version of a novel is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version in script form. I'll worry about condensing the script, though, when I get into the editing stage, which is not my concern in April.

As I write this, it just occurred to me that there's an easy way for me to secure a surefire win. In fact, it's precisely what I did back in '07 when I adapted the one good scene from my '06 NaNo novel (the scene which I'm expanding into an entire novel called Black Science). Basically, I open up the novel files in Word and the script file in Celtx. I look for a scene to adapt, one that I haven't adapted yet, and then I adapt it, replacing all the first-person narration with, well, script. I usually transfer the dialogue intact, unless I decide I want to edit the dialogue. Yeah, that's how I'm going to do it.

I'm still going to win this thing. But this time it takes a Panic Time...