A.R. Van Halleorg

Just a little FYI for the upcoming month; if you’re into that kinda thing.

As some or even many of you may already know, it’s that time of year again…that halfway mark between Nanowrimo’s, when people from all over the world join in on the fun of Script Frenzy.

This year I’ve opted to participate with a partner and after weeks of hashing out the details, we’re ready to tackle the challenge ahead.

If you want another writing buddy…just because we all love to compare page results…

My Script Frenzy Page

For those of you who don’t know what that is:

You have 30 days (April 1 through to April 30) to complete 100 pages of original scripted material.

- Screenplays
- Stage Plays
- TV Shows
- Short Films
- Graphic Novels

It’s completely free to participate, but if you feel like donating, you can.

You don’t have to be a writer. You don’t have to know anything about writing scripts. There’s a resource section for information.

Script Frenzy website
Script Frenzy – Rules
Script Frenzy – Resources

Have fun and enjoy the challenge everyone.

I decided to randomly look at my own blog today and I realize that I haven’t blogged in a week!…I thought that was utterly terrible of me and completely slack, so here I am, writing a post at 12:32 AM.

Learning Italian : I bought a book this evening called 501 Italian Verbs. I thought that having a book of conjugated verbs may help me in establishing a better understanding of the language. It gives really great examples with most of the verbs to be able to know how they’re used, so it’s great! I’m totally loving the experience. I haven’t felt this way about learning something, since I started learning programming.

Script Frenzy : Well, I’m 50 pages into Script Frenzy now. It’s 15 days in and we have another 15 to go. I’m on schedule! I’ll probably hunker down and hack out the next portion of it over the weekend. At least get most of the rest finished. I’m looking forward to getting to be able to go back over it all and make it into a polished piece of art. Fantastic.

Southern Gals : I’ve recently discovered that Twitter is quite a dangerous world. Flying tweets left and right. Everyone vying for attention and sometimes…sometimes you get a random message from someone and you’re thrown for several moments. You wonder if they made a mistake, surely no one responds to a tweet!

But they do!…who knew. So this southern gal, (who shall remain nameless, *cough*GO HERE*cough*) decided that I was deemed worthy of a tweet back! And I’m shamelessly linking you to her website, because I can. *waves banner and gushes in a southern drawl* “I’m her biggest fan, y’all! One day I could even get an autograph on my banner!”

What was I on about? It’s late and my mind is wandering lol. Right, so it was pretty cool to be able to meet someone on Twitter who had very similar interests to me. It’s rare that I get to talk to anyone who thinks anything I think is of interest, let alone it be their idea! So after hours of brain picking and confusing conversations about nothing in particular, I decided she’s cool and is now invited to the inner circle of friends. *crickets chirp in the empty field* …okay, it’s an empty space, but I have to start somewhere!

Okay, I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m too brain dead lol

Have a good day/evening all!

Well, it’s day 8 and things are finally starting to pick up some more. I’ve spent the majority of day in pain and after much Tylenol, I’m doped up enough to not feel much pain at all, so I’m writing this post. I’m sitting at around 37 pages now out of 100. Hopefully I’ll have a few more before the day is done. The last few days haven’t been too eventful, I’ve been trying to catch up on a bit of sleep and work on a website for someone at work, so I’ve been a little busy.

What have I gotten done in the last few days?…

1) I’ve managed to learn how to pace myself much better. One of those most difficult things that I struggle with is learning to pace the storyline instead of trying to force feed the information to the reader in 5 minutes time. It’s actually kind of satisfying to be able to do that. Now even I think it’s more interesting this way.
2) I’ve learned to drop hints/clues in order to prepare the reader a little better for the upcoming scenes.
3) My bad guys and good guys are a little less clean cut. I tend to be a bit of an extremist when it comes to characters. They’re either really horrible people or really sweet-tooth worthy. Now my bad guys show that they have some feelings beyond anger and hatred and my good guys show a side that shows they have moments where they don’t care who they walk over either.

I guess I didn’t do anything major in the storyline, but it’s an interesting learning experience nonetheless.

Have a great day everyone and I hope that your Script Frenzy is going well.

I’m not entirely certain whether it’s healthy to be up at 3:30 in the morning just to write a script. Personally, I think it’s a little ridiculous, I mean, I should be in bed, sleeping, enjoying dreams and soaking in the rest and relaxation before the sunlight streaks its way through the windows….That’s the logical thought process and yet here I am.

In my defence, my storyline has mutated quite a bit from yesterday. Certain things that had initially been brought up, are no longer in the picture and others are a little fairer. I needed a more distinct difference between the protagonists and antagonists. Before, I had an issue of them meshing a little too much, but hopefully I’ve managed to smooth it out.

So here I am. 31 pages into my screenplay, 69 to go!

Let’s see…what have I learned in the last 24 hours?

1 – There’s such a thing as too much Coca Cola. When you’re talking a mile and minute and manage to have 7 conversations within 16 minutes with the same person, you’ve just surpassed the limit and need to lay off.
2 – Sometimes, you don’t need to create drama where none is need. Sometimes, it’s just better to let the story flow.
3 – When they say that every interaction should have conflict, it doesn’t mean outright conflict. In the case of a scene I was writing, there was a situation that came up that normally the cliché would suggest being argumentative and cause some kind of friction. Instead I made the character reluctantly accept, while making a backhanded comment that would suggest dissension, but much more subtly.
4 – Watching movies while writing is such a bad idea. I wish it were because it wrongly inspires you, but for me it just kind of distracted me from getting any writing done.
5 – Pushing through a scene by writing crap is sooo much easier to work with. You can always go back later and correct it.

So, I hope you all have a good day or sleep when you get there (I can’t be the only one up at this time, who should be in bed)

So, it’s finally the time we’ve been waiting for- Or at least what I’ve been waiting on bated breath for the last week. In just a few short hours (already started for some people), it’s the start of Script Frenzy. I know I’ve already blogged about this and it’s probably boring, but who cares.

I’m totally in the zone for this one. I wasn’t very well prepared for NaNoWriMo, last minute characters showed up and ruined the party for everyone, but this time, it’s in the bag! Script writing is my forte and I’m going to aim to blow it out of the water. My personal goal will be approximately 250 pages. It’s a quicker dialogue pace, or else I’d reduce the pages. I don’t think it needs to be much longer for a 2 hour film…hmm…

What’s really great about this weekend, is that it’s Easter Weekend and while many of you are no doubt doing the family thing, I’ll be at home making the most out of the 4 day weekend and get ahead as much as possible. I’ll be sure to have my supply of Coca-Cola ready.

By the way, if anyone would like to, you can go ahead and add me as a writing buddy. I’ll add you back and we can keep eachother motivated to keep going! Just visit my profile.

I wish you all the very best and break a leg. The next month is going to be pretty insane as most of you know and we can only hope it goes well. May your creativity flow and I hope that the previously talked about writer’s block keeps itself at bay.

Have a great day!

Okay, so we have a full month (the month of April) to write a 100-page script for Script Frenzy. It’s the sister competition to NaNoWriMo and sadly, I think I’m going to fail this one almost as badly as I failed NaNoWriMo. I made the fatal error of introducing a character that I felt would make the entirety of the story much better and far more interesting, but it wasn’t feasible in the timeframe allotted to the competition.

Now though, I’m specifically sitting down a week ahead of time to try to work out the plot and really see if there’s any chance that another character might try to get its own cameo. Yes, we’re allowed to do that with this one. I specifically remember getting an e-mail about it from the NaNoWriMo newsletter that we should go ahead and start planning things out. So I am.

Now I run into a whole new problem! I have too many different ways the entire thing could end. Do I kill someone? Do I have someone sacrifice themselves? Do I let them all live happily ever after? Do I let the bad guy win? Hmm…the potential. It all sounds potentially intriguing and I’m looking forward to starting Script Frenzy, but it’s driving me nuts already!

I’m trying to keep a few short things in mind while I work on this one though:

1- Don’t introduce anyone or anything new that wasn’t in the original plot.
2- Avoid the temptation to aim for perfection on the first draft.
3- If it sounds stupid, write it anyways, I can make it sound better later.
4- Have fun.

And that’s about it. Anyways, I’ll update this one in a week and see where I get at.

Enjoy your day and to those participating in Script Frenzy, try to keep the insanity for April 1st.

Where’s an Epic Fail badge when you need it? No really, I failed at NaNoWriMo this year. It was my first year trying and I’m used to writing in my own timelines. I generally tend to veer off course and end up somewhere in the middle of a quiet field standing on the edge of a desert wondering how I got this far off track.

I made a fatal error approximately halfway through the month of November when I introduced a character that managed to write her way into my story. I know the logical advice would have been to just not write her in, but any writer knows that you don’t get to decide who is in your story. Characters will always find their way in, situations will arise that you hadn’t initially thought would happen. Your story outline for the most part is just a guideline. I tried my best to stick to that guideline, however, this character was so important to the story that I had to go back to the beginning to introduce her and explain why she was important to begin with. However it destroyed the entire 6,000 words I’d written for the beginning and made them entirely moot. I found myself facing 3,000 words instead of the 12,000-13,000 that I had hoped to be at by the end of that day.

Normally I would agree that I should have pressed on, but I’d lost the entire story I had and nothing I could have done could have salvaged it for this year. I didn’t want to end up with a pitiful excuse of a book. It’s nice to say that NaNoWriMo has no rules; just that you have to write until you hit 50,000 words, but I have my standards and I didn’t want to reach the end with a bunch of gibberish. So sadly this story is being redefined and I’ll start over from the beginning in next year’s competition.

On the plus side, there’s another competition this year and it’s called Script Frenzy. Script is actually my preferred way of writing. It requires a lack of description and thrives mainly on the dialogue with bits of description in between. After all, you’re only giving lines to the actors and giving an idea to the director, not telling him/her how to do their job. It’s up to them to make it look great; they just need a good basis.

Anyways! So here’s the challenge.

During the month of April!

100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days.

You may write the following types of scripts:

-       Screenplays

-       Stage plays

-       TV shows

-       Short films

-       Graphic novels

Find out more about Script Frenzy?

Register for Script Frenzy