I was sitting here lamenting how much work I’ve had to do lately and how overworked and just plain fried I am when I remembered the STFU Policy and decided instead to channel all that frustration and rage into something useful.

Viola!

I channeled my distress into 1,060 new words! Sure, they are bitter, self-pitying, over-tired words but they are new words, damn it and therefor more productive than whining. And I wrote them between 1 AM and 2 AM when I was really tired which I think makes them even more valuable words.

Now, I wrote these words and felt quite pleased with myself at first. While I am still pleased with these first new words after the Many Weeks of Too Much Work and Holy Crap the Stress, when I added these words to my spreadsheet, I got an unpleasant surprise.

I’m only 1,414 words ahead of where I should be. Remember when I stock piled all those words to get really far ahead between Script Frenzy and other self-challenges? Well, I squandered my entire lead! If I don’t write more than 2,000 words tomorrow, I’m going to be behind! Even if I do write 2K tomorrow, I’m going to be sweating to keep up instead of getting to go at a relaxed pace because of a huge lead.

This is not the end of the world, I can easily still make my challenge. But it did kill my buzz a bit when I felt good for writing only to discover it was a mere drop in the proverbial bucket.

I normally start work at 7 on Mondays but that is so not happening tomorrow which is good for my sleep count but bad because it means a shorter work day (unless I stay up late). I also have just finished a very long To Do list for myself of things that have fallen through the cracks since I’ve been in Busy Helltown (which is also my stripper name) so I’ll have to do those first thing tomorrow. But hook or crook, I’m going to find time to write those 2,000 words and get back on track!

But for now, I think that potato has the right idea…

There are still 5 days left in Script Frenzy but not for me, man, because I finished yesterday. I didn’t set out to win. I had worked all night Friday and Saturday was a busy day so I was determined to do nothing but sit on my butt all day Sunday but then I thought, well I could write a little bit. Then I just started going and when I hit a wall and wanted to quit I was like, to hell with it, and forced myself to plow through to the end of The Muppet Play.

I would say that my husband is a Screnzy widower were it not for the fact that he’s in hockey playoffs land anyway.

For those of you just tuning it, Script Frenzy is a worldwide challenge to write a 100 page script (I wrote 2 stage plays adding up to 100 pages) in a month from the people behind NaNoWriMo.

I have a lot of other work nipping at my heels and we’ll be out of town at the end of this week so I am total psyched to have finished early. The best part was that I finished at about 97 pages but I was writing each new section without formatting and adding formatting when I stopped for the day. So when I was finished doing my little format paint party on what I wrote yesterday, it was over 100 pages and I was like, yeeeehaaaaaw! The last day of writing was an over 20 page day, I wasn’t messing around!

Of course, technically, the script is 263 pages long because stage plays are only supposed to be 100 words a page but I started out to do 100 full pages of letter size and I decided to run with it even if it means I did over 2 and a half times the work. So both plays are a little long but I’m not worried about it as they both need a lot of editing.

(If you want your own stats like these, you can grab my little Screnzy calculator here.)

Those 4 pages per day are a little funny because I would do a big 10 page day and then take several days off so it just shows how sporadic my work was. To the people who are behind or who quit in the beginning because they were many pages behind or whatever, 10 pages is what I do per writing session so let me remind you that there is always, always time to catch up. It usually takes under 2 hours for me to do 10 pages and this play was slllllooooowwww going so you may be much faster. If you really worked on it, you could do the whole 100 page challenge in 20 hours.

But loving that average words per day! Sure, it’s less than my average during NaNoWriMo but its still way higher than my usual words per day so the exercise was definitely worth it in getting more writing done a day.  Other good news? For the year, my new writing to editing work has finally tipped the scale to 53% new writing this year over editing. Thank you, Screnzy!

As for the plays, they are a total rough draft mess, obviously, but I am really excited with how part of both of them came out and I can’t wait to carve out some time to hack at them and make them into something good.

So to everyone still working on their Screnzy project, consider this my rah rah rah and reassertion that believe that you *can* do it. Join the few of us already across the finish line, it’s awesome over here!

So we already talked about the One Act that represented the first 11 pages of my Screnzy 100. But what is the bulk of my page count about.

Script #2: The Muppet Play

When I was in college, a year after I wrote The Author, I started another novella. I was going along pretty good with it when my adviser told me that novellas were a waste of time. Now this whole conversation was much longer and was mostly about The Author but the end result was that I walked away realizing that the story I was working on wasn’t going to be long enough to be a novel but was too long for a short story so, like The Author, it was going to be “unpublishable.”

So from 2002 to 2010, the story of that novella has been gestating in my head. Amusingly enough, the story is about someone who is many years out of college, trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. This is funny, of course, because when I started it, I was still in college and thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Now, I am actually in the same place as the characters which makes it that much easier to write. Of course, I know what I want to do with my life but, handily, my brother does not so I have many hours of conversations with him on this topic to draw upon. So, in many ways, it’s better I waited as I am more equipped to write this story now then when I started it.

I also went back and forth over the years as to whether the story should stay prose or become a stage play. In recent years, I’ve leaned much more towards making it a play though I still go back and forth. I figured if I committed to writing the whole thing as a play, at least I’d have the whole story down and could more easily convert to prose later if I wished. So I decided to make this my Screnzy play this year. It has a working title but let’s call it The Muppet Play for blog purposes.

Because, see, the play also deals with the Muppets. Of course, on the surface, the Muppet connection isn’t apparent. The story isn’t about the Muppets and, aside from one character that is a fan, they aren’t really a part of the story. But, to me, the Muppets are what this play is about. I think of this play as “Riffs on The Muppet Movie and Especially I’m Going to Go Back There Someday.” I’m Going to Go Back There Someday is a song that Gonzo sings in the film and it is very deep and abstract and the best way I can explain this play is that I listened to that song and this play is my interpretation of what that song means to me. If for some reason you have never heard this, greatest of Muppet songs, you can listen to it here.

I wasn’t sure how long this play would be, especially since it was originally written to be a novella but the 45 page mark was the end of Act 1 so I certainly seems like it will be near the 100 page mark all told. I am still not 100% sure that a stage play is the best way of doing this story but its working so far.

Of course, this play needs to be all about subtly and understated things to work and as you may expect, my first draft is very bull in a china shop but I’m OK with that. Second Draft Hillary is a much better writer than First Draft Hillary, what’s important now is getting it all down. I have my moments where I am afraid I’m not a good enough writer to pull this play off but I think parts of it are very good and it has the potential to be really great once finished.

So, anyway, as promised, that is what I am working on for Script Frenzy. As you see my page count change these last days of the challenge, know that The Muppet Play is what I am working on.