In only a little less than four hours, I managed to complete a pretty strong rewrite of the first half of DREAMSHIP.  Even better, I was able to cut enough to take it from 62 pages to 55, which is much more acceptable.

Being able to really trim the fat not only helps the script flow better, but also improves your writing.  The more you can say with fewer words, the better.

It was surprisingly easier than expected to manipulate the scenes to get the most out of them.  Maybe it was drastically cutting whatever wasn’t needed, or finding a way to cut a scene by half, or combining two scenes into one.  No matter what was needed, I did it.  This included cutting a line I absolutely loved, but it had to go.  Besides, I can always use it later.

I especially liked getting rid of a drawn-out sequence that was too similar to something earlier in the story and reworking it so it was shorter, different and made my protagonist be more active and help drive the action.  Good things all.

But that’s enough high self-praise. Time to move on to the second half.  If I can be as strategic in the initial writing phase as I  am in the later editing, AND I can do a healthy output of pages per day/week, then this thing will be ready to go sooner than anticipated.

No complaints.

-I haven’t been able to read many scripts lately, especially those from the Black List.  For the most part, I’ve been underwhelmed by a lot of this year’s selections, and ScriptShadow has been covering a lot of them.  I’ll go over the list again and see if anything catches my eye.  Any suggestions?