Hard as this may be to believe, but I’m actually surprised at my progress with the outline for the pulpy adventure spec.

It’s coming along much faster than I expected, and the more I work on it, the more I see things that can be tweaked/adjusted/modified so as to improve on the overall story. I’m definitely not saying it’s easy; just easier than it used to be.

Having previous drafts to work with has been a significant plus, and once I fully embraced the notion of “anything can change”, it just took off from there.

But the biggest boon to this whole thing has simply been the pure enjoyment of working on it.

I don’t make any attempt to hide my love and appreciation of the pulp style of writing, so when I work on these kinds of stories, I make a sincere effort to really put it on the page.

The swashbuckling-ness of the fantasy. The rootin’-tootin’-ness of the western. And now the spectacle and wonder of science fiction.

I really do live for this stuff. One of my mantras since the beginning has been “Write something I would want to see,” and all of these definitely fall into that category.

Some may argue that writing material like this is counter-productive to getting a career going. “Nobody’s going to take a chance on something like this from an unknown writer!”, that sort of thing. If all I end up getting out of this is a solid writing sample, that’s fine by me.

Is it wrong to think somebody could read it and say “There’s no way I could get this made, but I really like the writing. Would you be open to working on ____?”? Hopefully not.

I’m taking my time with this, and in no rush to finish. All the work I’ve done on previous scripts is paying off in terms of knowing what to do, figuring stuff out and making the story (and the eventual script) better.

I’ve said it many times before: I am having an absolute blast writing this story, and hopefully those who read the end result will too.