Some good progress on the action-comedy outline this week. A little further into the second half of Act Two. Act Three still looms, but it’s getting there.

The biggest challenge has been coming up with scenes, sequences, and scenarios that – as far as I’m aware – haven’t been done before, or are at least a new take on a familiar concept.

Not as easy as you would think.

The last thing I want is a reader to say “That’s just a ripoff of _____”. I don’t like it when I see it in somebody else’s script, and I definitely don’t want that to happen when they read mine.

But a new spin or something totally unexpected that gets the needed result? Yes, please. I love when I’m able to do it, and really appreciate it when I see it in somebody else’s script.

This is most likely why this outline is taking longer than expected – a significant percentage of this is just me figuring stuff out. There has been a lot of jotting stuff down – numerous pages of ideas, many of which will most likely not be used, but I’d rather have that than not enough.

A pleasant side effect of all this churning out of ideas has been the addition of a few inspired solutions out of/through a few story issues. Nothing major, but enough to help keep moving things along. Still ironing out the details.

Going this whole process and filling in all these blanks remains the biggest challenge. But I’m fairly confident once all those blanks are filled in, going through and fine-tuning (along with the inevitable continuous rewriting) what’s there will be much, much easier.