My day in pictures

Yesterday Angela came home from work, where she teaches art to middle school students, and asked me what I did all day. So I showed her the dining room table where I'd set up my desk. (It has become winter in Los Angeles and the rain had set in so I needed to move closer to the lone heating vent in the house.) She was intrigued by my colored highlighters and all the little charts I'd constructed.

What I'd been doing yesterday, and what I continued today and will hopefully finish tomorrow is rewriting my Bones spec script. I had a solid second draft that needed to be put through the paces. Basically I needed to know if it met some of the television writing "rules" I'd been taught, if my plot was believable and if my "B" story and "C" story got enough screen time. So I made a big four-page outline. Then I made a plot diagram. Then I made a color chart to determine visually where I needed to put more "story". These are all tricks of the trade I've learned from classes and books and morphed into my own way of doing things. I'm a writer who needs to see things written out, sometimes it just gets to be too much in my own head so I write it down.

So here's a few snapshots of my work from the past two days. I once read or heard someone say we should take pictures not just of the special occasions and the big moments in life but also of the every day, of our homes and our regular lives. So here's my work day, here's what a television show looks like long before you ever see it in your living room: