Quick update - that fear? She's dead!

It's Friday at 2:30pm. You might remember I last blogged Wednesday at noon. On Wednesday I had a stack of notes and no idea what to do with them except dig in. So I did.

On both Thursday and Friday I spent countless hours glued to my chair, warming my hands on watered down tea, surrounded by sticky notes and legal pad pages and a pink highlighter that I used to put big Xs through every note I conquered. I spent hours focused on two pages on my screen at the same time.

One page had the old draft, old format, old everything. Old but still golden. The other page was blank, until it wasn't anymore. It's where I took what I had and cut it and shaped it and reworked it and molded it into something new. Something I love so much more.

The notes weren't as scary as I'd imagined (even though I already knew what they were I was scared to read them again). They were precise. They were exactly what I needed. Page 4 needs a joke. Okay. Got that. And guess what? I came up with one. And then a better one. Come to find out, I needed that fear. I needed that motivation to get through it all.

What exactly did I do? For one thing, I addressed every question that arose from all of the consultants. I wanted nothing to be confusing or unclear or murky in the slightest. I wanted more laughs and one way I realized I needed to do that was to tell, not always show. In screenwriting I was taught "show don't tell". That works well for film. That works well for people who will be watching your story in a dark room on a giant screen. But for TV? When there are couches and screens, so many screens, and food and kids and knocks on the door and distractions galore? I need to tell more than show. So I worked to find a balance between both. A balance in the story and in my telling of it.

Another thing I did was focus more on the funny. I had the story down. I knew who the characters were but it was important for everyone to see that. And to laugh while doing it. Only time will tell if we got there.

Also? I cut the script by 11 pages. That's huge. And I didn't cut a single scene. I combined and rewrote and tightened. And I may do more of that. But the script is tighter and flows more quickly which will be good for the staged reading.

Speaking of...

The script went out to four agents today! Four agents of four actors handpicked for the roles. We'll know next week if they're available and interested but this is so exciting! We have a theater and soon we'll have a cast! Love it!