Great morning, busy day

Finished the splay rewrite, finished my Music Theory homework, printing out "coverage reports" for an exercise in class today -- a full, busy morning.

I'm looking forward to Saturday when I can print out the screenplay and sit down with my red pen and go over it carefully again. I hope to send the rewrite to my agent on Sunday or Monday. I want to impress him with how quickly I deliver :-).

Also, while in StorySpace for the hyperdrama structure, I realized it's been a long time since I wrote a literary hypertext -- and the "Nails In My Coffin" material would really lend itself to this. Hypertext works best, in my view, when the story is constructed of vignettes. This material lends itself to that. I may think about this. In the meantime, though, the Cold War novel is next on the agenda for "traditional" narrative forms but I don't expect to return to it until after the hyperdrama video is done. What I'll turn to next week, I suppose, is the new screenplay. I'd like to deliver it before summer. I want to impress my agent with how quickly I deliver :-).

I think the splay rewrite is such a huge improvement, I'm humbled and a little pissed at myself that I hadn't cranked it up this much to begin with. I bet I still get notes for doing more but I think this is a huge step in the right direction. We're talking genre here, a romantic thriller, and in the first draft there wasn't enough "thriller" in the story.

My agent sticks with me because he loves my writing style: he's called me "a reader's, producer's dream" for my tight, concise screenwriting and dialog. But every story I've given him has been too "small" for his commercial tastes and targets. So I'm learning a hell of a lot with him. I am not a natural "commercial" storyteller. More naturally, I tell deep dark little dramas of human secrets, like my posthumous play "Oregon Dream," or broader social satires. I am having a ton of fun trying to write more commercially actually. Interestingly enough, I could never get interested in this as a prose writer, writing commercial novels, because there the language itself is so important and in general I can't stand the writing in popular fiction. But in a screenplay, the writing is pushed aside by the story. It's a story-driven form, and so I'm having a lot of fun with that without feeling like a literary whore.

And I could do none of this without the wonderful accident of my agent. It's a total fluke how he found me -- an old script, "The Brazen Wing", was in a pile somewhere, he got a copy, read it and responded. He had me change two story points, which I did, both to be more commercial (like the guy doesn't die at the end), and we were off and running.