January is usually a long month, but the fifteenth of this month crept up on me when I wasn’t looking. Here’s an update on how things have gone with my two challenges to kick off the year.
My plan to write 90 screenplay pages in 30 days hit a bump in the road a few days ago. By the 11th I was well on course, having written the 33 pages I needed to by that stage. Then I hit a bit of a wall, as I was working from a loose beat sheet I didn’t have anywhere to go when I was struggling. I was merely pushing the pieces around the board at that point, overwriting scenes and focussing far too much on the dialogue which was becoming increasingly verbose. So I gave myself a few days off, thinking that the deadline I’d given myself might not be realistic. Stepping away from the written word was actually very productive, while on a run this morning a key plot point fell into place. And by the final few kilometres, I was reworking existing scenes while the main characters spoke to one another in my head. This weekend, along with some rewrites to my short film script, I’ll be working on these changes but with less focus on the word count for now.
On the running front as of today, I’ve raised £810 for Mind, the mental health charity, and covered 35.4 miles of my 50-mile target. So after 50% of the days, I’ve done 70% of the running I need to do. I have a feeling now that running has become a form of writing that I might go a little over my intended target. So far so good, I’m looking forward to more running and writing in the next fifteen days.