Can you picture this?

I just found a quick solution to a problem that's been niggling at me for weeks.

Every time I sit down to visualize a scene, I can see the place my scene is set, hear it, smell it. But my character's faces tended to be fuzzy. Or worse, they'd be subsumed by faces of friends.

Thankfully, Nordstrom sent me a catalogue the other day. As I was flipping through it I realized, aha! That's Lucy. That's Nicole. And that's Alda.

Now I've got those pictures, and a few more I found in other magazines, pinned to my board, it's a snap to focus my brain and picture my characters as they speak.

I just finished act one! Yay me.

Slacker excuses:
I've been working on my screenplay 5 or 6 hours a day. Am I a slacker no more?

Slave rats

Beware Arc Flash!

Hallelujah! I have conquered my fear, laziness, and better instincts. In the last couple of weeks I've gone from having a good idea to having a tightly structured, neatly plotted, intriguing story ready to tell. Still don't have a word down in Celtx, but never mind that for now.

I do have a big corkboard full of colorful index cards, telling me what, when, why, and where everything is going to happen. The people who say they write without doing any structure first are either: a) lunatics or b) geniuses. I, being neither a nor b, think this board, with its tidy little world of wonderful structure, may actually save my life.

Am also eternally indebted to the internet and all of its wonders (how did we live before 1990?). Every day I dip into my favorite sources and seek out a few new places for advice, info, and morale-boosting. These are the ones I've harvested recently, with a dash of salt of course:

Screenplay Mastery - Quick ref guide to structure, and an interesting section where he critiques people's opening scenes.

Create your Screenplay with Barry Pearson - Another take on the standard structure thing.

Rereading certain Wordplay columns - especially this one on Plot Devices. Why oh why is Terry so successful and therefore too busy to add new columns?

And of course, I'm still visiting Jane Espenson for her almost daily hits of wisdom.

I'm also somehow managing to fit all this accomplishment around my latest paid project on arc flash and electric shock, which is infiltrating every bit of my screenplay, even suggesting character names and the title...

Slacker excuses:
"Lost" has started again and I finally got a membership at Blockbuster.