To bring you this special news bulletin.
Well, there's nothing really special with what I'm about to write. It's just not about my sister. I'll get back to that story later.
So anyway, yesterday I was at the office for a few hours, and while I was there, I asked Tamara's Magic 8-Ball if we'd come up with some great ideas today.
The responses were...
- It is unclear.
- Ask again later.
- Better not say at this time.
Sheesh... Thanks for nothing Magic 8-Ball!
However, today I am pleased to say that "All Signs Point to YES!" We made some pretty significant breakthroughs this morning (and hit a few brick walls this afternoon... but never mind that now).
One of our breakthroughs involves giving a sex change to our little boy character and transforming him into a little girl instead. I won't get into all the reasons why, but suffice to say, when I presented the idea to Jim, he was very keen. In fact, you might even say that he was excited. It just makes A LOT more sense.
On one hand it's hard to kill your babies. You know what they look like. You know what they sound like. You even give them affectionate nicknames, like Porkchop. (Which was a subtle nod to a lil' boy I once knew.) But these are the sacrifices you sometimes have to make for the greater good. A young girl named Maggie is going to work sooo much better! I don't know why we never thought of it sooner.
Unfortunately, as great as that idea was, it still doesn't help us with all the nagging plot points we've been trying to tweak up.
I swear to gawd, this process is endless! Not because we're perfectionists, but because we just keep encountering all these awkward stumbling blocks.
For the last two weeks it's been nothing but,"We can't have this scene and that scene back-to-back. Maybe we should insert this other scene in between."
"But this other scene shouldn't happen until after this first scene takes place, so we can't insert it up there. What if we remove this scene from way down here and move it up instead?"
"No, that doesn't make sense, because that will impact this scene and that scene, and then too much time will pass between these two sets of scenes. Plus, that also puts it too close to this other scene. So maybe we should just create a new scene to stick in between?"
One step forward... two steps back. One step forward... two steps back.
Sigh.
And when you consider that the movie is about two hours long, and every scene ranges between 15 seconds to 5 minutes, well, there's a lot of finagling to do.
I mean, don't get me wrong - every day we're making huge leaps of progress, but it's just such a time-consuming process. Just when you think you're close to being finished, you realize something which changes everything.
Naive me, I thought we'd be done our outline on Monday, and now it's looking like we'll still be plugging away over the weekend. Then again, the last time we reworked the structure it took us two months. This time we've been pressuring ourselves to wrap it up in only two weeks, because the sooner we get this next draft written, the closer we are to jumping into the next phase -- which is actually another phase of rewrites... (Yeah, I know!)
Of course, as everyone knows, you can't force epiphanies. They prefer to materialize at their own pace.
So yeah... not that I'm complaining... but I will say that I'm friggin' exhausted!
On that note, I think I'm gonna pull my bleary-eyed self away from this computer for a while, and will resume with Sister Story tomorrow. In the meantime I'm sure you're all simply losing sleep at night, tossing and turning, trying to imagine what her controversial plan might be to get herself into such a prestigious school. Am I right or am I right?
You are right! :o)
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