On Sunday, Fall seemed to arrive in earnest. It was pretty dreary and cold outside, which I should note, is among my favorite kinds of weather. We had a cozy morning inside and even turned on the fireplace for a while. Quite a switch from running the AC the day before.
I spent another hour or so working on my short screenplay submission. For those who didn’t see my post a couple of days ago, I made a last minute decision to join a friend of mine in a 48-hour screenwriting competition.
The way the first round works is that you get a genre, location and an object and you have to incorporate those into a five page screenplay. For those who have never written screenplays, I’ll say that five pages is REALLY short. Thus the challenge. Fitting a whole story, with a beginning, middle and end into five pages is TOUGH. The last competition I did was 10 pages, and that seemed impossible.
OnFriday night I got my assignment, and to my horror I drew, well, horror. Yup, that was the genre I was assigned. I’m not a horror fan, never have been, and while I’ve written lots of things that have been horrible, I’ve never written horror.
But by Saturday morning I had an idea cooking, and got a decent amount written. Sunday, it was about writing to the end of the story, and then making it fit into 5 pages. I started out about 2 and a half pages over, and I think it took me longer to cut back down to five pages than it took to write the whole original draft.
I’d been a little hesitant to go, because when we’ve driven by recently, it usually seems pretty busy, and we don’t really want to be crowding in on any playgrounds at this juncture. But, it was late afternoon and kind of cold and drizzly out, so I figured we’d give it a shot.
And indeed, that was the right call. The place was completely deserted, and we had our run of the park. The kids had a blast. They ran around, made up cool adventures and frankly, it felt like old times.
I enjoyed it thoroughly, too. It is a really cool park, I actually like the cold, drizzly Fall weather, and it was a fun outing.
Amelia drew a treasure map, and even found some “fossils!”
The rain really started to pick up, so thankfully it was a little easier to convince the kids it was time to go home. We headed back and had some dinner, and Erin and I watched the Packers play the Saints on Sunday Night Football. It was a really fun game, and I was able to put the finishing touches on my submission as I watched the second quarter.
