Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines – The Climb #682

Monday 4^th January 2021

So imagine you’d planned out your year. You remember seeing a screenwriting open submission around April and thought to yourself that would be a good thing to enter in 2021 as a form of motivation to try your hand at scriptwriting. Imagine you even planned to start writing a script at the end of 2020 / beginning of 2021. you know… so you were ready.

And then you find out the screenwriting open submission got moved forward to December and the deadline was next week. So you get to work, thanking yourself that at least you’ve been gathering a bunch of ideas over the last year.

And then you find as you start writing, that the deadline isn’t next Friday, but Wednesday.

Yeah.

That’s me.

So what was frantic screenwriting has turned into even more frantic screenwriting. I had to ramp up from 3 pages yesterday to closer to 20 today. I still need to get it to the required length and then edit it before submitting it… all in less than 48 hours.

Now, this is practise for me, and I honestly don’t expect much to come from it. It’s a way to try my hand at a different style of writing, and have fun doing so.

But everything else went out the window today as I battle with this deadline. I’m thankful I do have a good sense of story in my head. But I’m still learning formatting, I don’t know how to increase the font size so I can read what I’ve written and I seem to have forgotten how to spell.

I am having fun. With the greater world going to shit, I’m quite happy in my little bubble being challenged not only by the creation but by the deadline as well.

I’m probably going to make the deadline, but not without a ton of work today and tomorrow. Other things, including the novel have been deprioritised while I get this done. It’s only 2 days, but it’s still 2 days I’ll need to gain back before the end of the month when my personal deadline for completing the first draft is.

I see other people going back to work and gearing themselves up, and here I am four days into the month already up to my neck in writing and deadlines.

I kinda like it, though.