Good Night

There's nothing so satisfactory as a productive night writing. The world is different now. A chapter of a book now exists in the world that did not exist just a few hours ago. Sure, it's just a rough draft of a chapter. Sure, it's just a rough draft of the first chapter. Sure, it's just a rough draft of the first chapter of a book that will require many, many more chapters for it to be any kind of entertaining or interesting.

But hey, it exists.

It's my talking animal story. I cracked its code this afternoon. Well, part of it at any rate. I know the big picture of the world now. I know how it begins and I have a vague idea of how it ends. It's all the little bits in between I am absolutely clueless about. But with this particular story, that doesn't bother me. With most of my scripts (I'd say all but this book proves that I can't), I outline the entire thing, scene-by-scene, before I ever start writing. Outlines are easy to change. Scripts are in stone (until we get on set, then we throw the scripts to the wind and let the actors improvise their way through it). But with this story, I'm going to wind my way through it. I'm going to let the world and the characters tell their story to me.

I haven't written anything like this in over ten years. It's kind of exciting.