by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Our time on this planet is brief. I’ve finally begun to reach the existential angst of someone who knows this is just about the time when my age group begins to fade into non-existence. We have a solid 20 years ahead of us if we’re lucky, but the process of demise has just about begun.
As such, I’m going to slow drift towards figuring out how to flesh out a second creative “track” of working on a screenplay or three. I have a lot of movie concepts rolling around in my mind, but it’s pretty obvious that the learning curve is far, far sharper than I thought when I finally swallowed my pride and bought Final Draft 12.
I was thinking it was going to be a WYSIWYG-type editor.
Boy, was I wrong. I have to figure out how to use it format my screenplays. It doesn’t hold one’s hand at all. Which is something of a shock. How something that doesn’t really make it easy for a novice to format a screenplay to become the industry standard is curious to me.
And yet, I still have four (four!) novels to develop and finish as quickly as possible. But I’m feeling pretty good about that “main” creative track. Things are going really well in real terms, it’s just a lot — a lot — slower than I would prefer.
But I’m going back to writing again pretty soon now, even though I haven’t filled all the holes in my outline for the first book.
Wish me luck.
