arilin

Fall updates – no charge this month

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it (or, if you already have, I hope yours was happy)!

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know I’ve been having a bit of writer’s block this November. Or you may have just guessed from the lack of updates. I am writing now, working on a new Mensura story with some old faces and some new ones. It’s another experiment-of-sorts as I try to “reboot” an old original character of mine who’s never been in a publicly-released story b...

Updates and thank yous!

So: no updates at the moment, I'm afraid, but I have many ideas that I'm hoping I can move on. If I don't get anything out this month I'll cancel the payment processing for November, though. I may post something about the ideas I'm working through, too, at least if I can make the post interesting.

And: thank you all for your support through the previous two stories! I'm working on the editing for Saida & Autumn, and will have some ebooks soon. I hope. If you're supporting at the $9 ...

Next steps!

First, I’m sorry I didn’t get this post out earlier in the week; I intended to, but my “real” job had me working at a trade show and leaving me unusually wiped.

While there wasn’t unanimous support for sticking with the per-month patronage, there seemed to be a clear preference for that among those of you who voted, so—at least for now—that’s what I’m doing. If I can’t come up with what I think would have been the equivalent work to a paid post during a month, I just...

Looking ahead

As the screenplay wraps up this week, here’s some thoughts on what’s ahead.

First off, since last July, when Saida & Autumn started, I’ve managed…

• 39 posts in Saida & Autumn
• 15 posts in Red Savina
• 2 standalone holiday stories for Halloween and Christmas

Counting this post and the final Red Savina post, I’ll have made 86 posts total in 69 weeks!

Yay! But… the truth is I’m a little bu...

Red Savina 4

Gabrielle has some sharp questions for Harry, but is interrupted by a crisis. While she finds herself confronting the police, Harry searches through Mirasol's lab notebooks.

Note: this is likely the last section that's going to be published as "early access": if you want to keep reading, you'll have to a patron at at least the $3/month level, or wait until the whole thing's finished and published as a whole!

Red Savina 3

Harry convinces a reluctant Gabrielle to take Mirasol in as a temporary boarder. As the two women try to learn about one another, the vixen begins to wonder just what game her nephew is playing.

As before, this post will unlock for everyone on Saturday. The serial will go patron-only (at the $3+ level) some time in August!

Red Savina 2

Harry urges Mirasol to make nice with the Underwoods. When she reluctantly visits, she finds them in a literal fight—and no one expects what happens next.

Since screenplays don't have chapters, this picks up on page 9, after the end of the previous scene. What you've (hopefully!) already read is grayed out.

Red Savina 1 (Opening)

The opening scene of Red Savina, where we meet most of the main players. It's a grand party at the Underwood Estate, but not everyone is enjoying themselves…

After some deliberation, I've decided to upload the screenplay "sequences" as PDFs, and not attempt to muck about with a plain text version for now. Sequences will often both start and end mid-page, just as they would in a finished screenplay. Future sequences will have their first pages marked to indicate where new mate...

How to read a screenplay

(Because this seems like a good post before I begin serializing one.)

The title makes this sound either more complicated or more pretentious (why not both!) than it truly is. It’s not difficult to read a screenplay; it’s just that there are quirks and conventions of the format it’s worth knowing.

Screenplays sit in an odd corner: they have to show what goes on the movie screen, but they can’t be dry blueprints—they have to be good reads. It’s not the screenpla...

The Plan

I’ve finished the outline! The screenplay itself is underway, although just five pages in. I’m still working out how big each weekly posting is going to be; I’ll probably have a better sense of that when I’m farther along. I’d like to be able to stretch it out a bit, but I also don’t want the bits to be so short they don’t feel like they’re advancing the story.

During the past month or two I’ve made all the posts free, but patrons have been effectively funding the writ...

The nuts and bolts of screenplays

One of the many quirks of screenplay writing is one I obliquely referred to in the last update: they have a specific formatting style that goes back many, many decades. As the world moved from typewriters to computers, most publications looking for manuscript submissions—stories, nonfiction articles, whatever—gave up insisting that you make your manuscript look as much like it came from a typewriter as possible. Screenplays, though, didn’t, and studios still insist on that type...

Updates: on outlining and party scenes

Outlining

While I’m generally not a “pantser” (that is, someone who tends to write stories “by the seat of their pants,” I’m not generally an outliner. With few exceptions, I do my story planning as freeform notes in a separate document. I start this brainstorming document before I start the first story draft; it has the beginning, ideas for the kind of story I want to tell, and usually (not always!) a fuzzy ending. I ask myself questions about the story and answe...

Theme, character, and saving cats

In “The mad science of story structure,” I talked about—yes—story structure. I got into character arc vs. plot arc, and gave a high-level overview of Dramatica’s “theory of story” and how it takes those two major arcs and organizes them as four “throughlines,” three of which revolve around the character arc. The plot arc drives the story and generally provides the big, flashy set pieces—the spac...

Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Savina

So, confession time: while I “knew” the story in the way it feels like everybody knows the story, I hadn’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until a few months ago. And, yes, in broad strokes, what I knew about the story turned out to be true: a mild-mannered doctor working with chemicals that might as well be magic creates an evil alter ego for himself.

But if you “know” Jekyll and Hyde from other media the way I did, there�...

The mad science of story structure

In my introductory post, I talked about the three-act formula for screenplays. Countless books about it have appeared over the years, and more recently “story development” software has popped up based on various competing theories of the One True Way. At a 50,000-foot level, they’re all describing the same thing, but some of them take different (and occasionally drastically prescriptive) approaches.

In my own meandering journey through writing theory, I’ve read Syd Fiel...

Meet Red Savina

So if I’m going to write a screenplay, what’s it going to be about?

I mean, it’s going to be about a giantess, because hi, hello, have we met? Okay, beyond that. As I put it on my web site, giants range the gamut from gentle to apocalyptic. But I’ve just finished one of my longest-ever pieces about mostly gentle giants and wanted to switch up, and monster movies are pretty classic. Beyond that, I already had a monster giantess character bouncing around in my he...

So, for my next trick…

…I’m going to pull a screenplay out of a hat.

(“That trick never works!”)

Screenplays are interesting beasts: unless you’re doing a weird experimental art house film, a movie script follows a tight structure.

Act One introduces you to the protagonist’s life, sets up their thematic situation, and propels them into the main plot arc with what’s often called the “catalyst” or the “inciting incident.” Act Two sets up subplots and develops the c...