My Writing Journey: "Calamity", Part 2

Things have been a little...crazy in my personal life recently. Some drama I was involved in that I thought had abated suddenly got way worse than it had been (although I had predicted it would get this bad, I just didn't think it would happen so soon after the inciting incident). The drama has everything good drama should have: lies, manipulation, religion, meth addiction, a small-scale coup, and probably more I'm leaving out right now. It probably wouldn't make for a good novel, but it makes for great gossip if it's not actively happening to you. Unfortunately, it's actively happening to me, so as you can imagine, it's consuming almost all of my thoughts and free-time.

As a result, I haven't really been able to read or write anything for a couple of weeks now. But I finally was able to get a little editing done. Since it's been so long, it took me a while to figure out where I had last left off, but once I finally did figure it out, things have been going smoothly. So far, I've edited 58 out of 72 scenes, and right now I'm at the big climax of the story, where everything goes desperately wrong. Pretty fun.

I managed to close a plot hole I didn't even really realize I had created in my second draft, which was (accidentally) brought to my attention by my ex. He actually pointed it out to me and told me I should use "show, don't tell", which is frankly ridiculous advice. I mean, the audacity of this man (who has never written a story in his life) to tell me (someone who has been writing since elementary school) the most basic (and most misunderstood) writing advice that usually applies best to novels, not screenplays...can you tell this might be one of the things that eventually led to our breakup? I'm not saying it was this exactly, but it sure as hell didn't help.

Anyway, as my pseudointellectual, Dunning-Kruger suffering ex pointed to a scene to show me where I should use "show, don't tell" in my screenplay for a movie, I noticed a giant plot-hole, which I have now fixed. So I guess the ex was good for something.

The other thing I fixed was the gag I talked about in Part 1. Originally, I had Cal throw a Tesla into the Twitter building, and then it cuts to an exterior shot of Mar-a-Lago and we hear a scream. That gag was, obviously, written before Trump got banned from Twitter, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before Trump got reinstated to Twitter but decided "nah, I'm good', and before Musk went off the rails crazy. Well, now we cut to the SpaceX launch site in Texas and hear a bloodcurdling scream. My only problem is that a) I don't want to give Musk any more attention and b) I really want to be clear that I'm making fun of Musk. I think that gets through, but I might need a second opinion.

(Side note: my ex was also a huge Elon Musk fan. That actually had a lot more to do with our breakup than the other thing. How can anyone look at Musk and think that he's a good person or an intelligent one? And yet my ex thought both these things. Like I said, pseudointellectual and suffering from a touch of the old Dunning-Kruger).

Anyway, with only about a dozen scenes left to finish editing, I'm hoping to have this third draft done soon. I don't quite know what I'll do with it once it's finished, but I might actually try my luck and submit it somewhere. Where? No clue. That's what research is for. Before that, though, I'll probably have a few people look it over. William, maybe, and Nehemiah, but maybe even a few other people.

Lastly, I talked a lot more about my ex in this post than I expected. He actually isn't involved in any of the drama I talked about, and in fact, we broke up in late June. I guess there were just some things that I needed to rant about in relation to him. Hopefully it doesn't become a habit, I'm not a fan of renting out my mind to people, especially not for free.