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I Finished!

 
 
Ethan Hawke
11:02 / 01.03.02
Woohoo! I just finished a rewrite of my first screenplay, chopping down a monster 155 page first draft (which was actually sans ending as well) into a lean, mean 122 page comedy machine.

I gave myself today in order to finish it, as it's the deadline for a screenplay competition I wanted to enter (sadly, I feel like I can only finish projects if I give myself some external, immovable deadline to work towards).

Now what? I think I am going to put it away for 2-4 weeks, rewrite the ending (which really doesn't do it for me right now, alas, alas) and then send it out to agents or something (got to investigate that process). Anyway, it feels great to finish my silly little piece of work.
 
 
deja_vroom
11:14 / 01.03.02
Congrats, man. There's few things like the feeling you get when you actually FINISH the dam piece of work, right?
Good luck with the agents, mate.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
11:17 / 01.03.02
Hyurr. Don't feel bad about the deadline thing. It's something you share with a lot of other writers, myself included. More important is, can you hit the deadline every time? If you can, you'll be a popular guy...
 
 
Ethan Hawke
11:26 / 01.03.02
I'm definitely good with deadlines. To be honest, I almost punked out on this one. I've been working really hard this week and was exhausted last night. I knew I had only a little bit to write, but it seemed like a huge burden. Plus, I was hampered by the fact that I ran out of printer paper and there's no office supply store near me. So there was a lot of on-screen editing going on ,(not the smartest thing to do at midnight and the hours there after...)but I forced myself to finish it, just because I didn't see another "real" deadline in the future.

Anyway, I just printed this puppy out at work, and at lunch i'll get it punched and bound, and then it's off, off, off.

And on to the next idea....

(BTW, I freakin' love Final Draft. I mean, there are some annoying things about it sometimes, but it rulez compared to setting up your own styles and macros in Word, which I had previously been doing. God bless the bootleg software vendors of NYC.)
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
11:53 / 01.03.02
I forgot to say...

CONGRATULATIONS.

Sorry...

And don't bless those bootleg guys too much...it's not like FD has a huge market in the first place. I tend to suggest that if you sell the script or get a commission to do something else on the back of it, the first thing you should buy is a licensed copy of FD...it has a kind of symmetry, and God help us if BC Software were to go under. I mean, can you imagine FD done by Microsoft...dear Jesus...
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:02 / 01.03.02
Oh, I would definitely buy a copy of FD if I sold something, if only for the fact that the "assign voices" function on the bootleg copy doesn't work and that sounds like so much late-night punch-drunk rewrite fun.
 
 
deja_vroom
12:50 / 01.03.02
This sounds. REALLY useful. What is. FINAL DRAFT?
 
 
Ethan Hawke
13:33 / 01.03.02
Final Draft is a word-processing program designed specifically for formatting screenplays, teleplays, and stage plays (I think). It'll take care of all margins, formatting, etc. for you, and has "smart text" features that allow shortcuts for repetitive character names/locations. The keyboard shortcuts are really intuitive and easy to learn (It took me like an hour to get used to it).
 
  
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