A wicked Nor’Easter is raging outside, frustrating my spring cleaning efforts–tis the season for pitching junk–and flooding the sewers. The coven of raccoons beneath the porch seem quite upset at the forced relocation.

Been reading Black Sunday by Thomas Harris in bits and pieces for the last several weeks. His first novel, a best seller nearly written thirty plus years ago, a good decade before he birthed Lecter, strikes me on two fronts:

1) He delivers the goods and keeps the ball rolling. The man is a master at ratcheting tension.
2) The voice is muted, possibly by an editor, and definitely on purpose. Oh, his fingerprints cover the pages, it’s Harris all right, but his expert baritone does not ring through the narrative like a crafted pop song. And certainly not as powerfully as it does in Silence of the Lambs or Hannibal.

When I mentioned the second note to a good friend of mine, she countered that maybe Harris toned his personality down to sell the boo. Once he had his foot in the door and some sales, he could do it his way.

And I’m thinking she’s right.

The screenplay effort continues, as I cross the 40 page mark. Since 50 is halfway, I’m happy with the progress, and also having a lot of fun with the story. This week is vacation, so I have a lot more time than usual for writing, which I have seldom found a bad thing.
The professional proofreader working the line edits for The Last Track is ahead of schedule–another plus. Querying for the manuscript continues, but nothing new to report there.
And soon I’ll be in Peterborough, Ontario chillaxing.
That’s three aces in my book.

One of the greatest things about screenplays for me is the premium placed on forward motion; it’s the one form which allows a writer to start and finish a scene without making apologies. In fact, a rapid assault is the whole point. Make something happen and fast. There’s another coup, though.

Screenplays are compact.

End to end, a properly formatted screenplay lands south of 120 pages. 100 pages is very common, a length of 105 pages is my projection for the contest. And given that much of the content is white space, slug lines, and character names, there’s not a tremendous amount of words to manage and edit at all. Which makes spotting and addressing issues easier. And there’s little bothering with my old nemesis, description.

See, coherent scene set ups in a novel are a good idea, and a matter of course. Truly effective ones are hard to write, and I admire authors who pull in the audience with well phrased imagery that evokes sentiment and interest.

But an expertly styled scene dripping with adjectives and similes in a screenplay? Waste of time. EXT. HERO’S FRONT LAWN DAY. The action happens outside, during the day, on the hero’s yard. Boom. Done. Me, I’m drinking a beer while a director paints in the blanks.

Yeah, so far I’m having a blast. Tally in this effort to date: four writing sessions, twenty-seven pages. Three more weeks at this clip leaves two weeks for revisions. Or so.

A few people who read this site are fans of Joe Hill, and someone forwarded this recent shot from Publisher’s Marketplace, so I may as well pass it along without sending unsolicited emails. Cause that would be spam. And that’s evil.

I’d say the resemblance is striking.

Original caption:

Like Father, Like…
Joe Hill, aka Stephen King jr., stopped by the Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., to sign copies of his new book, Heart-Shaped Box.