The Envelope Please...

I've decided to pull an old project out of the storage file, where it's been dwelling for a little over a year now. I started toying with an idea in a similar vein to it, and that turned into a fusion of picking up the characters and some smidgen of world rules from the first project and fusing them to the second world concept I've been spinning a little. Interestingly, I've decided to pick up those characters in their arc where I saw them ending up at the Season2 or Season 3 mark and beginning from that place.

So to start with, I didn't open the old script drafts. I pulled out the old envelope. When I finish with the "big board" (you may have seen an old incarnation of the big board on this blog, which is really brown package shipping paper and painters' tape that my landlord doesn't object to having adhered to his walls! Cheap, easy way of making a visual space for blocking out an outline, for those who need one!) and all the scenes and beats and character addendums and such, I tuck them all into an envelope, seal it, date it, and tuck it away. I come back to projects often enough that having the old notes doesn't hurt! Sorting through the "Thursday's Child" envelope, I doubt I'll use many of these notes, but it's a good refresher and is helping me make notes of some ideas I want to lose and some I want to keep.

And yes, the original title (currently in the "keep" pile) comes from the Mother Goose:

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child born on the Sabbath Day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

Today's writing tip is a reiteration of something I pulled from playwright Leslie Sloan Orr. Hang onto the old stuff, even the tiny notes! It may come in handy again! Also? Deconstruction and tearing apart the old stuff is FUN! Pulling it all apart and slicing out slivers of the best of the old world and bringing them to a new world is FUN!

I keep promising to go back to The Devil's Wife and work on a full length screenplay from the short, but I'm still not at that point where I can sit and just watch it without the urge to tear it apart in a non-constructive way. Maybe for my NaNo project this year... =) Meanwhile, I'm re-building character profiles and a new sci-fi genre world for a pilot alongside continued edits for my "Castle" spec and edits on my most recent pilot, "Divine Judgment". In between, I hunt for a real job. Glamorous life of an aspiring TV writer, huh?!