12 days of "write fast!"

(If I were my wit-machine friend and colleague Kat Sherrell, I would surely attempt to write this as a parody if the song "The 12 days of Christmas", one line each day for the next twelve days.  But I am not so clever nor do I want to put in the time to try to be.  But you should check out her blog, currently featuring daily haikus.  It's awesome.)

Once again, I have an insane writing deadline to meet: 12 days to complete this rewrite. I have 5 scenes to revise and 2 scenes left to write.  That's a scene every 1.7 days.  Erp.

This deadline is not an arbitrarily self-imposed one, though.  TRU (Theater Resources Unlimited) - an organization of which I am a member and am also very fond, check them out - has a reading series for new plays with a deadline of January 3rd.  I wanted to submit last year, but didn't feel the play was ready at that point.  So I promised myself I would submit this year.  At the time, I figured it would be done many months in advance.  Funny.

It's actually not entirely my fault that this didn't happen.  Or I guess it was, it just wasn't because I was being lazy.  I did complete a rewrite in the spring where I changed the structure of the play, an important step but definitely a transitional one.  This summer I was busy writing for a short-forms class at ESPA, in which my writing grew so much that it was time well-spent away from this draft.  This fall I enrolled in a rewrite class, confident that I would then have the draft complete by the end of the class in late November.  But then I had to go and take on this show (see my last post), which did not allow me the time or mental focus to work on the play for the last month or so.

So, here I am again, writing on a deadline, one of my favorite past-times.  I'm actually good at it.  It helps focus the mind.  Last night I finished the revisions on scene 1, on to scene 2 this morning.  I'll keep you posted!