It is over. It is finished. It is done.
Well, as a screenplay, it’s done. It was an interesting experience.
The screenplay checks in at 156 pages. Using the minute-per-page rule, that’s 2 hours, 36 minutes, about the length of a modern action or scifi movie. By the time I reached the climax, I didn’t care. Now how is this going to translate into word count? It depends.
Prose requires that you supply what a movie director would show. There’s that show-don’t-tell that’s rammed into our heads. Only sometimes, showing takes up waaaaay more space than telling. So tell the unimportant bits. Otherwise, you bore the hell out of the reader. We don’t need to show every detail of Joe in the porta-john during battle. It’s enough to say he went off and underwent the ill-effects of the previous night’s Taco Tuesday. No need to go into detail. Focus on the combat.
Another thing I realized as I wrote the ending why so many scripts don’t have the same ending as the finished film. Writing a screenplay ends with just getting the pieces into play. And then there’s the denoument, or in English, that part after the climax. Where you wrap things up.
By the third scene in this part, I was having bad flashbacks to Return of the King, which seemed to have seven endings. I almost expected Cate Blanchett as Galadriel to pop up and go, “But wait. There’s more.” And then JT, Suicide, and Davra appear to Yuwono and Duffy to tell them “We sailing to the Western Lands to hang with Dumbledore and Obi-wan.” Didn’t happen, but as one scene ended, when I realized I had yet another scene, I thought, “God, will this ever end?!?!”
But it’s done. Now I have to turn it into prose, which I’ll do in a few months. But first, back to the sequel to Holland Bay, then the first draft of The Amortals (formerly Quantonesia). It may be an extra draft, but so worth it.