I'm on vacation this week, so one of my goals is to finish a draft of my ghost-story feature screenplay. I had a great day Sunday, writing 15+ new pages, a mix of rewriting scenes from an earlier incomplete draft and adding new scenes. I spent this morning reconstructing a sequence that had stymied me for weeks after realizing, once again, the problem was in the concept, not the execution (or lack thereof). Came up with some awesome new material to replace it, which is going a bit slowly as I'm feeling me way. Once I get past this sequence, though, it should be fairly clear sailing.
One of the challenges with the new idea is that it involves flashbacks and possibly some voiceover. The funny thing is, I don't have any experience with those in screenplay format. I mean, I know how to do the formatting, but I haven't written flashbacks & V.O. before, because in reading screenplays by others who are also new to screenwriting, I've discovered a lot of people use them way too much, as a crutch for poorly structured plots. So I resolved to avoid them. They are justified in this sequence, so now I have to learn how to do them; i.e., when to switch to or from flashbacks, when to put in the voiceover narration, and so on.
On Saturday, I wrote an entry for the CoWrite contest. The contest provides a basic premise for the story, then each week writers compete to create the winning 10-page entry based off the evolving story. This is the first week, so it's the first 10 pages, introducint the characters & setting things up. Then next week, people will write the next 10 pages based on whichever entry wins. You don't have to enter every week, and it's only $10 per entry. And there's a $2,000 cash prize plus other prizes for each week's winner. So I'll be interested to find out what happens on Monday.
My Doorway sci-fi short screenplay is receiving some nice feedback. Also, I'm talking with someone interested in turning it into a short film, which is cool.