Rachel H. White

...two of my vampire series into the Spartanburg art show, the Stained Glass Window and the Werewolf Sighting.  Let us all cross fingers that they'll get in!  And the great part is that I'd already paid my Arts Council dues so it didn't cost me anything to enter!  Yay, free publicity!

The weekend retreat in GA was great.  Got a lot of insight on my vampire story.  Currently I am working on running the story through the "Snowflake" process where I outline the plot and all the characters, starting with one sentence to describe the whole story, then moving up to a five-sentence paragraph, then five paragraphs on one page, etc.  This is not something I got from the workshop, by the way, just something Mom found and e-mailed to me, but it coincides well with the talks we did on plot structure, and Lucker (the teacher) did strongly suggest that we make an outline before we started writing (er...too late to do it before, but better now than never).  Anyway, I don't think I mentioned before, but the weekend was taught by Michael Lucker, who is a Hollywood screenwriter.  We actually talked relatively little about screenplays and more about writing in general and plot structure.  The big thing about a screenplay, you see, is that it has to have a certain format and structure or it gets thrown out the window before it even gets read.  Most screenplays are 120 pages (one page per minute of movie time).  So we split up the plot in chunks: in the first 10 pages you have the "inciting incident" ie: the bad guys take over the building.  Then at about page 30 is the first "act turn," "plot point," "disaster" whatever you call it, in which something goes wrong for the "hero" that he/she wasn't expecting.  There are one or two more plot points at pages 60 and 90 and the rest is climax and conclusion.  Now go watch your favorite (and especially recent) movies and see if they follow this pattern .  Anyway, of course with books the number of pages varies but the structure is the same overall.

In other news, I'm working on building a monthly planner in which I lay out ahead of time everything I'm supposed to do each day, with the idea that I will be more organized and won't waste time wondering what I'm going to do today...We shall see if I can get myself to do it.

And finally, of course:  I am so pumped to go see Pirates II when it comes out Friday!!  There's a scrumptious picture of J.D. in Rolling Stone if anyone's interested (I'm afraid you'll have to find a copy of the mag, because they don't have it posted with the article on the net).

Until next week then -- Rachel

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