With just a few weeks to go until the 2010/2011 US tele­vi­sion sea­son starts I thought I’d con­tinue the proud tra­di­tion on this blog (can three years be con­sid­ered a tra­di­tion?) of talk­ing about what I’ll be watch­ing over the next year or so.

Here’s last year’s tele­vi­sion list for comparison.

What stays

• 30 Rock - Like I said last year.This is one of the few tele­vi­sions shows that Ange and I watch together.
  
• Cal­i­for­ni­ca­tion — Every time I watch this show I get the urge to become a crazy writer. They make it look so fun.
  
• Entourage - Last year I stated that Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold was the only char­ac­ter peo­ple watched Entourage for. I still stand by that. He’s the only char­ac­ter who’s had any sort of growth.
• Robot Chicken — I haven’t seen this show for a while now. I won­der if they’re still mak­ing it.
  
• South Park — One of life’s guilty pleasures.
• Super­nat­ural - The last sea­son ended on such a high note that I worry how well this last sea­son will pan out.
• The Daily Show - Since ABC2 started screen­ing it at 7:15pm every week­night I haven’t had to down­load this show. It’s what The 7PM Project is attempt­ing to be. Irrev­er­ent, but still rel­e­vant. Love it.
• The Simp­sons — All but rusted on now.  I can’t not watch it. Though the last cou­ple of sea­sons have been get­ting bet­ter, they’re still no sea­son six.
  
• True Blood - There’s only one episode to go in the third season.
• Weeds - I don’t know why this wasn’t on ear­lier lists. I’ve only been watch­ing it for the past five years or so.

Added in the off-season

• Doc­tor Who - I was never a fan of Doc­tor Who, but I started watch­ing the new Matt Smith sea­son on a lark and was com­pletely hooked by the end of the first episode. The upcom­ing sea­son has an episode writ­ten by Neil Gaiman. Can’t wait!
• The Big Bang The­ory - This should have been on last year’s list. I churned through the first two series in about two weeks. It has it’s detrac­tors, but I like it.
• Com­mu­nity - Eas­ily one of the best shows on TV.

What’s new

• Blue Bloods — I might wait until the off-season and watch the first sea­son of this show in one hit. I’m not dying to watch it and wait­ing frees up my down­load cap for other more use­ful things.
• Nikita - I caught an episode of the orig­i­nal Nikita TV series years back and didn’t mind it. I do like my action-y/spy stories.
• Under­cov­ers - I’ve just about reached my limit of TV shows launched by JJ Abrams. If I don’t get into this one I’m swear­ing off his stuff for good.
• The Event — This could end up being another Flash­For­ward. The mar­ket­ing cam­paign has just been awful.
• No Ordi­nary Fam­ily — This could be ter­ri­ble or it could be good. I’ll give it three or four episodes.
• Walk­ing Dead — A TV adap­ta­tion of a zom­bie comics. How could I not be inter­ested in it?

What goes

• Doll­house - What a let down that sec­ond sea­son end­ing was.
• Flash­For­ward - A mod­er­ately inter­est­ing thriller only notice­able because it actu­ally answered ques­tions (*cough* Lost *cough*). Started to sag towards the end, but it’s can­celled now.
• V - After build­ing up my hopes, the first episode was a total let down.

Well, what can I say. Another Script Frenzy, another dis­mal failure.

While I may need pre­scrip­tion glasses to see, fun­nily enough I have per­fect hind­sight. I know exactly what I did wrong:

• Had only the barest idea of the plot,
• Had no idea who the char­ac­ters were…
• …or their drivers,
• And didn’t write nearly reg­u­larly enough.

I’ve men­tioned it before on the site, but actu­ally start­ing to write is one of the hard­est things for me to. Once I get going though it’s pretty hard to get me to stop.

So the plan for now is to write and write and write. I don’t know what I’ll write, but I need to keep the fires burn­ing. That means throw­ing up a frame­work around my cre­ative writ­ing. I need to lock down my weekly out­put and what and where I need to improve. Hope­fully with  year’s prac­tice I can come back to Script Frenzy and fin­ish the damn thing.

I’d like to share a rel­e­va­tion I had towards the end of last week. It’s a fairly sim­ple rev­e­la­tion, and now that I’ve had it I can’t believe it didn’t occur ear­lier. Some­where closer to the start of the month. And here it is:

Write the inter­est­ing stuff first.

I did warn you of it’s simplicity.

See, my cur­rent method of scriptwrit­ing involves plot­ting out a num­ber of beats in my head, then writ­ing down every­thing that hap­pens in the lead up to each beat. In the­ory the beats become a rewards sys­tem. A long slog through mun­dane, lead­ing con­ver­sa­tions is rewarded with a few pages of white hot action! Of course, in real­ity what hap­pens is that the promise of tear­ing into a juicey story beat things just isn’t enough to keep me from bor­ing the shit out of myself and los­ing  inter­est in writing.

I guess I just wanted to keep a sense of lin­ear story pro­gres­sion. With­out the bridges the story just becomes a series of vaguely con­nected story beats. Basi­cally the script for Napoleon Dynamite.

With only 1 week to go until the end of Script Frenzy, I’m going to focus solely on those  story beats I’ve got rid­ing around in my head.

Oh and for those of you still keep­ing score. I wrote two more pages this week. Bring­ing the grand total to 10 pages.

I bet you’re think­ing “With the poor show­ing last week he would’ve used this week to catch up or at least get close. ” The answer is no, no I didn’t. The total num­ber of pages writ­ten this week was zero.

It’s not that I don’t want to write. I love writ­ing. I like build­ing tiny uni­verses and pop­u­lat­ing them with semi-interesting people.

This is very sim­i­lar to what hap­pened with NaNoW­riMo, except it hap­pened far ear­lier. I was all set to write my amazing-but barely-thought-out screen­play,  but then that devi­ous black box of dis­trac­tion just had to rear it controller-shaped head and insist I pay it some atten­tion. And who was I to argue?

It’s a tad cliché, but com­ing home after a big day at work, there’s noth­ing bet­ter than send­ing a few dig­i­tal hollow-points down the old tele­phone line. I’m just not in the right mind­set for cre­at­ing a stel­lar piece of writ­ing at the moment.

That fact that I’m even a day late with the reg­u­lar update is proof enough.

Has it really been a week since Script Frenzy started? Well how about that?

Thanks to the Easter bomb wip­ing out 4 days, it hasn’t been the most pro­duc­tive week. Accord­ing to the Script Frenzy site I should be sit­ting on around 23 pages of glo­ri­ous sto­ry­telling. But the unfor­tu­nate real­ity is  I’ve only just passed page num­ber eight.

I still don’t have any idea of what the story beats will be (which could leave me with a  story that turns in on itself some some lit­er­ary oroborus) do I have a few thoughts on what’s dri­ving the moti­va­tion for trav­el­ling to other worlds.

I’ve been writ­ing the story in a lin­ear fash­ion, but I may switch this up in week two. Maybe I’ll try writ­ing down inter­est­ing ideas and flesh­ing them out over mul­ti­ple pages. Essen­tially writ­ing from the mid­dle out to see if this improves my page count. The story may not be all that coher­ent, but that’s for the edit­ing phase to fix up.