We’re a two-car family:
- The Goddess drives Her chariot, aka The Little Car;
- and I drive the sportswagon, aka The Big Car.
The sportswagon is Japanese, inconspicuous and boringly reliable.
The chariot is Italian, spunky and an attention-seeker – the attention being of the garage mechanic kind. But The Goddess loves it to bits.
Just before we headed south last weekend*, the wee car was lustily belting along when all power disappeared – just like that – and, after some checking and poking under the hood, and reading of the user manual, the sportswagon and I towed it to the local garage.
A few days later, mid-holiday, I came upon a scrap of paper with The Goddess’s handwriting:
- hatchback
- 1200-1500cc engine
- manual transmission
- a Honda Jazz?
(Below Her writing was a scrawl by different, mortal, hands: ejection seats, STOL capability, NOS on-demand, coffee machine, HUD with satnav, cloaking device.)
Like I said, The Goddess loves Her chariot. But I suppose there’s a limit to how much one is willing to contribute to your mechanic’s passion for deep-sea fishing.
I have a similar list for my current project:
1. treatment
2. scene breakdown
3. working first draft
4. first draft
5. inflict on readers
6. second draft
7. inflict on surviving readers
8. third draft
(and so on)
The thing is, the first draft was aborted after eighty-plus pages and although I’ve returned to a prose treatment… I’ve started another list:
a. it’s a story about fathers and sons
b. the father was a towering personality
c. the son has a chip on his shoulder (ie., his father)
c. it’s a tale of love lost… and regained
– while in a less tidy hand – still my own – and in no discernible order:
– throw in a car chase
– and a gratuitous sex scene
– have them sort it out over hot lead
– as long as they all hold hands in the end
– gratuitous sex tasteful love scene
Mm. Getting there.
(This’ll be the last post about the process (and That Project) for a while – the potty-mouthed Phill Barron and the mysterious Daily Screenwriter write about process much more interestingly than I do.)
* Sorry for the week’s silence. The Mamea family were in Wellington visiting aiga and the only ‘net access I could get was through my cellphone (hence my few emails were of the all-text-on-one-line variety).
