Share my joy.

This was an exciting morning for me. I finished my skeletal draft.

I never start typing anything until I've index carded the whole script. I color code the cards and place them neatly on the bulletin board I've attached to the wall in my office at home. Then I forget all about the index cards and type. The only time I look at them is when I'm stumped, which fortunately isn't that often because I just skip over the parts that throw me. But the cards mainly serve as a starting point and a writer's block remover.

Then I do a skeletal draft. I start at the beginning and write until I come to a scene I'm not feeling. Then I skip it, leaving in its place a note about the basic scene that needs to go there, something like "Mike tells Ethan he wants to quit but Ethan refuses to accept his resignation." Then I move on to the scene I do like. I usually have five or six of these major holes in the script on the first pass. Then I get to the end, write out the last scene, print it out and go through to fix the holes. That's what I call the skeletal draft, and this morning I finished it. And for me, 39 pages is a lot for a skeletal draft. I tend to write short, but that's almost long enough to be a complete episode already.

Many of my writer friends always ask how the hell I write at work. I didn't for a long time, then the wireless Internet disappeared from the room I work in during my conference period. (I'm travelling, which means I don't have a classroom.) And as we all know, the Internet is both your best friend and your worst enemy when you're writing. But the past two weeks I've written up a storm because I've been sitting in a room with nothing but my laptop and no Internet, just ITunes and Movie Magic. I didn't even mean to finish my draft today. It just happened.

I can't remember the last time I felt this certain about a project either. Usually when I finish the skeletal draft I feel uneasy about certain scenes, like they're just not working and I don't know how to fix them. But not this time. I'm feeling good. I'm knocking this sucker out of the park.

Of course, all that could change tomorrow when I have to start filling in the gaps.