I’ve been sort of “meh” with a lot of potential writing projects as of late. I don’t really know why. I think part of the reason has been that I’ve been away from screenwriting for too long. It’s been over a decade since I wrote a finished screenplay. Although I know I have little-to-no chance at pursuing screenwriting as a serious career, the fact is that it’s my preferred writing format. It’s what I learned writing with.
Quite unexpectedly, I found that Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles was reawakening my desire to pound out screenplays. Over on my blog site, T I B, I started posting some scenes. The series was creating situations that I wanted explored. For me, once a story idea starts rattling around in my brain, I have to write it down to get it out and give me peace.
I’ve written several scenes (and in one case, essentially half a teleplay) and posted them (do a search there for “Scenes I’d Like to See”). Although they are basically 1st draft attempts, it felt oh-so-good to write in screenplay format again…I can’t even begin to describe my joy with that.
Anyway, all of that sort of came to a head with the Season 2 finale for the series. At this point there is about a 40:60 chance of it getting renewed. The thing is that the finale fired up my creative juices to a point where I have to start writing stories. Not just scenes, but full-on episodes. Since I also like to bring other eager minds to the table, I’ve set up a forum that’s sort of a writer’s room for this project. That should give you an idea of how fired up I am…no one goes to this sort of trouble for fanfic (fan-generated fiction).
In addition to the screenwriting, this is a revisiting of one of my old habits: writing fan fiction. I really haven’t written any since the see-it-as-it-comes-off-my-fingertips rough draft fanfic novel I wrote for the Xena – Warrior Princess universe. It’s been sort of a side-effect of my being involved in some degree with a number of fandoms since the 1970s. For me, it’s basically play time.
It appears that, for the time-being at least, when I step away from art and still haven’t satisfied my desire to be creative, I’ll be doing up some Terminator fanfic. I’m kind of curious to see what happens.