Apparently, the main time my creative brain works is in the wee hours of the morning. This is something I’ve been slowly coming to understand. The previous post was written around 0330 this morning (which I only mention because, as someone recently pointed out to me, there are no time stamps on when I post these things).
Shortly thereafter, I got to work adapting my most recent feature screenplay (which is incomplete, as most of my good works are) into novel (fiction) format. In the general scheme of things, as most any good writer will tell you, that’s bass-ackwards. One tends to adapt screenplays from novels, not vice versa. It just so happened that I liked how this particular adaptation of my original concept (the grain of which was first conceived on a CYOA site back in 2006) had been working itself out.
I’ve begun a narrative on this fictional world of mine probably 3-4 different times, but this one in particular seems like it will be incredibly marketable to the legions of HP and LOTR fans that are longing for the next big something. That said, (and as it has been pointed out to me by at least four producer types by now) the language and nomenclature in the screenplay is such that the excitement of the story gets lost in the confusion of the names.
Basically, I have to have my new audience “get it” elsewhere before it can be translated to the silver screen. This, of course, stands to reason. In order to be trusted with the hundreds of millions of dollars that it would take to make this movie rightly, I must first have my (measurable) audience fall in love with the characters elsewhere – much in the same way that there was evidence of a huge market for both LOTR and HP before they went into movie production.
This is good news in that it gives me more time to hone the personalities of my lead characters, (which in itself can be bad news – for as my readers know, a glut of time for me oft increases my procrastinational tendencies) but is bad news in that the young man I would most like to play the title character (Asa Butterfield) will most likely be too old to play a boy of 16 by the time this work goes to production. Granted, he won’t be 16 until April 1st of this year (and for the amount of filming he’d have to be involved in, most producers wouldn’t touch him until 2015 [because of time limits per day on filming children]), but we’re probably talking about a five-year process here.
Then again, everything could work out and the Universe could pleasantly surprise me… again.
You never know.
What you should know, however, is that the “official” date that I began working on the novelization of what will likely be the very next HP or LOTR was today.
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