I am an idiot.

I am an idiot.

I really, really am.

Made a novice mistake today. If you've been following the blog, then you know at my last posting my page count [Re: The Trendsetter] was at 32 -- "fat and healthy 32," I think I said. I knew from my outline I had five scene left to go, and since I was shooting for around forty, after some healthy "scene sweating" [removing unnecessary bits to help lessen the page count -- think like an MMA fighter trying to cut weight], so I figured I'd have roughly 15-20 pages left to go. These parts of the story I have the least amount of work on paper for, but have had in my head for several months now, and since I'd woken up with a pretty strong feeling that I could finish the screenplay's first draft off before Friday came, I decided to dive right in.

Now, the first of the five scenes I was writing only recently made it into the cut, and was inspired by an off-handed remark John had made while helping me through my writer's block earlier in the process. Wanting to make sure I got the spirit of what we'd been talking about, I tried to find the word document that I had stashed the IM log in for reference later. By accident, I opened up an earlier draft of the script I'd done months ago [it sucked, even compared to what I'm doing now], and as I went to close it, I noticed something wasn't... quite... right.

The font was wrong -- or actually, the font was right -- and great big Courier Style 12 point was staring me dead in the face. Now, the reason this looked wrong to me? For various reasons, partly because I don't like looking at sized-12 style retard font and partly because page counts come out better in comic book scripts this way, I tend to write my screenplays in Courier size 10, and at the end of the ordeal, I'll pop it up to 12 and number the pages properly.

Now, I can't fathom why I would forget this -- probably the feeling shitty, lack of sleep, adrenaline, etc, but basically what this means is yesterday's reported 32 pages is actually 41 pages. That's already one page over what I was shooting for, and there are still five scenes, and roughly 20 pages left to do.

In size 10 font. Which means it's closer to 30. Which means first draft on "The Trendsetter" will come out just shy of 80 pages. Which would put it just about 20 pages short of feature length when I'm finished with it.

I'm an idiot.

So, after I'm done, I either have to find a way to flush some 40+ odd pages out to get it back to being an "Untitled Short," or just say the hell with it, and make it an honest-to-god movie.

The upside is, a lot of this is going to be up to Kyle. But I still have to tell him what I'd recommend doing, and right now, I just have no fucking clue. Other than maybe finding a rail spike, and slamming it through my right eye repeatedly.

I understand its hard to understand exactly why this is a problem. More pages, in theory, sounds like a good thing. But just the fact that I made this mistake, is well... it's amateur night, is what it is.

So I didn't get a lot of chance to work on this today. Definitely not 20 [30 in the right font] pages. Spent several hours talking to Sam on AIM. I had my away message up, but she, luckily, tried me anyway, and even though I probably should have been more vigilant in the writing, I don't get to talk to her enough.

After that, I opened the damn file, and I just looked at the script for a couple hours. Just looked. Can't even tell you if I read it. But I definitely didn't add any pages.

More later.