SCRIPT FRENZY

Script Frenzy is a worldwide contest to see who can write a movie script consisting of 100 pages in one month. April is the month set aside to do this. The people who sponsor this contest also have the NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) contest each November where you commit to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. So if you put this writing goal into perspective, realistically it should be by far easier to write the movie script. I currently have one movie script, "No Angels In Hell", about the Sturgis, South Dakota Motorcycle Rally and it is copyrighted with the Writer’s Guild of America. The McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis gives $25K grants to deserving individuals every year in various writing categories. I have wanted to enter this contest for a number of years now, but there was one little hang up—you need to have 3 copyrighted movie scripts to enter the contest. So every year the contest deadline nears, I tell myself I will write two more scripts by the next year. When I saw the Script Frenzy contest, I knew it was just what I needed to get another script written, so I signed up. This one would be a sequel to "No Angels In Hell", and would take place in Daytona, Florida at the Daytona Biker Rally. April started out as a good month for this writing challenge, even though Easter fell in this month with its traditional Easter church services and Easter dinner. I was on track and only had thirty pages to go on the evening of Apr 29, when I sat down to tackle the last pages. I knew I had all day Saturday to work on it too and felt pleased with my progress, knowing the goal was totally reachable. That was of course until I typed in a couple of pages and my laptop shut down. At first I assumed it must be the battery, but upon further examination of the electrical cord, it became evident it was indeed still plugged in. I tried frantically to power it up for at least an hour, but to no avail. Finally, I decided the battery had to be dead and I would have to take it in to the Geek Squad at Best Buy in the morning. I still felt confident I would reach my goal. Saturday proved to be an extremely disappointing day, especially after hearing the verdict from the Geek Squad that my laptop had died and would not be coming back on ever again. And they meant never. They kindly informed me most laptops only last 3 years and I was extremely lucky mine had lasted 5 years. This, however, did not help my script in the least. Unfortunately when writing scripts you need to use a special program, like Final Draft, which I had on the laptop. Being the trusting person I am, I had forged on writing the script and was waiting to back it up on the jump drive when it was finished. So needless to say it was not backed up. Luckily though, being the paper fanatic I am, I had printed hard copy the night before, so at least I have 1 printed copy. However, there was no way I would even try to attempt retyping the script onto my old desk top into an old version of Final Draft. The deadline came and went and I didn’t make my goal of 100 pages, but I did make it to 70 pages, which in itself is an accomplishment I am extremely proud of. In the next weeks I will get a new laptop and they will pull all the info from the hard drive (hopefully!) and put it back on the new laptop. Hopefully, my script will magically appear on this new laptop and I can forge on to page 100. So just a word to the wise for everyone, ALWAYS, ALWAYS back up your work because you never know what tomorrow will bring in the world of computers!