Had a productive day - hammered out a good deal on both current projects early in the morning. In the early afternoon, Mike came by to run through an edit of our screenplay and figure out what we would want from the producer. The screenplay is now ready to roll, eight years after the original draft.

1998 - wrote the original one act play version during class in high school. I forget which class.
1999 - expanded to full version
2000 or so - revised it and put it on my webpage
2006 (april) - thought Mike, who is a director, might like it, started work on a full rewrite.
2006 (may) - finished the rewrite in collaboration with Mike
2006 (november) - revised.

I had more or less forgotten about the thing. Now it's been recalled to life, as it were, and the chances of getting it filmed seemed pretty good. My main work on the project is pretty much over - though I'll probably be there for most of the filming, may have a cameo or something, and will probably end up with an "executive producer" credit or somesuch. In the mean time, though, a producer is interested, and it looks like the Old Town School of Folk Music (or people from it, at least) are interesting in pitching in.

This sort of thing isn't unusual - with How To Get Suspended and Influence People, I can trace a long string of events:

1994(!) - got the idea that sometime I should write a kids book dealing with censorship. I was about the age Leon is in the book at this point.
1999 - got the idea to write a movie about a guy making an avant garde sex ed film. The idea was really about a director who goes crazy trying to find a replacement for "Carmina Burana," which he decides is overused.
2002 - got the idea to open a short story with a line about a kid whose dad really sucks at being an inventor. Sketched out a basic outline for what became the first couple chapters of the book
2003 - actually wrote the first 3-4 chapters (or early versions thereof). The first two were initially a short story, 3 and 4 expanded on it, incorpoating the avant garde sex ed movie idea
2004 - wrote the rest of the rough draft, incorporating the censorship idea from 10 years earlier.

Similarly, an early version of the sequel (with very different, college-aged characters) was written in 2001 and revised in 2003-4.

But the thing is, these earlier things are just ideas that ended up working their way into the final. Sometimes they're central to the concept, but you don't need an idea to write a book - you need LOTS of ideas. The basic concept of the plot is, in the long run, a small part of it. If you work at it, you can probably base a whole book around just about any of the smaller ideas.

ANYWAY

Snow should arrive in a few hours - I'm listening to Bob Dylan concert I saw in East Rutherford two weeks ago. It was avery good show to see, but it's one of those where listening to the recording makes it sound WAY better than it sounded at the arena. The thing that made the Philadelphia show better was largely Dylan's visibile energy - he was jumping up and down between verses of Desolation Row! - and that gets lost on the recording. This East Rutherford show sounds GREAT on the recording, and holds up to repeated listenings MUCH better than some shows do. Even most of the better shows I see wouldn't hold up well as live albums on their own. This one would.

Hit Tower Records at midnight to pick up my copy of the new Bob Dylan album. My long "study guide" is here:

Modern Times: Sex and Violence