Side Quest Goal #2 Achieved: Finished 1st Draft of a New Script

I had my goals for the year all listed out, and I had an order that I was going to go through the goals that I had complete control over. But I always told myself that the order wasn't set in stone, and it could change at any time... if something came up.

Well, something came up.

I had all these script ideas that I wanted to work on, so a lot of my goals were to do 1st drafts and 2nd drafts of the different scripts. You can see below, my code words and partial title names... "Gun" "Floss" "Titanium" "Mother" and I had them listed in an order that I wanted to work on them in.

The order is semi-important. I am submitting scripts to contests and sending them to writing gigs and trying to contact producers and managers and agents all the time. I'm also writing all the time. But I never know if, and when, someone might contact me and tell me they liked one of my scripts and then ask the magic question, "What else you got?"

It was the question I was told to be prepared to answer, and that pro tip was correct, I had a meeting with a management company once, and they really liked a story of mine, and then immediately after wanted to know what else I had. The thing about that is, you want to have similar projects as the one that they liked. And probably quite a few similar projects.

Since most of my scripts were comedies, I wanted to get a nice artillery of other comedy scripts ready. The scripts vary, some have more action, some are Rated R, some are PG-13, so I figured I needed to not only have a big dollop of comedy scripts, but a few that were similar to others. I had a PG-13 script, so I made sure to have another, and one Rated R script that isn't too crass. I had an absurd Rated R comedy, so I made sure to have another one or two similar to that. I also had a thriller, so I knew I needed another one. Both have some supernatural elements, one of which those elements are a small part of the script. This also made me realize I needed a few other non-comedies.

That was where "Titanium" and "Mother" came in. Two more thriller-style scripts, one with speculative elements, the other, not so much. So, I had my order set, and then something new hit me in this whole "How To Go About Writing My Scripts" plan.

Producers LOVE projects that could be lower budget.

And not a ton of my scripts really were. Some of them could be medium-to-low budget, but not just truly low budget. A couple of my upcoming ideas would be low budget, but they were the non-comedies. Among the comedies, again, some were medium-to-low, and in fact, one of the ones I was working on this year could've gone either way, so I purposely wrote it so it would NOT be big budget. But then it got me thinking, I need to have a few low budget ideas ready. What if someone reads my medium-to-low budget idea, likes it, but then asks, "What else you got?" and adds "And also, something cheap?"

So, I went through my script ideas that I hadn't put too much work into, the ones that were still inklings of ideas, and I deciphered which of them could be low budget. I found a few that would actually benefit from being low budget. I picked one of them, got really excited about it, and it jumped the line. I'm going to try to work some more low budget ones into the repertoire, but I felt that I needed to get one done soon. And as of yesterday, I finished the 1st draft of this low budget comedy script.

I'll still have to go back and do a round of editing later on, but at least I got the 1st draft finished. It wasn't a goal listed on my sheet from early January, but I always knew that list was subject to change. And even though, at the beginning of this year, I didn't set out to complete it this year, it obviously still feels fantastic to complete another draft of a script. It probably would have been a goal for next year or the year after, it just got bumped up the list.

There's no box to check off, but it's 107 pages of a script that I find funny, that has it's weird and wild moments, and that I'm proud of for a number of reasons, including the fact that I kept budget in mind. Hopefully for those reasons, it could appeal to someone, especially someone asking, "What else you got?" You know, if someone should ask me again.

In the meantime, side quest goal achieved!