Script Frenzy Sitrep

The first two scenes of The Death of Albatross are written — somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes of stage time, as near as I, in my relative inexperience, can estimate. There is a standard format for stage plays that's supposed to yield about one minute of stage time per page, but I double-space my text (as it's just nicer for everyone if the thing actually gets read by anyone who isn't me, or — one can hope — performed). That means that my pages are significantly quicker to get through than others', and I'm stuck with estimating based on word count, which you're not supposed to do. Tough.

At the rate I've been keeping to for the past three days, I may even finish a substantial-enough first draft to win Script Frenzy as much as a week early! I'm going to push for that pace, because I want some wiggle room to write more if I get a horrible shock when sending my draft through the official page-count validator and find I'm 30 pages or so short. (Based on the organizers' rationale for switching from word-count to page-count for this year's Script Frenzy finish line, 20,000 words were too many for a workable-length screenplay, so I figure that would be roughly true for stage plays, too. In that case, if I aim for about 18,000 words, I should end up with enough pages.)

And that brings me to my Curmudgeon Fit for the day. I go to crit groups. I go to workshops. I do Script Frenzy. I check out scriptwriting software. And what do I find, everywhere I go? SCREENPLAYS! Bloody SCREENPLAYS! As if those are of course what every reasonable writer wants to write! "Oh...stage play. You're writing a stage play. How...quaint." One well-regarded software package I looked at didn't even HAVE a stage-play template (that I could find, at any rate, although it was easy enough to find the screenplay template, wasn't it? Wasn't it?). Just because playwrights have far less hope even than screenplay writers of becoming rich, is that any reason for the marketplace to ignore our legitimate needs? (Um...did I just answer my own question?)

Playwrights of the world, stand up with me and demand respect!