Writing is going well – though I have to admit I’m taking a one-month break (1.5 weeks left) to learn Sonar (I downloaded the incredibly frustrating and hard-to-use 30-day free trial) and use it to create a remix for a remix competition.

I’m finding that the writing is getting easier, the deeper I get. The story is roughly divided into three acts and I’ve got the scenes of the first act fairly set and have a rough idea of the scenes in the second act. Its a little weird, painstakingly nailing out an outline with 40-60 scenes when I know most of them will change once I put together a Story Team and we find lots of ways to make the story better, but it’s important to have a starting point.

Formally, Twilight doesn’t have a lot to do with my story (it’s in the teen romance and vampire genres and my story is really in neither of those). But informally, there are a lot of similarities. Both stories have a lot of action, yet are fully “character-oriented”. Both have a bit of a dark grunge/gothic mood to them, but it’s not overwhelming in either. Also, the Twilight script is, well, a movie script and thus reads fairly quickly — something my story will do also.

Mainly I was just impressed with how the script brought out the characters so vividly in so few words. This comes naturally when you’re condensing a couple-hundred-page novel, but to do it without writing the couple-hundred-page novel first is more challenging. One technique to do just that (which they used to do in the film industry) is what they call “full treatments” (if you’d like, I could post more about them from Rob McKee’s book “Story”).

Things are going real well with us. I’ve just finished translating Acts 1:1-14 (this time with the help/editing of our pastor, who’s a Greek pro) and am co-teaching on it at our church’s youth group tomorrow night. Jimmy’s almost 4 and Jessica just helped out a little at his preschool (at Christ Fellowship, Everson).