So, this is a fairly long rambling about my current screenwriting project, cut for your convenience and sanity.

This was supposed to be a good weekend for getting shit done. I didn't have to be to work yesterday until 7:30pm, which means that I had the entire day to actually be productive and stuff. Naturally, I wasted the entire damn day, because I am a terrible human being. Tonight also presented a golden opportunity, since I was off at 5:15 and had the whole night ahead of me. This I also mostly squandered, mainly because I was tired. I didn't get much sleep last night, the couch wasn't terribly comfortable, and it was a long day. My good karma last night in securing a parking spot and entry to the complex (my gate key being in Kansas City with Julia) was negated instantly by having to be Big Larry's boat partner today. So I had to share my boat--my slow, crappy boat, which tragically used to be one of my favorites--with a guy who maxes on all his breaks, doesn't load the gun, and spits on the mic. So yeah, I didn't exactly get home chomping at the bit to get something done.

I wanted to, mind. I actually went so far as opening up Final Draft and scrolling through the pages, looking for the bit of the first act I want to chop up. But actually focusing on the words was such a chore, I couldn't do it. So I went a slightly different route.

I've been fielding, especially in class, a great deal of comparison of American Gods to Alice in Wonderland. It's a pretty fair comparison on the surface: naif gets drawn into a strange world. But I was confronted with the fact that, in its current form, Shadow takes pretty much an hour to go down the rabbit hole. Unless I want this to be a Peter Jackson movie (which I don't, since the very thought of King Kong makes my ass go numb), that ain't gonna work. So, since my own material is proving a bit much, I'm looking at the other material.

What I'm doing now is looking at Wonderland stories and seeing what makes them work. How do you follow someone through this strange new world and back out again, and have it make any sense? So, I decided to watch the Disney Alice in Wonderland, which, setting aside my professional and personal bias, is the most pervasive cinematic depiction of the text. (I also intend to refresh my familiarity with The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan.) (Well, I also watched Airplane! while I waited for it to download. Lawks a mercy, do I take my gigabit for granted.)

So, what's the narrative thread in a world of Cheshire Cats and March Hares? It would seem to be a hell of a focused protagonist. Alice wants to find the White Rabbit, and Dorothy wants to go home. (At least in the Disney version, Alice changes her mind in Act III and also just wants to go home, but she's just as adamant about that as she was about hunting wabbits.) This is their entire drive and purpose, and the resolution of this goal is the end of the film. I don't particularly recall Wendy having any particular overarching goal once she actually reaches Neverland, which is why I want to take a look at Peter Pan again.

Okay, so that's pretty good. Something strong has to drive the protagonist. Hell, that's true of all storytelling. So what about the Wonderland protagonist's character arc? Well, here's where it starts getting tricky. See, Alice is pretty static. Dorothy's rather one-sided. And Wendy, all told, is a bit dull. That's one reason, I think, why this role tends to default on children: they don't need to come out of the story profoundly changed.

Shadow, on the other hand, is profoundly changed. The world that Shadow gets caught up in forces him to make decisions, accept his heritage and desires, and grow up. Despite the fact that Shadow is 32, this is very much a coming-of-age story. So the early 20th century Wonderland model, while helpful, is inexact in this case.

So what about Shadow, anyway? This story's about him, but who is he? Strictly from the text, he's passive and fairly intellectual, which is a pain in the ass to write, and harder to write sympathetically. No one likes this guy, unless he's Hamlet, and even then lots of people want Hamlet to shut the hell up and get a hobby. Obviously I have to deviate from the text, though I'm having to fairly force myself to increase the degree to which I leave the book behind.

So, let's get to basics. What does Shadow want? My first inclination is that he doesn't want anything, which is a crappy, crappy way to write a character. So. Looking again, I see that he wants a quiet, anonymous life. This is pretty good, actually, because it puts him in instant conflict with his position in the middle of a war between the gods. But it's still, ultimately, a pretty boring thing to want.

But hey, sometimes people want boring things, at least at the outset. That can still be interesting. So what does Shadow need? I played around with this one for a while, and I think I've distilled it into something that I can actually work with: Shadow needs a home. He spent most of his childhood moving all over America and Europe with his mom's embassy work, and so he's never really had someplace to call his own. Home was with Laura, briefly (how briefly, I wonder? I should figure out how long the two of them were married), but her death sort of threw a wrench in that.

The thing I like best about this approach is that it lets me work in Lakeside, and while that material's still troublesome, it's easier to fit more solidly in, because Lakeside becomes the fulfillment of that need. It also lets me play with Cairo a little more, since Cairo's the first place where he realizes this need.

So, I think I'm starting to get my head around the material conceptually, which is fantastic. Less fantastic is the fact that I have a month to create a viable first draft of this thing. I should not be slowly grokking this story, I should be cranking out some goddamn pages. Hopefully I don't end up rewriting myself to death, but we'll see.

Now it's getting really late, and I want to hopefully hit a Borders before my shift so I can pick up a copy of Peter Pan. (Generally I don't accomplish anything on breaks at work, but since I haven't worked parades since July, I'm reasonably sure I won't know many people, which makes it easier to get some reading done.) And I'm going to write no fewer than five pages on Monday, if I have to get someone to come into my room and zap me with a cattle prod until it gets done.

I imagine this will not be of interest or make sense to anyone, and this is probably not what many had in mind when seeking signs of life from me, but meh. My blog.

Also, as a final random sleepy aside, the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? DVD is an excellent edition of a great movie, but I really can't play with it at the moment even though I want to, because it gets my brain thinking about my own noir project, and my creative energies are already divided enough as it is.