Fried Green Tomates

Fried Green Tomatoes

That’s what my brains are. Furious writing, making the MYCMM deadline with only seconds to spare can do that it seems. Four days after I’m still having difficulty putting 2 + 2 together.

I didn’t do myself any service by taking until Wednesday to start my actual writing. My BIL and SIL were arriving with families on Friday night. So there was a house to clean and groceries to buy. With four kids in the house, that’s a two steps forward and one back type of thing.

My writing took place between midnight and 2:00am. By Saturday I had a rough first draft down and a day to rewrite. I decided whatever I completed by 11:00 pm would have to do. I would take thirty minutes to correct typo's then email the script by 11:30 which gave me 29 minutes to spare for the 11:59 pm deadline.

Talk about your Midnight Madness.



My script was finished at 11:02. I put my timer on for 30 minutes for the edit.


At 11:31 all hell broke lose. Kids screaming and crying. My teenager begging me for the copy of Harry Potter. Fighting over beds and toys. Did I mention I had 9 extra people in the house?



AT 11:45 I locked myself in my office and tried to focus. I still had to make my Title page. I had a crappy logline but no time left to improve it. At 11:51 I tried to save it as a .PDF. My scriptwriting software has an odd way of doing this. It's not in the SAVE section but in the PRINT section but I couldn't remember the exact steps...and the directions were saved on my other computer which I had just turned off. Shit.



There was allot more swearing and cursing, finding the email with all the directions, saving, renaming files, emailing, while literally juggling two laptops in my 3” by 3” space know as my office, before I finally sent the email.

Google time… 12:00am Sunday, July 22nd. 60 seconds late!!!

But there’s a happy ending to this story. After 48 hours of anxious pacing I received my confirmation email to say my entry was accepted.


Except for the last 20 minutes, it was a rewarding experience. I think just writing FADE OUT: was worth the money. It's been a long time since I forced myself to finish anything.



But if I do this next year...I'm going into hiding.