In order to make “Don’t Make Me Come Down There” the best book it can be, I’ve submitted it to a test audience to get feedback on it. I did the same thing with both “Blood Splatter” and “The Comicon and Convention Survival Guide”. It’s been a few weeks and the reviews have started to come back. This is one of the hardest parts of writing. Of course I like the book. I’ve spent years working on it, but how will the rest of the world feel when they read it. Will the jokes work? Is the plot enjoyable? Are the characters interesting? All I could do was wait with baited breath.
During this time, I started working on the screenplay adaptation of the book. Because, that makes sense right? Writing the script for a book I haven’t sold? Well, to be honest, it was more so a writing exercise to keep the creative juices going. Converting a novel to screenplay is no mean feat. You take hours and hours of a story and condense it into 90 -120 minutes, or if you’re The Hobbit, you drag it out over three movies.
During this project something interesting happened. I edited the first act of the book to be more concise and get to the zombie outbreak sooner. There was a lot of character exposition, but a lot of it really didn’t add much to the characters, so I edited it down. I’m about twenty pages away from finishing it.
In the past two weeks, I’ve had eight reviews back on the book and they have all been extremely positive. It’s a wonderful experience hearing how they have been affected by the character journey’s. However, one comment seemed to be unanimous. It’s a bit slow in getting started. So I’ve decided to revisit the story and tighten the first act. It isn’t easy editing your own story when you have become attached to each scene. But the kicker is I’ve already edited this act. In the screenplay. So the novel which inspired the screenplay is now inspired by the screenplay. I’m hoping to have both the book and screenplay completed by the end of January.
Yours excitedly
CWC
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