Beginning a new project while I'm querying another, like so many other folks on this site. Right now I'm trying to clarify voice. To help develop this as well as confuse myself completely, I'm writing a novel and screenplay simultaneously. So far the one is helping feed the other? question mark? Anyway. I'll share both.
Novel excerpt:
1.
The sun hits me dead in the face like it was aiming right for it. My own personal six-fucking-a.m. spotlight. I turn my head over to where it’s dark, down in the dirt and flowers. I’ve still got a few minutes before the cemetery guards get here.
A wilted white rose presses into my cheek. Its thorns bite in and the tiny pinpricks of pain feel good. I run one hand over browned petals and faded mementos toward the cool grey marble of the headstone, finding the raised bronze letters and tracing their familiar lines:
James Douglas Morrison
1943-1971
What was it like to be Jim, I wonder for the gazilionth time.
Write some songs, change the world, flame out hard, cold in a bathtub at twenty-seven. Done. Death achieved. Fourteen-years-olds camping out on your grave forty years later. Immortality achieved.
My life plan, since I first heard a Doors song, is crazy simple: be Jim Morrison.
Lately, I seem to be working mostly on the dead part.
---
Screenplay excerpt:
EXT PERE LACHAISE CEMETERY (PARIS) - MORNING
Fourteen-year-old RYDER is lying face down, fast asleep on JIM MORRISON’S GRAVE. His head is turned to the right. We DRIFT from his left side down and around his body to his right side: tangled dark hair, black Doors t-shirt, dirty jeans, written-on converse sneakers, right hand holding tight to one of many flowers left on the grave by fans, hair covering his face. He blinks in the brightening daylight and opens his eyes.
We DRIFT slowly back and away from his steady gaze, then up overhead revealing a maze of packed-in mausoleums and graves and the walkways that thread through them. CLAUDETTE and FRANCOISE, two uniformed cemetery guards doing their morning patrol of the grounds, are walking nearby when they spot Ryder.
CLAUDETTE
(in French, with subtitles)
Again?
FRANCOISE
(also in French, subtitles)
You’re shitting me.