Welcome back, everyone! I want to share a little behind the curtain moment with you all. It was about six months ago when I chatted with Craig James, the ISA's founder, and we discussed my intent to launch a solo podcast alongside all of the other interviews I was doing for the ISA. The other interviews were doing well, and we were bringing on some excellent guests, and we found that the conversations were covering so much material on a wide range of topics. Which, by the way, I am launching an Online Class that will go into much more detail where these podcast episodes are concerned, and they will include written lectures, assignments, weekly creative support via email, and a script evaluation at the and of the ten week class. And the ISA will consider your script for our Development Program and hopefully submit it to our industry contacts. But...I'm getting off track here...
So while you were all loving those podcast interviews, I felt the need to get specific and cover the topics in detail beyond the fun conversations with executives and producers and the like. So we created The Craft as a bit of a teaching tool, but without the boring lectures we hear in so many other arenas.What we discovered was that our listeners were hungry for this kind of quick and concise series of podcasts! And even more, The Craft has become one of the highest downloaded series in our Curious About Screenwriting Network! Seriously, guys, that means the world to me.
While we haven't hit numbers big enough to make it on the iTunes front page or anything, I don't really care. I know that you're getting something from this, and when I had that thought this morning, it reminded me of something that I had recently forgotten. It was a reminder that I so desperately needed. And I say "desperately" on purpose, because it's one of the biggest lessons every writer needs to learn, and it's a lesson that no one teaches. And that's not to anyone's fault, it's just something that isn't focused on because it doesn't hold the elements of the screenwriting craft within it. In other words, today's podcast episode is, yes, another Sidenote, but I'm purposely placing this Sidenote before the next episode and explanation of your script's final sequence (sequence 12), because we all need to be reminded. I say "we" because I am most certainly including myself in this mix.