Just sent in the first part of the project, and I’m all wibbly because I don’t think it’s as reduced as they hoped it would be. The problem is these characters talk to one another a lot — the dialogue is kind of the point of playing, as in many social simulation games. It’s been incredibly difficult to rewrite the dialogue so that it says the same thing in fewer words, while keeping the age of the characters and the age of the audience in mind. I effectively lost the last two days of work too, because there was a miscommunication between us and I’d been cutting out entire useless scenes, only to discover two days later that everything had to remain intact: there had to be the exact same number of lines in the final product. So Friday, yesterday, and today were spent restoring and rewriting those deleted scenes to use the fewest possible words.

Argh.

If I could have deleted scenes that don’t affect the action, I could have reduced the script by a fifth! They would have loved it!

Now I shall mope until I hear back from the client. And maybe eat lunch, as I’ve been working since five this morning to meet this deadline, with only a pancake and a cup of tea to keep me going.

[LATER: Yup. They’re disappointed. My hands are tied! Tell me I can delete entire lines — nay, entire unnecessary scenes! — and it will work!]

Excellent ritual last night, lovely and grounding and introspective (which is what we all needed). It ended up coming to me remarkably easily in plenty of time, thank goodness. An excellent meeting all in all, actually. I’m excited about studying something again, which is nice. It’s draining to constantly provide something for others to do, and for everyone’s good intentions about holding workshops or presenting research it rarely seems to actually happen. It’s a relief to have a topic to cover the next few months’ worth of meetings, and a topic I can learn about too.