Nickelodeon Fellowship Woes

I've been stoked to apply for the Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship for the past three months. The first year, I tried writing a script, but I couldn't finish it in time. The second year, I revamped that same script and came up with an AWESOME story that made people laugh their socks off. I still love it and still feel a special kinship to all of the Ninja Turtles because of it. Unfortunately, I didn't get into the writing program. So this year, I tried again, this time with an Ultimate Spider-Man spec. I decided that the fastest way to write the script was to outline it to death before I even attempted to write script pages. This time, it only took me two months to produce a first draft, and another two weeks to produce the second draft. The outline process worked really well and I got some good feedback. Unfortunately, that feedback included comments pointing out the the story wasn't consistent.

I studied a Spider-Man episode inside out, thought VERY deeply, talked to my sister, and after I hung up, I realized, "Crap. I have to take out the blindness angle, don't I?" The whole reason my script exists is because I wanted to see Spider-Man go blind and have Daredevil train him. Awesome idea, right? And mix in Spidey learning to use his Spidey Sense more effectively while fighting a villain that uses illusions (Mysterio)? Awesome fun, right? But a friend of mine pointed out that Daredevil added one  subplots too many and distracted the story from the central theme. Actually, I didn't really have a theme, which was probably the problem in the first place. That was the first thing I set out to fix.  It wasn't clicking, wasn't working, STILL wasn't working, and then the solution hit me like a ton of bricks (I apologize for the cliche, I'll have to revise that simile later. It's late and my brain is tired). I realized that I had to take out the blindness stuff and put more focus on the villain. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. This means yet another major rewrite merely eight days away from the contest deadline. I am totally gonna die.