It's official!

It's official now, I have an artist for one of my billion projects in the works... My horror mini, title known but not being shared, is "in the works" with an artist, Denman. He has a lot of fine art background and seems to work with every medium under the sun, so I'm excited to see what he does with the script... By far, this script is the best I've done to date, it flowed naturally and ended as planned at just the right length for a horror mini-series, four issues... 90-ish pages. I'm not positive when I'll think it's safe to share more details of it, perhaps when we get the go ahead from a publisher or something.

On other writing notes, I had lightning strike my brain on my way home today refreshing another idea that's been mulling in my brain for a couple of years, so I'm finally moving forward with that. Honestly, I had originally planned it as a screenplay, but I just couldn't get my feet under the concept well enough to start writing. I had a lot of good ideas, but sticking them together into a coherent story eluded me until today. So, more good news for that!

Still trying to find "the right" artist for the project I have over 130 pages scripted. I was tearing through that story this morning and at lunch to reorganize the pages. I wrote each issue as 32 pages, so I thought it would be smart to take each issue down below "giant sized" so it's cheaper for people to buy it when it does come out (price does matter in this economy)... So, five issues of script turned to six issues of script. I also found a couple of other issues that worked themselves out with a little editing and shuffling, so good to go!

That's it for now... When will I write more? Who knows...

And they keep on flowing...

I'm pretty excited today... I had to take my wife's car to get the oil change, tires rotated, etc... While I waited (just under two hours), I ended up typing away on my laptop, trying to crank through the script for my horror comic... No, nothing with zombies, vapires, or werewolves, something a bit more visceral. I used to watch a ton of horror movies when I was younger and still love to check them out when I have time but one thing plaguing 90% of them is poor writing. The last ones I watched that didn't come across that way were 28 Days Later and The Ring... There were others, I'm sure, but I can't remember them. The dialog in so many other horror movies is so contrived it's ridiculous! So, my goal for said horror comic book script is to make the dialog more realistic... How would people REALLY react in some of these situations and also keeping in mind that before, during, and after the story the characters had lives, relationships, etc... Just because there's a story going on doesn't mean their lives end, so I sneak in elements of their personal lives that may not be pertinent to the horror, but they help to color the story and to help it make sense when characters do certain things, react certain ways, etc... Also, when all is said and done, I want the reader to feel bad for the characters if, by some small chance, they get hurt or, God forbid in a horror story, someone dies! Oh no! The most perfect comic book I read that falls into the horror category is Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman... If I write my own mini-series half as well as he's managed to consistently do with Walking Dead, I'm going to be extremely pleased with myself.

Now you may ask, "when will I find out what this story is?" Well.... you've got to wait. I'm not worried about someone stealing the story so much. It's so specific that if someone DID steal it, I'd know... it's not some spin on something else, it's a twisted vision based on the combination of a photo and a dream... Unless you shared the dream with me (please let me know if you did so I can go have some powerful psychic suck it out of your head), you've not seen anything like it.

Exciting, encouraging, or what?

On a positive note, I've actually received some very good feedback from several people on the sample script I posted on my blog here and it hasn't been up for long! Can't complain about that! Hopefully Avatar will enjoy it when it comes up in their stack of freelance submissions. If not, I totally understand the crap shoot that is the business. At some point I'll catch the right person's eye or ear and it will make all of the difference. It's kind of like applying for any job when you think about it. There are thousands of people who, on a piece of paper (resumé), all look alike with equal or even fewer qualifications. Once you manage to get past that first hurtle, however, and catch someone's attention, it's a lot easier to show them why you are a good fit. I've always done well on interviews, so here's hoping!