I hate this little peanut man.



Can’t believe that Thanksgiving is mere days away. I have too much to finish before the end of the year, and let’s not get started on Christmas presents. This time of year in Raleigh is kinda charming because it’s less crowded and I feel like I have the place to myself. The Christmas parade Saturday didn’t even wake me up, which is an issue on weekends living street-level downtown when you stay up until 4AM taking machetes to Chargers and Smokers.

Majority of casting for San Souci is done and now I get to wrangle scripts and rehearsal spaces and squib counts and other minutia until Janurary, which will then hopefully pass in a relatively pain-free blur. The locations have worked out pretty well thanks to Bogart’s and Hi5 but the Funeral Home where most of the action goes down is still somewhat tenuous, so I’m stressing more over that than anything else. Also, you can apparently rent caskets, which is news to me. But if anyone has a casket lying around that they’d be willing to lend us, shoot me an email.

Writing-wise I continue to grind. I’ve got two new scripts I’m eying for Austin/Nicholl next year, that I’m struggling to get into some sort of shape for workshop. I do myself absolutely no favors by being neurotic on each draft I know, so someone kick me in the head please.

Finally, since the Hurricanes are doing their best to emulate my other favorite franchise, the Cubs, Mom and I will be heading to VA to catch some AHL Hockey with the Albany River Rats. With the way things have been going, in all likelyhood many of the Rats may be in Raleigh at the time, so I guess we’ll be watching high schoolers or something.

Happy Halloween!



Never forget, when taking down Houdini, bring prizefighters, a platoon and high calibre weapons.

Stargates and etc.



So Eli Roth is working on three projects simultaneously, which, including a fantasy past time of beating Nazi with baseball bats, makes two things we have in common. Getting back into the workshop scene has revealed that my tenuous grasp of storytelling has slipped and that my favorite convoluted and apparently genre-obscure project isn’t universally appealing. So two projects go on the back burner and another one comes back for another pass.

Elsewhere, I snagged my second limited edition print from the arg-inspired LOST art project damoncarltonandapolarbear.com. It did not involve dolphins killing the president, but I am expecting some murderous marine mammals once the show returns.

Also, completely unexpectedly, I’m kinda digging Stargate Universe. The first episode was interesting, and it might just scratch the itch BSG left behind when it finished up. Robert Carlyle is playing things slightly detached, which is creating conflict with just about everyone at this point. Here’s hoping it holds up.

Won’t waste time or effort on the CS Open again



Updates being few and far-between I don’t expect I get much screenwriting traffic on the blog anymore, but just in case, I thought I’d pass along an opinion on the CS Open screenwriting competition- avoid it and spend your time doing more productive things. Like clipping your toenails or something.

The CS Open sounded interesting $12 an entry for an elimination style tournament. You get a prompt and have increasingly shorter deadlines to return a new 5 pg scene with each round. Since I’m a spec writer and I’ve been out of college for a while, the idea of a deadline really appealed to me. (I’m sure working writers who genuinely sweat crazy deadlines are thinking I’m crazy, but… Well okay, I can’t really deny being crazy.)

Here’s how things have played out… First, there were technical problems with registration, then some folks had issues submitting their entries by the deadline so it was extended, and now it appears some entries have just disappeared into the ether. But as far as I knew until this morning, I wasn’t having any of these problems. Got my proper #digit entry ID, had my pages done and submitted, properly formatted and title paged, by the original deadline, got a confirmation page and everything. But no score. No nothing.

I’ve sent several emails after each “Check by” date they posted to the site and still have not received a direct response. Found out via Twitter that a few other people are having the same problems. Done Deal reveals others.

So to hell with that noise. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a lot invested in this. $12 ain’t gonna break me, which was half the reason I entered. Plus I had a lot going on the weekend of the first round, SparkCon was going down in Raleigh, bands were playing, I had even gotten a little sick. But I came up with my 5 pages anyway, trying to put a fun spin on the vague plot requirements- but that was it, these weren’t characters I’ve spent months learning about and I guess I like my process a lot more when I live and breathe my characters for more than 5 pages.

My Olly Moss Locke print….



Courtesy of Damoncarltonandapolarbear.com:

Snagged print no. 281 of 300. Looking for a nice chunky wooden frame and gonna put it on the wall next to the classic Anatomy of a Murder one-sheet.