You will find a list of my current scripts here in my Master Screenplay Listing, which will be updated as new scripts and/or treatments are completed and registered, and summaries will be added to the list.

If you would like to learn more about me, my approach to writing, or just see what I'm up to, please drop by again.  If you would like to friend me, please see the bio bit on my profile page here at LJ.

Thanks!

A few nuggets and obviously a lot of inspiration from musical  sources as well. . .

Frank Herbert's Dune - the book that started it all, and also inspired the strange technology that appeared in The Infinity Grid

Blue Oyster Cult's Veteran of the Psychic Wars - nothing like that old story telling sci-fi rock to get my gears turning.  Pink Floyd's On the Turning Away had a little effect on me as well, perhaps because it's so atmospheric and the lyrics are beautiful.  Also, Tangerine Dream's Bent Cold Sidewalk (from 1978), one of their few lyrical pieces that fits in there with the likes of BOC and Hawkwind, very atmospheric, slight story telling lyrics. 

Duran Duran's Wild Boys video.  Go ahead, laugh if you think my head's stuck in the 80s, but that set was brilliant, the boys were in leather and chains (which I will never argue with), and Russell Mulchahy directed, later going on to direct Highlander of which I was a fan for many happy years.  Simon LeBon "tortured" on a windmill while belting his lungs out singing. . . okay, that was interesting.

Sometimes those trips down memory lane can really pay off.  I've been behind the scenes here working on something, a few somethings actually, but one in particular has all of my heart.  However, my day job is about to intensify and consume my life a good bit more than it did, so I'm putting aside the funds for a little netbook so I can make my writing even easier to carry around, and have a back up computer as well.  It's all good, and exciting, so I'm just in a phase of happy nostalgia. 

Took an ink drawing class today with artist Alan R. Young as a refresher to kind of give me a kick start back on the path of actually drawing and painting rather than photoshopping photos.  Ever since moving back to the mountains of NC, I've felt more free and creative.  The boost in my writing is evidence of that.  Now to get back to the art.  We started with some basic exercises in technique (cross hatching, stippling, etc.) and then moved on to picking out a picture and working from it.


( I picked out a fox. . . )

And here we have the gorgeous scream queen Sybil Danning taking her turn at cutting the cake at the cocktail party.  Can you believe she's 62?  She looks absolutely fabulous!

And the cake. . . best red velvet cake ever, and the decorations were designed after elements from different horror films, like the puzzle box from Hellraiser and the orb in Phantasm.

I drove up on Thursday afternoon, taking my time because I knew nothing got started until Friday.  I got checked in and went down to meet my friend Troy King, a talented film maker and one of the coordinators of the fest.  I was disppointed to hear that my friends Tim Abell, his gal Georgia, and Patrick Durham of Morningstar Films were not going to make it to the event after all due to last minute scheduling issues.  I was sorry to hear this as I had a lot of catching up to do with this bunch.  However, Troy informed me that William Forsythe would be coming in soon, with Linda Blair and Michael Madsen arriving later in the evening.  Soon after, we met Forsythe in the hotel bar, and I also visited with his friend and fellow actor Michael Nicolosi, who was the voice of Clown in the Spawn cartoons of the late 90s.  Both are absolute gentlemen and I enjoyed just hanging out and chatting.  I refrained from going too fan girly on William, but the truth is I've wanted to put him in something I've written for a while now.  When I was younger he was that face I always remembered in a film, then I committed his name to memory, and after The Devil's Rejects, I was like okay, that's it, I can so see this guy in MY movie.  Get in my movie, dude.  Well, of course, that's easier said than done, but a girl can dream, right?

As it happened, late Friday morning, I ran into them again in the lobby.  William asked me if I'd like a coffee from Starbucks.  I'd thought I heard Michael say it was only two blocks away, so I asked if they'd mind if I walked with them.  They said they were driving.  Oops, I felt intrusive, but they were insistent it was okay for me to come.  We drove around looking for this elusive Starbucks and chatted.  I wanted to ask William a lot of questions, but couldn't get my head around how to ask them.  So I let it go, we finally found the Starbucks, and returned with our coffees.  I met up with them again off and on through the weekend as they worked William's signing table in the dealer's room.

Among the events were screenings of hundreds of movies, from features to shorts in varying levels of horror.  I mainly went to Saturday screenings, popping in and out of the shorts room and back out again.  I took breaks in the dealers' room deciding on items I had my eye on, and got to know other writers and artists.  I also picked up my signatures from Michael Madsen and Linda Blair.  Madsen is the quintessential guy's guy.  So many men want to be him it's not even funny, and he's got too cool for his boots turned up to eleven.  He was there because Patrick Durham had helped arrange for him to come to Fright Night.  I shook Madsen's hand and told him I was a friend of Patrick's.  "What's up with Patrick?" he asked me in that whispery voice of his (as in what's up with Patrick not showing).  I told him I had no idea, but he declared he likes Patrick, "He's a cool cat."  Just something I'd expect Michael Madsen to say.  He also proclaimed to me not to let the rough looks fool me, he's a big teddy bear.  I had what I call the "What the hell am I doing here?" look on my face.  But yeah, he really is a big teddy bear, and smart and well. . . yeah, he's all that.

Thanks to benmt  for the heads up on this super kitteh who saved his neighbor's life.

Cat Saves Man from Burning Home

And you know the rest of that phrase.  There's more work to go on the house and I need to paint the two back bedrooms, especially the front room because new carpet will be going in after it's painted so I need to get that out of the way.  Spent the last couple days doing some fun projects with my mom and a friend.  We decorated paving stones with stained glass and marbles by putting them down with tile glue.  Today we grouted to fill in the spaces, and I have a couple more of those to grout and then I can use them in my "new" yard when I get moved in.  Pretty sparklies.  They'll liven up any flower bed and provide nice little visual surprises for anyone touring the yard.

I'm stuck near the end of chapter seven because here comes a big car chase, and I'm mulling over how to keep it interesting, but so as not to stay stuck, I'm skipping ahead to chapter eight because at least that one is planned out and it's the big explanation sequence, where a member of the supporting cast finds out why her world has suddenly been turned upside down in one single afternoon.  Still, a little hard to focus while thinking about moving and preparing for Fright Night Film fest.  I've been asked to take part in a writers' panel which has me a little nervous, but I also have the feeling that once I'm back among some friends and familiar faces, I'll get comfortable again.

Anyhoos, on my little lunch break today, I was at the table and kept hearing Pumpkin acting up.  I finally found him at the sliding glass door in the front living room.  A lizard had gotten itself caught between the slidding glass and the screen.  It was safely out of reach of the boys, but it seemed to enjoy teasing them.  I did open the screen to be sure the little guy could get out, and last I saw him he was on the other side of the porch and the excitement had died down. 
( See back here for the kitteh drama club )

One more month before I move into my own place.  One more week before I can at least get my hands on it and start painting walls and taking boxes in and odd pieces of furniture, but September 1 is the official day.  I'm excited and impatient, and ready to get my fresh new workspace set up.  I've been speaking to my agent, and she is LOVING my teen novel, was even more thrilled when I told her over the weekend that it will also be a series, at least three books.  I'm still working on it here at my folks' house, but I am excited to think how much faster I'll churn it out when I've got my office set up.  I will have a roommate, and she will also have her own work space.  The house is perfect for two people to split, two main bedrooms, two attic bedrooms.  The attic rooms will be our offices, so if one wants to watch television downstairs, the other has the quiet and space she needs to work.  Kind of funny how I'm going from an office in the basement (read, dungeon) to an attic room.  I've been known to make extreme shifts like that.  Hey, if the environment isn't working, find another.

Between now and then I'll be going up to the Fright Night Film Fest to hang with friends and hopefully make new ones.  I'm also still plugging away at my scifi screenplay for Ken Mader.  It's slow, as I'm juggling the two projects, and I need to put aside a series of days to devote entirely to only the script.  Probably will do that this week, actually, as I'll be getting a little chunk of days to myself and that will be a good time to dig into it and shift gears.  Once I'm caught up, I have no concerns about shifting gears back to the novel.

Yeah, I know it's nothing new, but I wanted to have it handy.   It makes me smile and it's a good giggle for my fellow cat lovers.

Woke up around three in the morning from a bizarre dream, and I was glad it was a dream because damn it was exhausting.  All I remember now is me making some bizarre attempt to sleep in a lawn chair out on the front porch (which is a second level porch pretty high above our big sloping yard, and then discovering the yard full of vicious prairie dogs and a Viking era reinactment group.  It was dark in the dream but when you shined a light on the ground below, the prairie dogs scattered and if you shined it among the trees, you caught people in period garb grumbling and looking irritated.  There are no prairie dogs in North Carolina, except maybe those in zoos.  And I have no idea where a Viking reinactment group came from or why they thought it was cool to camp out on our lawn.  That was what my mind rationalized them as, but it was still dark.  I knew what they were even though I couldn't see them very well.  The stressful part was trying to evict both prairie dogs (who had torn up the yard) and Vikings (who were retaliating with vulgarity).  Yeah, I know. . . go figure.

So, awakened from this dream, a little stressed and asking myself what the hell was THAT, I was still groggy enough to figure I'd go back to sleep.  Nope, didn't happen.  I laid there thinking, like my brain had to make sense of prairie dogs and Vikings, and then finally I managed to flip the switch and start thinking about Apocryphal.  I'm getting over a hump in chapter 5 and moving to a greater hump with chapter 6 where I introduce a new character.  I've been pondering this character, how to introduce her and what events will take place in the story and the general choreography of them.  A lot of the chapter is action and survival.  Those are some of the harder chapters to write so they can take some time.  As I laid in bed pondering this, the character began to flesh out in my head and scenes as from a movie began to play out.  She encounters a terrifying obstacle here.  She runs into the bad guy there.  She grabs something important that she needs to run with here. . . wait, no I'm not going to spoil anything.  Point is, finally I got a grasp on the chapter, and when my internal movie reels finally did put me back to sleep, the good news is I remembered all of it when I woke up again.

I'm going to be taking a lot of notes today.

So, um. . . it's been a long time since I put up one of these.  Yes, I'm still alive and kicking. 

I've talked about the changes I've been going through over the last few months in previous posts, covering everything from learning to trust and be patient with myself, and also learning to be single again.  My divorce was not a huge family controversy, and I don't think it surprised anyone, really.  The biggest changes have been the move back to my home town and settling in at my folks house.  I still intend to rent my grandmother's house from my mom sometime after the current tenants move out, but that is a while now, and I've still got some financial recovery to do.  Depression was a given.  I mean, after all, it was the failure of a marriage which my ex and I tried very hard to keep together, to the point we were driving each other batty.  He has felt it, too, on his end, and I think for both of us it has eased off.  It is true that time heals, if you let it.  We are still in touch, and still friends.  I get out more, I exercise, I get some sun, and I am certainly eating better. 

( Read more... )

I posted these a while back on Facebook and then took it down when they toyed with changing their policy, but I'm putting them back up here.  I'm still deciding what direction I want to go with them.  I may put some of them up for sale once I determine costs on supplies and time, but I've also been asked to teach a class on putting them together, and in the meantime, I've got some ideas I want to play with for a shadow box, and I'm kind of itching to do that.  I should have photographed them with coins next to them, but for basic comparison, I can say that the largest gears in them are about the size of a quarter.  When I get a chance I'll drop in an actual pic of that.

( Check 'em out back here. . . )

I don't comment much on Supernatural here, even though I love the show and have been with it from the beginning.  I can't say I'm always happy with what happens on the show, but usually I sort it down to story tension and move on.

( But tonight's episode. . . )

It seems a major irony that once I get something new going, inevitably that's when I get approached with proposals for other projects.  Maybe it's that I'm putting out vibes that I'm in brainstorming-working-uber-creative mode and they come back to me three fold.  One door is closing in my life and a whole lot more are opening.

( Read more... )

When I write, I have a thing for immersing myself by watching movies in the genre I'm writing, wearing a piece of jewelry that reminds me of my work, whatever.  When I wrote Automaton, I felt inclined to design some jewelry that had a rather steampunk feel to it.  Now it's a mood to don my silver acorn or one of my unicorns (yes, I'm a big kid, I still wear the occasional piece of unicorn jewelry).  I'm writing an urban fantasy, which means it's time to put LOTR (the special edition) on and play it in the background while imagining what it would be like to lift the characters out of Middle Earth and dump them in modern Vienna, Los Angeles, London, wherever.  That sure sets some wheels turning for some inside jokes.  Can you imagine Legolas fighting orcs in the Vienna metro?  One day that will make sense to more than a couple of you on my friends list.  I don't mind mentioning it because, watered down, it doesn't sound that much different from an event set in the already existing Shadowrun universe, but when finished and in context, my story will have its own unique touch on it.

My other immersion technique is to piddle around with Photoshop and do mock up covers.  Here's an early one I did a few months ago when the idea began to bud in my brain.  He won't make the final cut on the actual book cover, but he makes decent enough desktop wallpaper.

( See my pretty elf back here. . . )

I've made some big decisions this week regarding a teen urban fantasy novel I'm working on.  I spent most of yesterday doing some complex reworks on several chapters as well as leaving page breaks for chapters I want to insert that will introduce a new major character whom I'm still developing.

While it can be frustrating sorting out the new material, it can also be interesting and exciting what new doors it opens.  Like the Chinese box, you open one layer, and new layers are revealed.  Sort out those layers, and there are more beneath.

I have an entire chapter written following the POV of a character who rushes to the scene of a rescue, but then I realized this is the only chapter where that character will be featured to that degree.  For the most part the book will focus on two specific POVs, and this is not one of them, thus I'm left wondering if I should keep it or toss it and find a way around the situation.

For various reasons, the title came up as an issue as well, but that's minor right now.  Titles are mutable until you find just the right one.  I need to think on the universe in which the story is set and how the title defines that because I'd also like to make a series out of this one.

It also amazed me how fast I can spout out words.  Almost 14,000 so far and that's just getting started.  This leads to more evaluating on how fast I'm unfolding the plot.  But, layer after layer, it's coming together.  I open one box, and there's another inside, only a matter of time before I get to the goodies in the middle.

Had a good day practicing archery in the back yard with my dad the other day.  My dad is a very talented carpenter who also builds long bows.  Some time ago, he picked up a bow I had bought from a craftsman at a local flee market and started target shooting with it, and then next thing, he was building his own, and they aren't just simple long bows like mine was.  He layers them with different woods, such as maple and red padauk, and the results are both artistic and functional.  Having been through both back surgery and cancer surgery, and then a round of chemo in the last two years, my dad has become thinner and was losing strength pulling the 35 to 45 pound bows he was used to before.  Recently he designed the most beautiful bow with a 30 pound pull, that turned out to be one powerful, sweet-shooting little bow.  It has the aforementioned red padauk, which is vibrant and is in no way dyed wood.  It really is that red.  For a while his archery club shot in a rental space in an old warehouse in the middle of town, but the paper mill recently purchased it out from under them, so that led to setting up a temp range in our back yard, and with the spring weather, that's been perfect.  The yard line is set at 20 yards like it was at the indoor range.  I was really proud of myself trying out that new bow the other day.  My daddy was proud of my shots, too, and that meant the world to me.

( See results back here. . . )

Some time ago I started a screenplay inspired by the route I followed when I took a trip from Oxford up to Loch Lomond and stayed in the town of Luss.  It was in '95 and I chose to take that weekend to have some time to myself away from my classmates.  So I booked a ticket from Heathrow to Glasgow and got on a Skyways bus.  I was 22, and it felt strange to be out on my own to that degree.  After a life of being accompanied on vacations, here I was in Scotland alone. 

( More back here. . . )

My first novel was a space opera, which was written back in 1996-97.  Although I got fantastic feedback from authors William Forstchen and William Greenleaf, I had a heck of a time finding an agent.  Both tried to help me out there, but were stumped when their references turned me down.  Frustrated, I ended up self publishing with xLibris in 2001, and that is where The Infinity Grid can still be found.  It may have been jumping the gun a little bit, but I don't regret it and I learned a lot in the process.  Although I have an agent now for other projects, I haven't yet made the decision to pull Infinity Grid from xLibris, give it a fresh pass, and shop it anew.  Perhaps some day I will.  As I wrote it, I drew, more for my personal pleasure than anything, and because I was discovering a cartoony style that I liked.  So here are a few oldies but goodies.  More to come as I pull out my stash and get them scanned.

( This way for art. . . )