Just as the fictional Felix Unger asserted his inability to do impossible cooking tasks, so too would Neil Simon probably protest any prowess at writing, but let’s be honest. If writing were cooking, Neil Simon was the magic chef of scriptwriting. (The idea of Neil Simon being a figment of his fictional creation’s imagination seems like the fun neurotic thought to occupy one of Neil Simon’s characters.) And if you recall my piece on Sam…
I will leave it to you to determine whether I am one of the sharks or am merely swimming with sharks, but I will be at a “Shark Tank for Filmmakers” event this Saturday out in the wilds of Northern Virginia, where the passenger jets roam. The event is organized by fellow filmmaker Ron Newcomb, who has been tirelessly working on building the narrative film community in the DC region pretty much since I’ve known…
Most of the creatives I know instinctively want an audience. When they think about why, the immediate answers of “someone who likes my work” or “someone who buys my stuff” are natural. I mean, what’s not to like about emotional and financial validation? Bring forth the audience! But building an audience is hard. In fact, it’s something of a slog — a seemingly Sisyphean slog (which I’m experiencing first-hand as I try and build an audience for…
If you’re a regular listener of Scriptnotes, you’ll know that the hosts (especially Craig Mazin) have little time for screenwriting “gurus.” So you probably won’t be surprised by the this article by Stephen Galloway that was in The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week all about the high cost and non-return of many a “pitch fest” held in New York and L.A.
Harlan Ellison, a writer with a more than active imagination and an activist for writers, died peacefully in his sleep yesterday. he was 84. You can see write-ups in Variety and the Los Angeles Times. A brief, but excellent remembrance is from Mark Evanier, who knew him for almost 50 years. I think he put it best when he said: Harlan was a writer who made other writers proud to be writers. He goes on to……
In case the various posts on Star Trek or my mentions of writing a space opera radio show hadn’t clued you in already, my geek quotient is reasonably high. So yes, not only am I aware of Dungeons & Dragons, I have played Dungeons & Dragons and, in fact, have served as a Dungeon Master. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not a bad thing for writers or storytellers in general (see also these pieces on…
We officially launched Jabberwocky Audio Theater on the broadcast airwaves yesterday. It was exciting. It took a lot of work to get to this point — and really, the main point of the work was to share these stories with people. But, as with all creative endeavors –heck, with any endeavors that depend on public reaction to thrive– the enduring question is: will enough people be interested… enough? And that multi-faceted question is important: because we…
My recent project, Jabberwocky Audio Theater, is not a recent development. I’ve been working on it in one form or another since 2007. When you work on something that long that means there’s definitely breaks when you’re not working on it… and within those breaks and at those moments of starting or stopping, your doubts about continuing happily pay a visit. In one of the blogs I perpetually read, Mark Evanier has a response to…
Hey, it’s been awhile since I’ve done a “Motivation Monday,” so it seemed like Big Bill’s birthday was as good a day as any to get back to it. I’d caught Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED talk on writing and motivation (the video is 20 minutes, and this link also has a transcript), so when I saw an Amazon article ad for her “10 Tips for Writers,” (as compiled by Cynthia Shannon), I figured it was…
This past week, a friend posted a video of a friendly local comic shop/bookstore. Used books are stuffed into every conceivable bit of shelf space, surrounding long boxes of comic book back issues, with memorabilia and figurines placed in strategic –and sometimes haphazard– locations. It’s almost archetypical for what you’d imagine a used bookstore/comic shop to be. A week earlier, I stepped into that same comic shop for, if not the very last time, my…