Monday, April 22, 2013

Falling into place


After a week of complications with Createspace, who prints the screenwriting book over some margins. It seemed that our margins weren't correct even though the first proof of the book looked perfectly fine.  After some phone calls and arguments they finally approved my book and are sending a second proof to check out before it goes on Amazon.

I'm also finishing a pitch TV series called Likely Scenario, which is about a movie writer who joins a CIA-like agency to find bad guys of any kind. And before you think it's a silly idea the US govt actually did solicit help from writers after 9/11. 

What they wanted is for writers to create worst-case scenarios, in other words, what's the worst thing terrorists could possibly come up with. So who are the best people to come up with wacky ideas?  

Screenwriters, of course. And novel writers also.

I hope to finish my pilot this week and hand it over to a company who will then maybe take it to a network. Lots of maybe's here. It all depends if they like it and nobody ever knows what "they" like.

And once that is over I will then start pushing my book both thru Amazon and Barnes & Nobel as well as a few bookstores in Canada and several film-related bookstores in the Los Angeles area who have expressed interest.

And a week from now I should be able to begin to write a new screenplay, the first one in a year and I'm sure anxious to start. It's about "a female U.S. President" and that's about as far as I go as ideas tend to be spread around and the idea I have has never really been done before.

Although I'm probably wrong as I've always told my students and my friends that whenever I get a great idea for a movie I automatically assume five other writers have that same idea. There are 2 who are thinking about writing it, one who has started, one who has finished and one coming out next week.

So as you see, ideas aren't that hard to find, rather making the idea a little better. 

Also had a surprise Sunday when we were riding the bikepath at Venice Beach and I was looking ahead and suddenly saw a man with white hair standing there looking at us. It was our friend Chris Sullivan, who has his own blog and you can find it here. He flew in from London and surprised us totally. So this means chili at Chili John's in Burbank, the best chili I've ever had, and run by a great family.

Anyways, back to work.