Unsealed up on Zoetrope

Just a short post this time...

I've put the screenplay for Unsealed up on Zoetrope - American Zoetrope's "virtual studio" site. It's in the short script section.

If you want to check it out, either sign up for an account there, or feel free to email me.

A new screenplay... and a new title...

Little Miss Litty is getting a rename... it's now called "The Mara". It's a little punchier, and a says "horror movie" a lot more than the original title. Hopefully it'll sell better.

Speaking of selling.. I've not heard anything back from any production companies yet. I faxed Twisted Pictures (the guys who did the Saw movies) a couple of days ago. I also emailed Vincenzo Natali's agent over at Endeavor LA - and got no response.

Goddamn, this industry is crazy. Back when I was a journo, it was pretty freakin' easy. Phone an editor. Pitch the story. Go off and write it, send it in. Easy. Of course, when I first got started there was an extra step - write a short 300 word synopsis... but that went away after the first couple. (Oddly, the need to write synopses came after writing for Your Sinclair for a year... weird).

If you're a script reader for a production company and you come across this page, please feel free to email me.

Meanwhile...

It's time to crack out my old notebook and start working on a new one so that I can get some distance before doing rewrites on The Mara. This next one I already know the story for from soup to nuts, and I have a synopsis written up and ready to go. (This was back during my sit at Bandoleone with a glass of wine and write period, and the story itself is one that I put together back in 2001). It's called Dot Comedy right now, but really it's a kind of heist movie... naturally with quirky twists on the basic formula.

Step one, take the ten pages of notes, put them in OneNote where I can edit them more easily, and work out the structure scene by scene. Then, it's time to get down to the real writing :)

I'm like butter, baby... I'm on a roll.

Of course, the slightly sad part of this is that I'm now cannibalizing my stash of stories that I was hoping to direct myself. This one is budgeted at a cool $270,000 if I was filming it myself. If it was done full on Hollywood Style (which it really should be), it'd probably come in at a respectable $4 to $10MM.

The log line for this one?

Dot Comedy

Two collegues get laid off from their high paying jobs. In an effort to continue their lifestyle, they decide to borrow money from a loan shark, reprint it using the office printer, and take it Vegas to launder it with the help of an alcoholic gambling addict. But the loan shark wants his money back and he's coming to get it - with interest.

(I hate log lines... take a story, and squeeze all the juice out of it... it just doesn't get across the full fun of the story. Ah well).

This Is Vegas: Our Illustrious Leader

http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/previews/20365/First_Look_This_Is_Vegas.html

G4 TV covers This Is Vegas from GDC. Look, it's Alan Patmore, Surreal Head Honcho.

:D

Viruses as a cause for Cancer - and other diseases (part 3)

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This article is not about the clinical side of this theory of mine - it's about the path that led me to believe in it.

For a long time now, I've been utterly convinced that most kinds of cancer (except those caused by really faulty genetics which cause childhood mortality) would eventually be discovered to be caused by either a bacterium, a fungus, or a virus.

This is a pretty bold statement, but it's one that I can trace back a long way. It's also proving fruitful - especially with the recent discovery that certain strains of HPV (human papilloma virus) can cause cervical cancer and oral cancers.

The Discovery of H. Pylori and its role in Ulcers

Back in 1982, a link was discovered between Heliobacter Pylori and ulcers - namely, that most ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection of the stomach lining. This theory took 10 years of research to confirm, and is now widely tested for - and treatable with a combination of proton pump inhibitors (to allow the stomach lining to heal) and antibiotics.

I first heard of this in 1994 when a friend of mine who had suffered from ulcers for some time finally went and got treated. (I can't remember if I came across a reference to the treatment in New Scientist and I told her, or if she already knew of it and told me). Either way, a light went off in my head. Some things - some things previously considered untreatable, or a part of the human condition, are caused by things that we just hadn't had the tools to look for, or that we just plain didn't put two and two together for.

Cholangio Carcinoma - and my mom

My mother died in September 1996 of Cholangio carcinoma - a particularly nasty kind of gallbladder cancer which wrapped itself around the hepatic portal artery, making it (at the time) inoperable. It was a drawn out affair; from original diagnosis as stomach pains, to a stay in hospital due to hemorrhaging, to her final death at home while being treated with radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and on a nearly constant morphine drip for the pain.

At the time, I spent a long time searching for all of the information I could, trying to find a cure. It wasn't easy - the internet was in larval form back then, pretty much the domain of university students and academia.

I always wanted to know why this happened. I finally think I've figured it out - but unfortunately too late for her. Sorry mom.

Crohn's Disease and my dad

Around the time that my mom died of cancer, my Dad came down with Crohn's disease. He had a section of his bowel removed, and he's mostly fine today. I'm hazy on the timeline, but I'm pretty sure that he was suffering from it during my mom's illness, and put off seeing a doctor about it until after she died and he had some room to start thinking about himself again, instead of the woman he loved more than anything (I really should share the story of how they met some time).

Is this just another case of broken heart syndrome, where the surviving spouse - through extreme stress - ends up contracting some kind of illness? I don't think so. I believe the two are intimately connected.

Warts and P52

I was reading a paper in 2001 on Human Papilloma Virus and P52. HPV causes warts in some forms, cancer in others, and in some forms, it's just a dormant thing that causes a lesion - or nothing at all. By the time you're in your 50s, you will have some form of exposure to HPV.

Apparently HPV does its magic by interfering with the expression of gene P52, a factor in cell death (apoptosis). By doing so, it's able to cause the cells to grow rapidly without being killed by the immune system - or themselves.

This got me thinking. If a virus can cause warts, and cause skin cells to grow out of control within a limited area... what's to stop it from causing other problems elsewhere? Such as cancer.

It would only be much later - in 2005 - that HPV would be making the news because of vaccines designed specifically to target it. Unfortunately, although cervical cancer had already been identified as a potentially sexually-transmitted disease, the discovery of a link between it and HPV was made in the 1970s. Why unfortunate? Because it took 35 years for a potential cure to be discovered, and for the role of the virus in the disease to become common knowledge. For some reason, that information remained locked up in medical research for way too long.

When news of the vaccine came out, it was something that I took as a personal vindication - my theory could be true!

Alzheimer's and Herpes

The connection between Alzheimer's and Herpes made the news in 2006, but I didn't catch wind of it until December 2007, at which point I was doing research on the subject because I'd heard that one of my favorite authors (Terry Pratchett) had recently been diagnosed with an early-onset form of the disease. Research in January points to a new treatment for Alzheimer's in the form of an anti-inflammatory drug known as Etanercept or Enbrel. I believe I've identified a missing link between the virus and the treatment, which you can find in my post.

Why was I researching this in December 2007? The father of someone I know well is currently dying of Glioblastoma Multiforme - a particularly nasty kind of brain cancer. I'd already seen a connection here between the alphaherpesvirinae (HSV1, HSV2, Varicella Zoster Virus) and this particular disease. I now feel that this connection is pretty solid, based on the symptoms of his wife (Multiple Sclerosis), and the fact that he had a virulent outbreak of shingles during the first round of chemotherapy. Coincidental? I hope not. I believe that all three of these conditions can be explained as varying immunity and genetic predisposition in the face of a particularly nasty Varicella Zoster Virus infection.

Further research has lead to a number of other similar connections. I'm posting this information in the hope that it spreads and people start using it.

What Changes Can We Make Today?

I would like to see, at a bare minimum, doctors start to take the history of patients as well as their spouses and children, including anyone they have been living with for a long time who has any kind of disease or condition. I'll explain this further in a later post. Let's just put it like this for now - this is essential data that we're missing, especially if it's possible that multiple conditions are caused by the same basic cause. In the case of my parents, I believe that a variant of Cytomegalovirus was the cause for both my mother's cancer, and my father's crohn's disease. This is something that could have been picked up on if medical records included this information.

My Cancer/Late Stage Of Life Disease Theory

Here's how the theory l have put together over the years lies right now:

1. There is no such thing as a "human condition" disease

Okay, so basic aging aside (that is, architectural problems that only show up in old age because the system itself is clogged), I don't believe that any disease just happens by itself. Particularly cancer. Why?

2. With the sheer number of cells in the human body, late-stage diseases such as cancer should always occur in childhood

Your body contains billions upon billions of cells, all replicating, all exposed to free radicals. Except during breastfeeding, your food supply doesn't change much through adulthood. Antioxidants, vitamins, etc, which protect cells should always affect you the same way - you shouldn't need more protection as you get older. It's a limited supply, that needs to be replenished regularly.

If you're going to see problems with replication, or other random malfunctions, then they should be as likely when you're young as when you get older. If you're going to get them when you're older, you should get them at the end of puberty if there's any magic involved in still being a child.

3. Chronic conditions build up over time, except in the case of active infection

Unless you are actively infected by something, a chronic condition will be caused by a subclinical condition occurring for a very long time. At some point, there's a tipping point, and your body is no longer able to handle the subclinical condition, or the condition is exacerbated, and it becomes full blown and noticeable as something we can point to as a disease.

4. Cancer is caused by a variety of agents, such as bacteria, funguses or viruses, meddling with the body's own machinery

Wart viruses are the best example of this. Alzheimer's is rapidly becoming a solidly defined disease that is caused - in part - by HSV1 infection of the brain.

5. Subclinical viral infection - particularly by viruses which can go "latent" or "dormant" - causes late stage diseases

We only see the active part of the infection - not the subclinical, latent phase. A latent infection can still cause symptoms and problems - look at the literature on genital herpes, where viral particles are still shed even though the virus may not be in its "active" phase.

I think that this is a reasonably solid theory, and gives us something to work with. Unless you're unlucky enough to have a genetic malfunction, we should look at other causative agents as well in most diseases - not just at the body itself.

In the next article, I'll cover the connection between Glioblastoma Multiforme, and Multiple Sclerosis, as well as other diseases which appear to be caused by Varicella Zoster Virus.

The Herpes Virus - what is it? (part 2)

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This is a picture of a herpes virus. It's a virus that most people come into contact with at one stage or other during their lives - usually when they're children. Different forms of this virus cause:

Virus Subtype	Classification	Disease
Herpes Simplex Type 1 (HSV1)	HHV1	Coldsores
Herpes Simplex Type 2 (HSV2)	HHV2	Genital Herpes
Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV)	HHV3	Chickenpox, shingles
Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)	HHV4	Mono (infectious mononucleosis), Burkitt's Lyphoma, CNS symptoms in AIDS patients, post-transplant lymphoproliferative syndrome (PTLD), nasopharyngeal carcinoma
Cytomegalovirus (CMV)	HHV5	Mono-like symptoms (infectious mononucleosis-like syndrome), retinitis, cytomegalovirus colitis, cytomegalovirus hepatitis
Roseolavirus	HHV6, 7	"Rose rash" (roseola infantum), "sixth disease", "three day fever", "baby measles"
Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV)	HHV8	Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoman, some types of Castleman's disease

Table taken from Wikipedia.

There may be other forms of this virus associated with other diseases in humans; there are over 100 known herpes viruses - there may well be many more.

The viruses are classified into three groups based on the types of tissue they exhibit affinity for in the body.

Viruses	Tissue type	Classification
HSV1, HSV2, VZV	Nervous system tissue	Alphaherpesvirinae
CMV, Roseolavirus	Lymph tissue and lymphatic system	Betaherpesvirinae
EBV, KSHV	T or B lymphocytes; also lymphotropic	Gammaherpesvirinae

As many as 90% of the population carry one or all of these viruses in their systems. After infection, the virus hides in a latent form, where it can stay dormant for years - possibly forever - until the conditions are ripe for it to come out and replicate again.

In the alpha viruses, it hides inside the cytosome of the nervous tissue awaiting reactivation, often caused by stress or inflammation. I mentioned this previously in an earlier post on Alzheimers, Herpes and Etanercept; the key trigger for alpha virus reactivation appears to be the presence of TNEF-alpha in large quantities, telling the virus that it's safe to come out because the immune system is currently busy.

In the beta viruses, they hide inside the nucleii of the lympahtic cells themselves, causing what are known as "Owl's Eye" inclusion bodies - so called from their appearance:

The gamma viruses behave similarly to the beta viruses, but target specific lymphocytes.

When the virus replicates, it often destroys the host cell in the process, or severely distorts it.

The Herpes Virus - A cause for more diseases than we give it credit for?

Most of the literature on the web tends to only consider the problems with chronic and acute infections by herpes viruses. These typically form in children (upon first exposure), in the form of sexually transmitted disease (HSV2), or in immunocompromised patients (for example, people with AIDS, organ transplant patients, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy).

They don't tend to consider the long-term effects of a sub-clinical infection; after all, if there are no symptoms, then the body is looking after itself - it's why we have an immune system.

However, I believe that it is important to consider sub-clinical infection and asymptomatic infection as potential causes or cofactors in a wide number of diseases - ranging from heart disease to most cancers.

This is becoming more possible now, partly because of the creation of gene-chip technology - especially viral chip assays, which allow any tissue sample to be tested for the presence of a virus quickly and efficiently. This is something that was not easily possible before, and has lead to the discovery of the presence of herpesviridae in many cancers. However, the researchers are not yet willing to draw a conclusive line between these results and the cause of the diseases themselves. In the case of Alzheimer's disease, however, we can definitively say at this point that there is a direct connection. And much of the research is showing other connections too.

The next article in this series will cover the path that led me to this conclusion. After that, I'll start tackling each disease, with references to the research. And finally, some proposed treatments that can if not cure the diseases, at least slow them down as long as doctors are willing to prescribe common medications off-label.

CMV Owl's Eye Inclusion picture source: Dan Wiedbrauk, Ph.D., Warde Medical Laboratory, Ann Arbor, MI. Used for educational purposes.
Herpes Virus picture source: taken from http://www.health-news-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/11-2007/suppressing-infectiousness-of-hiv.html; original source unknown

Games and Storytelling: Tropes

This article was originally written a couple of months ago for the Surreal Game Design blog, which is currently deceased. I'm publishing it here instead.

I know what you're thinking. Let me guess. I can see it on the tip of your tongue. What the hell is a trope? Is this British lunatic making up words again?

A trope is a kind of story-telling shorthand. Camera cuts are tropes. Camera dissolves are tropes. The good guy in a Western riding off into the sunset at the end of the movie is a trope. The nerdy guy getting the girl by the end of the teen movie? That's a trope too.

They're like memes, but instead of being Just infectious ideas, they're specifically memes that relate to how a story is told. The only other meme with a given name I've ever come across is the ear worm.

The really cool thing about tropes (other than the information they convey) is that unlike most industry short-hand, they actually have cool names. I mean, where else are you going to come across a camera move called "The Khan"? (Although it should really be spelled The Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!)^[1]

Of course, video games have their own particular brands of tropes specific to them. After all, once you have a new story-telling medium, it suddenly accrues tropes like barnacles. The one everyone has heard of is "Crate Expectations", and it's now a sport to rank games on the amount of time you have to play until you hit the first crate in the game.

Why do we like tropes?

Well, for a start, once they become embedded in the media, you don't have to think about them any more. You don't think about hitting the Start button to pause your game... and nowadays, all kinds of things can be expected to live in the start menu - like your current list of objectives. That's a trope too.

Not only are they a useful user interface tool, but they push the medium along. Look at an old movie from the 60s. (Sorry, film students... I'm going to pick on Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey now as specific examples). They're shit. Well, okay, maybe that's a bit strong. They're not shit. They exemplify the inherent beauty in the medium, and they were stellar works for their time... but the medium has moved on. They're now boring as all hell, and no matter how emphatically anyone whispers "Rosebud"^[2] into a boom mike, and no matter how many candles of lighting you throw at it to make it have the largest depth of field ever imaginable (even if the actors get all squinty), I'm still going to only get 15 minutes into the movie at the end of the day before I get bored and turn it off. As for 2001, let's face it, you're only going to watch it for the end these days, and there's only so many times you can watch that without getting so completely mindblowingly high that you start trying to sync it up to Dark Side Of The Moon.

Why?

The medium has moved on. We learned the short-hand. And once you know the short-hand, you don't need the long version any more. Everything these days is fast paced Jerry Bruckheimer cuts^[3] and always starts in media res. In fact, some media relies on tropes for its effectiveness. Spoof films like Airplane, for example. Horror movies pretty much require them - you just don't get that "Don't go in there!" feeling unless you've seen how it goes down when they walk through that door a million times before.

Where things get interesting is when a new trope hits and spreads like wildfire. The rage flashes in The Suffering were a horror videogame trope that hadn't appeared before in the medium (although they'd been used in other places in film before). Possibly the most well known new camera trope in a long time has to be the Bullet Time sequences in The Matrix movies (which then quickly jumped the divide and started showing up in video games as well - heck, Stranglehold even called it Tequila Time). Michael Gondry had previously tried to get the ball rolling with a number of music videos along the same lines, and then The Gap commercials writ it in stone, but it took The Matrix for it to become a trope. And now it shows up everywhere - even in animation where frankly, it's not even that flashy because... well.. it's animation, and you can do anything you like in animation, just by drawing whatever you want to see.

So what's the brand new trope I care about right now?

That'd be something I just saw in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I'll talk about it in my next (hopefully much shorter) post.

(Crate photo stolen from tvtropes.org)

^[1] Which brings me right back to the earworms... but I digress.
^[2] Spoiler Warning: It's the sled. The sled is called Rosebud.
^[3] Jerry Bruckheimer cuts are cuts which last no longer than 5 seconds. Watch any Bruckheimer movie, and you'll see that none of his cuts last longer than this. It's what makes them chock-full of actiony stuff.

The Photo Hunt Continues... The Mystery of the Screaming Woman

Still trying to track down who the model was and who photographed it, but ...

... I did find a bigger copy :)

 

I think this photo is awesome. Wish I could figure out who did it though. Still, at least it's bigger now.

Little Miss Litty - The Pitch

The elevator pitch:

Little Miss Litty is the story of a schoolteacher who discovers that one of her children is being haunted by a demon. In an effort to save her, she ends up burning down a classroom full of children - and then, the demon latches onto her.

 So what now?

I'm working on wrapping up the rewrites on the screenplay. I've identified about 10 extra pages I need to add to the script... possibly 15. (I know... it's weird, but I have a tendency of writing short... So it's too tight, and needs a bit of padding - and missing pieces added back in... I try to err on the side of assuming that my audience can read my mind... I just took it a wee bit too far this time.).

I'm officially looking for representation at this point. I need an agent who can push this to the right people.

This puppy is officially for sale :D This is page 2, by the way...

What else?

Well, if I have my druthers, I'd get it in the hands of Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Cypher), or James Wan (Saw, Death Sentence). Somehow I can see David Hewlett playing Miles, and he's basically part of the package with Natali, so that's cool :)

Either way, time to get this puppy wrapped up, and into the hands of people who can do something with it.

If you'd like to be part of my read-through crew, or if you are an agent, or know a good one, please contact me at simon at popcorn films dot com.

Champagne Time!

The first draft of Little Miss Litty is now complete!

This calls for a drink ;-) Why don't you join me?

That's probably all I need to say. Two more drafts, and I should be done.

Current version comes in at 90 pages. I expect the final one to hit about 93/95. (There's a few bits and pieces that I put in really rough that need expanding once I get more eyes on it).

Yay!

Photo credit: Strawberry & Champagne, by Velo Steve, used under Creative Commons license.

Cooking Mama: The Spitting Pea Soup Edition

I love Cooking Mama. It combines two of my favorite genres – Iron Chef and The Exorcist.

Don’t worry… Mama will fix it… Mama fixes everything…

Little Miss Litty...

... just hit the 80 pages point. I'm in the home stretch! (although I need to take another roll through my treatment and convert the end into something I can screenplayify).

And then, the glorious task that is 1st draft is done. It will then be time to get my readers' feedback, and print it out, and start getting medieval on its ass.

I have a 3 date maximum. Some people have a 3 date minimum, but to them I say "live a little!". Some writers will rewrite and polish until you can see your face in it, hitting hundreds of drafts. To them, I say "Push your children out of the nest!". Hah!

Good times :D

THIS IS VEGAS!

We just announced the game we've been working on for what seems like... well... almost 4,000 years now :)

Welcome to Vegas - or our deliciously twisted parody version of it at least - in the new game coming soon from Midway and Surreal Software - THIS IS VEGAS.

Trailer here... Articles here...

We'll be up on IGN all week... check it OUT!

. . . . . . . . . .

German coverage is up online too... scanned from Play3 magazine

Projection (... or what do you do if you can't sleep 'cos all you dream of is Tetris)

How can you tell when you have an absolutely fantastic brand new game mechanic which is going to take the world by storm?

Surprisingly, it's really easy. If it's fundamentally that different, enjoyable, and - dare I say it? - addictive, you're going to dream about it.

(And yes, I know, addictive is a bit of a dirty word when it comes to games... it has bad connotations... but heck, if you're going to play a game a lot and keep coming back for more, it'd better damn well be at least somewhat addictive. If you don't prefer the entirely way too honest approach, please pretend that I said fun instead).

Seriously. I've known people who after playing Tetris nearly nonstop for a week started dreaming about it. All they saw in their minds eyes as they got the necessary RDA of beauty sleep was falling colored blocks. Most of them asked for their money back, claiming that they'd had better dreams after watching horror movies.

It's not limited to dreams though. In my own personal experience, I've played Crackdown and found myself staring off the deck at work thinking "Yeah, I could jump that!". Of course, a saner head prevailed, and also, of course, I wouldn't have been able to. I'd have been in traction, probably taking all my meals through a straw. But for some reason, the game had attached itself to my brain in such a fundamental way that I had entertained the notion for a tiny moment of time. Okay, for a week or two. Yes, I'll admit it, I was looking at most of the buildings around me as I walked into work figuring out how to scale them. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a powerful game mechanic.

Katamari Damacy? After I played that for the first time, I found myself wandering around idly wondering if I could roll things up. All kinds of things. Usually huge things like cars and buses.

Midnight Club II? Well, let's just say that if I was driving the car I am now back then, I'd probably have enough speeding tickets to roast a nice steak*.

Viva Piñata has never had quite this effect on me. Halo 3? Nope, sorry, it didn't do that. (Mind you, neither did the first two, and Half Life - as much as I love that game... as much as my old producer at Sierra told the AP who gave me a copy in my first month there "not to give the programmers crack when we're trying to ship a product" didn't cause as much as a peep).

Portal though... Portal is a different matter. Portal had that effect. I spent a good while dreaming about how I could create holes in things that led to other holes, allowing me to travel through those holes, in an altogether wholly weird dreaming experience.

So what does this have to do with projection?

OK, imagine that you're holding a screwdriver. Put the screwdriver into a screw head. Feel yourself turn the screw. The weird thing is, as you're slotting the screwdriver home, you can feel the tip of the screwdriver touching the screw as if you had little touch sensitive nerves right on the end of the screwdriver.

This is a wonderful human ability. It allows us to do all kinds of things from driving to using a mouse. (If you're wondering what I mean by that, slam your cursor to the top of the screen right now. Note the word slam; because when it stops there, it feels like it hit something. Of course it didn't - and your mouse kept on moving... but that's what it felt like). If you will, it allows us to push our senses outside of our body, and manipulate our environment with tools as if the tools themselves were part of us. And it's cool.

I've got a theory that new gameplay experiences actually trigger a whole new projection learning experience in the brain. It's like you've never experienced this way of interacting with something before, and you need to digest it. If it's compelling enough, and fun enough, you'll need to process it harder. And if it's something just a little out of the ordinary, you'll end up dreaming about it.

Maybe that's what great gameplay is all about... pushing the boundaries of our experience outside of these fragile little shells and into a whole new vista.

I just wish that it was easier to reverse engineer. The problem with this kind of massively compelling gameplay mechanic experience is that while it'd be awesome for every game to have the power to make you spend your nights dreaming about it, it's really hard to come up with those kinds of mechanics. It's easy to spot them - but hard to create them.

But heck, I really know them when I see them. And apparently, my dreams know them too.

* First take your steak, marinade it, add salt and pepper. Then take a charcoal grill. Use the speeding tickets to light the grill.

This post was originally written for the Surreal Software Game Design Blog.

Little Miss Litty - The Treatment is Complete

I finally finished the treatment for Little Miss Litty, and I think it's good :)

I write these things in stages. I know that for me, the biggest hurdle I hit when I'm writing is that if I know how the story ends, I stop actually writing it down. I tell it to people instead. Nowhere near as useful, or as satisfying as a well crafted story - but unfortunately at that point, my personal need to understand and tell the story has been met.

This time I tried something else; Little Miss Litty is a short story I first worked on about 12 or so years ago. I never completed it, but I came across it recently and it seemed like a great kernel for a longer story.

So I took what I had, and expanded on it, this time in screenplay form.

Once I ran out of that source material, I started "rolling" on the story. I normally hate planning stories too far in advance because once things get going, the characters like to do their own thing. I can push them in one direction or another, but the rest of it is really truly and honestly up to them.

Sounds kind of weird, I know, but the characters do know what's going on better than I do at any point.

So my new process involves writing a chunk of treatment in OneNote - enough to get me going for the next 20 to 40 pages, and then a very brief outline following that of the next 30 or so pages after that, in italic so that I know it's not yet fleshed out.

(I do the same thing for any bits I get stuck on - just put them in rough, in italic, so I know I need to do some research or expand on them later - this stops me from getting stuck, or letting myself succumb to writer's block).

Next, I write this up in Final Draft in screenplay format, striking out bits of the treatment as I go through it.

This method seems to work well. It means I have a guide-rope (so to speak) that I can follow through the story, but without blowing it all for me as I'm discovering it. It's just enough to keep me going without having to make it up on the fly in long-form.

Some writers keep note cards to plan out scenes, and rearrange them once they have a script going. I don't do that - I don't need to. Programming (for better or for worse) has taught me all the tools I need to do that in my head. Once I have the script written, I've got a visual map of elements and blocks that I can rearrange to make sure the structure's right. To be honest, I don't need to do it that often - like with my day-job, I seem to have gotten that down to an intuitive process, so most of the time it comes out right first time.

I also use OneNote to throw elements of story ideas I come up with in there. That way I can mine it later for bits and pieces that I want to use later. The other advantage to this is that once it's written down, I can drop it out of my brain until I want to pick it up again later, rather than spinning on this latest greatest idea for too long and letting it get in the way of the real writing work.

That doesn't, of course, stop me from wasting time on the blog though ;-)

Current screen-play page count: 69. Dude. About 30 more to go, give or take.

More medical writing to come soon, btw. It's such a heavy topic, and things have been rough at work with the crunch, so I needed to switch to something a little easier for the time being... More soon on that topic, I promise.