Zeros 2 Heroes - Posts

Panicman123's "You gotta check this out!" #1

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:40:15 -0500

I, the mighty and foreboding Panicman123, have decided to start a new...thing. As "Ask Panicman123" was a shameless rip-off, this is new. It's called, "Panicman123's You gotta Check this Out!" Each week I'll blog about something that you gotta check out, be it books, comics, music, movies, or anything I want. Best of all, you can send me your suggestions for things I should check out and then I can write about them.

This week: the LA-based Irish rock band Flogging Molly. Look them up and listen. Their brand of punk-Celt is awe-inspiring and is sure to make your blood pump. Sometimes political (Drunken Lullabies) sometimes pirate-themed (Salty Dog), and sometimes folk-ish (Factory Girls), there's something for everyone.

Another great thing about them; they're all in-band. Seeing them live is even better than listening to the record, because every instrument is accounted for. Not to mention the smoking-hot violinist. Molly is one of those bands that you feel in your soul as you listen, and the music consumes you. YOU GOTTA CHECK IT OUT!

Here's a link; this speech leaves me breathless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ix7q8N0I2w

Next week: Send me your suggestions!

-Panicman123

Lego Mod: Blake Undying

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:55:09 -0500

Asclepius wanted to see the LEGO Blake in the beer store scene. I tried this a few nights ago and all I got was beer all over my precious LEGOs so the following was born.

Our story starts finds Blake having his bath... yes he wears shades in the tub... he is THAT cool.

Next Blake discovers he is still alive (creative liberty has been taken substituting toaster for a computer). Still alive!

Blake now out of the tub, in his apartment, tries to kill himself again. (Unknown to many, Blake loves his hair, hence the towel wrap). BTW - that is a knife.

The Infamous "Blake vs the Marker" - a fan favourite! (Which at this scale I do not believe would end well for Blake).

And finally - a cool, calm voice is heard off panel, all that is seen is her fine-tuned, cybernetic arm and what she holds in it - "Un-die this!" apologies for blurriness to the left".

The New Creative Screenwriting

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:28:02 -0500

If you check the new September/October issue of Creative Screenwriting - on newsstands now - you'll find an article by yours truly! Huzzah! As an example of the things I do when I'm not writing Black Jack, or struggling with the promotional aspect.

The story's about how to write for online web serials - which are getting hot these days, but are tricky to create. You think getting a story into 22 comic pages is hard, try getting it into a two to four minute script. But there's a company called Electric Farm Entertainment that seems to have found a model that works.

A lot of projects seem to be doing the webisodes as loss leaders, a way to generate traction and get a development deal in some other medium (sound familiar?) but Electric Farm is making theirs profitable out of the box, strictly as web shows. That's not to say that they can't still do a film or TV deal down the road, but they don't need to.

Their current project is called Gemini Division, and it started streaming a couple weeks ago through NBC Universal's web sites. It stars Rosario Dawson in a kind biotech paranoia conspiracy thriller about artificial humans that have gotten loose and are hiding among us. (Coming up next for them is a zombie comedy starring Jon Heder called Woke Up Dead.) The article is built mainly around Gemini Division, and includes the complete script for the first episode. I'm rather proud of it actually - it's just the sort of thing I'd want to read in that magazine, so maybe you'll like it too.

Field Promotion

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:59:34 -0500

I've always known that it's not enough to cloister yourself off in an ivory tower someplace and let your imagination roam free. Once you've produced something, you have to get out there and show it to people if you want them to read and respond to it.

But it's the cloistering and imagining part that I'm good at...

I do want people to read and respond to my work though. Ever since I was a boy growing up very much alone in the wilds of rural Virginia, I've been obsessed with communication. This was pre-Internet, mind you. When I would come across magazine articles describing things like print-based "many to many" amateur publications or primitive telephone-based chatrooms, I'd be fascinated by them. The common element for things that would turn me on like that was always media, always communication. I really think all along it's been about how isolated I was growing up and how desperately I longed to make some kind of outside contact.

Nonetheless, longing doesn't create ability. If anything, just the opposite. The things you long for most are those you're exposed to the least. And those are the things you're least prepared to deal with when they show up. At any rate, I totally suck at networking and self-promotion and all that. Totally.

I'm trying though. I'm way behind all the other books in terms of this - though I've got some real life excuses for that. But I'm hammering my way through a Facebook page, and things are going to start slowly trickling out here. Also, if anyone wants to friend me on Myspace, Doctornaberius now has a page up there, and I desperately need friends to walk me through it. (I've not quite got Facebook figured out. Myspace is like being airdropped into Uzbekistan.)

So thanks for being patient with me, and keep watching this space. The wheels do turn slowly, but they are unstoppable once they get going.

Things Moving Beneath the Surface

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:41:20 -0500

Just in case you've been wondering, there is stuff going on on the Black Jack O'Breen front. Sometimes very cool stuff. I've seen things... I'm just not sure what the powers that be want me to talk about, and they seem to like to unveil these things themselves.

That said, I can say that we've got an editor, our own Andrew Foley. We've gone through the script now (except for page 15 which we still need to bash around a little bit). We've got thumbnails and script revisions and all looks very good.

In particular, I'd like to thank Andrew for his patience and the visual chops he brought to the page breakdown process. I have no real visual experience to speak of. I basically don't know what I'm talking about when I set out to describe a page. And yet I care deeply about how this project turns out, and very much want to get my ideas out there rather than just dropping back and letting the more visually oriented people take over. It must be rather frustrating to deal with. The catchphrase I've come up with is that I have "very strongly held nebulous ideas."

Yet Andrew has done a great job of getting me through that process. He went a bit above and beyond in terms of detail on the thumbnails, and I'm very grateful for that. I found that extremely useful. Without it, I'd probably be floundering around, trying to figure out exactly what we were talking about and being a massive pain in the ass to the production team. (I may be anyway, but I can see how it could be much worse...)

And I've seen an early pin-up (which implies we have an artist, but I'm pretty sure they'd be cross if I told you who that was). And this book is going to be sweet.

The Acceptance Speech

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:35:51 -0500

Well, it's been a long, strange trip to be sure. One with plenty of odd twists along the way, and it's ended up quite a ways from where I thought I was going when I set out some months ago.

Nonetheless, I've arrived in a rich land full of adventure and surprises, someplace good, someplace worth finding. And I'd like to thank all the people whose support and feedback and encouragement and criticism helped get Black Jack here. It's been a great ride so far, and it wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for all of you.

Still, if there's one thing the struggle to make a living writing has taught me, it's that the reward isn't at the destination so much as it's in the journey. And on this particular journey I've learned useful things, and I've made friends, and I've had some good times and heard some good stories. You can't ask much more than that.

Once in a while, the journey takes you by some spot with a particularly nice view and you stop for a while. You rest and you look out over the rich, inviting landscape before you, and you think you've finally arrived. But before long you start to wonder what's actually out there in that distance, and you know you'll set off again.

So all those who are happy for this particular moment, let's enjoy it and wish each other well and take our satisfaction in our achievements while we can. Because tomorrow the journey starts again, and it's still all uphill from here.

Casting Jack

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:12:07 -0500

Huh, this is interesting. Let me know what you think of this. So if I'm lucky enough to win with Black Jack O'Breen, I'm going to have to come up with some information pretty quickly, and one of those things is the kind of fantasy casting choices for the characters. So I've been thinking about who would play Jack in the movie. Or at least in the vision document. And this surprises me as much as I imagine it will surprise you but, you know, I really think it might be Lukas Haas. That's right, the kid from Witness.

I know! But I was toying around with people and I was thinking Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a minute, because I admire the hell out of him as an actor. But I'm not sure he's quite right. And he's a little young, even though I'm thinking of pulling Jack back from 30 to middle 20s or so because I'm not sure he needs 12 years in America to become the person I want him to be. That's a lot of time gone by for everyone to be so dramatically intense about what happened.

But Joseph Gordon-Levitt got me thinking of Brick, and I remembered Haas as The Pin in that movie. (If you haven't seen Brick, by all means go out and rent it or something. It's basically a hardboiled Dashiell Hammet story set in a California high school. Amazingly cool vision.) He was a very strange character, but a very interesting one. And he had a certain intensity that I associate with Jack sometimes.

So I dug around for present day pictures of him, and yeah, sometimes he looks kind of goofy, but when his hair's right and stuff, well, check this out.

Hell yeah, give him a battered old cowboy hat and a gun (one of those Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" hats) and that could totally be Jack!

Or how about this one?

Yeah, he'd work. That doesn't mean I'm not open to suggestions though. So who do you think should play Jack?

And then there's all those other characters. Like Rose. I need someone who's got that Anne Hathaway kind of heartbreaking beauty, but tough. Anne Hathaway doesn't say tough to me.

The Time Is Now, People

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:27:50 -0500

Okay, I've got something to say here. I know a lot of people have been watching my pitches for a while now. A lot of people have supported me on this site, and I can't tell you how much that means to me. I've been a bit confused about what the community wanted to see from me, based largely on the perplexing performance of Third World, and I know I've acted a bit strangely in that regard.

Well, I'd just like to thank you for your support and say that now is the time. Black Jack is the choice, and we're running with it. So if you're currently voting for Black Jack O'Breen, I thank you. If you're voting for it at a lower rank, I'd invite you to take another look and consider giving it that first place slot for a couple days.

If you've voted for it in the past but aren't voting for it right now, I invite you to take another look. I've done some work on the pitch as the actual script develops, and I'm putting up some live script pages. So far the opening action kick of Liam being taken by the Hunt, but more's coming.

And if you've never voted for Black Jack O'Breen, I'd invite you to check it out and I'd ask you to give it your vote this week and help put it over the top.

A few updates on what's happening with the pitch. I know I'd talked about the idea of not having the produced script be the first issue origin story, but a typical adventure that just jumps in in media res. Toward that end, I've plotted out the first three issues, and was going to start with issue three, largely because the opening scene there (between Jack and Rose after the disaster that is the end of the second book) I think has the potential to just be shattering.

But only to me, I realized. Because I understand it. And without the first two issues to set it up, it doesn't have the same impact. Like it or not, there is an arc here. It's not just a simple setup followed by episodic variations on a theme. And so you need to know who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing.

So it's issue one after all. But that's okay. There's some good stuff in issue one. We introduce all the main characters, we have some action and some drama and some humor. I think it's a good overview of the feel of the book, and it raises some interesting questions, hopefully twists in a few ways you weren't expecting.

I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope you'll vote for it - and now is the time to do it. And I thank you for your support and feedback over this long strange process.