Any idea, thought, or story not committed to paper may as well have never happened. I am full of them, and none are finding their way out. But ideas and thoughts want to have happened, it is their one and only goal - to be written down and take form. This means the tricky buggers wait until you are working on something else and they sneak out into it. Where this has become a big problem lately is working on Strength, the ten minute short I'm writer/producer on for film school this year.
To save Strength, my stories, and myself I have come up with another idea; this 'blog'. A random collection of thoughts and scattered writings with only the slightest interconnection of goals, to track and detail my work on committing the rest of these ideas to some form of life.
I have taken the time to work these old, new and current ideas into several projects I can work on mostly-simultaneously. These projects are as follows:
- Personal Blog which will eventually evolve into something more. Yes, this blog counts as a creative output, but I do have an ulterior motive behind this being here. To begin with this blog will just be a chronicling of progress with the occasional thought or experience thrown in. Eventually as these projects and others progress I will make the transition back to having a personal website or showcase.
- Personal Essays. In an early class for entry-level academic English I was taught the format of the "Personal Essay". I found and find this format interesting and even exciting to try and write for. I have already started a dedicated website to these and maybe other format essays with the goal of posting a new one every week as workload permits.
- Book to be self-published either in print or eBook format. I find the world and methodology of self-publishing/self-promotion of books and novels fascinating and would like to try my hand at learning the basics. In order to learn and explore this world however, I need something to publish. While I have a few sketched out ideas I am leading to an expansion of a short story I wrote as a gift a few years back, a Sci-Fi story about a man become god.
- Webseries. The future of serial motion picture storytelling; the Webseries. Possible to shoot, promote, and distribute on extremely low budgets webseries are extremely short episodic stories that are developed for and watched online. I have two series I want to develop and produce with classmates from school in the near future.
- Untitled Werewolf Post-Apocalypse Story. An ongoing series about the world after an apocalyptic outbreak of lycanthropy decimates the planets population. Survivors are forced to live in fear of the werewolves and each other, and scavenge the ruins of past society.
- The Party. A mini-series composed of multiple self-contained shorts all set during one house party. While each short would be a self-contained story all to itself the over-arching story of "The Party" would be told quietly in the background over the course of the series. I think this idea is especially open to creative collaboration after the general outline is cemented.
- Ten Minute Script. After the current term is finished most, if not all, of my current classmates will burst out into the world and separate from each other. The only way to keep everyone collaborating is to work on and produce as many summer shorts as possible. With my experience writing and producing a ten-minute short for school I want to expand out and do another.
- Divers. My first ever experience of working on and helping to create a product that was actually shown to multiple people around the world who had absolutely no vested interest in me, my co-conspirators, or our product was a pre-YouTube internet TV show called, Divers. We only managed to finish and produce one episode before equipment issues pulled us from production, but it was generally well enough received by those who bothered to contact us. Now after many years, and the explosion of internet media, I want to re-visit this early show and see how it looks today.
- Divers Re-edit. Nobody has a copy of the original master that I've been able to get my hands on. However, I do have the source footage of the first episode and the two follow-ups we shot but never managed to edit. My plan is to re-edit a pilot and the other two episodes for digital re-distribution, even if just to those who helped to make it the first time.
- Divers Documentary and Reunion. After finishing the re-edit and re-distribution and dealing with the fallout I think it would be fun to reunite the original team who have since all gone on to bigger and better things. This reunion along with reactions to the re-edit could turn out to be a fascinating documentary about the evolution of internet TV, and a personal look at where we all ended up.
- A close friend has suggested the documentary could be even better if it encompassed the whole of the Divers revisit, starting from me working on the re-edit, through contacting everyone and organising the reunion, and ending with the reunion itself. I like this idea. I like it a lot.
- Create a coherent world somehow separate from our own, and set short fiction in it. This is something I try to do with all of my projects, but as an experiment I want to try doing this backwards, build the world before looking for a story. Into this world I can set many different kinds of fiction, short stories, essays, comics, even films.
- Superhero Webcomic. A classic hand drawn comic about super-powered superheroes battling garish, insane supervillains. A shout out and look at the classic form with a dark, realistic undertone, a closer look at the humanity in the hero. Without giving too much away; one of the early leads is an ex-hero now suicidal and unstable still battling small-time criminals.
- zGame Review. I have a companion blog to this and my older one, wherein collaborators and myself write up our reviews of video games. I tried to take a different approach the classic setup by reviewing each game twice; an initial "first impressions" short review after the first hour or so of game play, and a longer more in-depth review after either finishing or discarding the game. I ended up only ever posting one review, so I am not sure if I want to continue working on this project. I am going to give it one more shot when I review the upcoming Mass Effect 2.
- Database of Characters. One of the most important parts of writing good fiction is realistic, compelling, characters. There is a number of guides to creating a believable character with goals, emotions, and flaws. Following one of these methods I want to build up a stock of interesting characters that can be inserted into different stories with little trouble or re-writing.
- Mystery Project One. I have a project in mind I don't want to risk naming as I have attempted to revitalise it multiple times only to have the attempt fall to the wayside again. I will continue to work on this and talk in more detail when I have made some real headway. I do have a hint however; when I am ready I am going to need the help of multiple like-minded individuals with multiple talents lying in the areas of computer software and art.
- Mystery Project Two. I have another project in mind that often comes very close to being realised only to be self-scrapped again. This time I choose not to jinx it by making detailed discussion until it is much better developed. Another hint; this project will not see much push until after I start exploring further the intricacies of self-publishing.
This blog entry was composed, and re-composed, on Dark Room. A fantastic program for Windows in the vein of OmmWriter for Mac. If you do any creative or commercial writing of any kind, I suggest you start here.
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