Wanderings

ShadowScript is a blog that reviews screenplays. I have been reading it for a couple of months now, although I usually just read the first two or three paragraphs to get a feel for what the author thinks of a script. The stories behind the script are often more interesting than the script itself.

Everyone has a script in their left hand bottom desk drawer. I have ideas for five scripts and I intend to write at least two of them when I retire. Unfortunately, the odds of selling a screenplay is even less than the odds of making a professional spec-fic sale. At least in spec-fic there are semi-pro sites. Of the hundreds of thousands of screenplays written each year, only a few hundred get made into movies, and not many more are actually read by a decision maker.

ShadowScript will be reviewing a random screenplay submitted to their site during the first week in May.  The first they will pick two whole screenplays and the rest of the week, they will pick just the random loglines. They will treat the screenplay seriously, but they don’t expect to get any real winners from the slush. I would guess that they will get about 500 scripts, and could get many more if the word gets out. If they review one a day, then the odds of getting reviewed would be 1 in 250. This is far greater than the 1 in 10,000 odds of getting a script read by submitting it using standard strategies.

They say that if your script is chosen they will be gentle. Maybe, though, your screenplay is a real gem and they will rave over it. (You are deluding yourself if you believe that.)

Get your script in now!

WEEK ONE – AMATEUR WEEK – ANYONE CAN SUBMIT
e-mail address: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Instructions: First off, write your logline INTO THE SUBJECT LINE. If it doesn’t fit, write as much as you can. The full logline will also be posted in the body of the message. Attach a PDF of your script with the e-mail. Here is a sample of how the body of the e-mail should look:

Name: Joe Screenwriter
Title: Blanket Man
Genre: Horror
Logline: When the people of Sleepville begin losing their blankets one by one, they realize that a horrifying entity known as “Blanket Man” has been stealing them, in hopes of making everyone really chilly at night.

May is Amateur Month!.

My brothers and I invented the term Dumpster Diving. I even wrote a story about brothers who find an alien artifact while dumpster diving.

Now there is a whole site devoted to dumpster diving, although the site includes some darker uses for the things that you might find in a dumpster, including blackmail, identity theft, and corporate whistle blowing.

My brothers and I are more concerned with finding buried treasure.

Once I was with my brothers and one of my cousins down in the Tribeca section of New York, near Canal Street and we passed a dumpster. A building was being renovated and the contractors had dumped the contents of all the abandoned apartments into the dumpster. There was lots of stuff. I jumped in and started digging. I looked up a few minutes later and my brothers and my cousin were also in the dumpster looking for treasure and finding it.

The first time I heard the dumpster was in Honolulu. I spent the summer there with my Uncle when I was 14. He was in the army and was stationed there. There was a company called Dewey Dumpsters that placed the dumpsters around the army camp. My cousin and I started our long careers in Dumpster Diving during the summer of 1965.

It must be in the DNA.

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I opened up the new hives today. They are doing well. There is lots of honey already.

I did some work on the Connie Hive. I was stung a dozen times. Connie is hybrid Russian and Italian and very bitchy. I did not use smoke. Smoke is used to calm down the bees, and I should have used it, but I decided I would be quick and that was a mistake.

When I opened Connie, thousands of bees swarmed up to protect the hive. Hybrid Russian and Italian bees are very strong, but are not known for being calm. They are very aggressive.  I took out the spacer super that I wanted to remove, but they stung me.

I am 6 foot 3 inches tall and the bee suit doesn’t go down to my shoes and the bees stung me many times in my socks. They also got up my sleeve and stung my wrist. I am sitting here in serious pain.

One good thing, bee venom prevents arthritis. I should never get arthritis at this rate.

There is a story about a kid and a troll making the internet rounds. It got started at the 2010 Mule Day Liars’ Contest in Maury County Tennessee. It sounds like a good joke that sounds real enough that people repeat it as true.

It is, however, funny even it is not a true story:

This lady I work with has a son who is autistic. Not like Rainman bad, but noticeable. So she has been taking him to these classes for around the last year so that he can stay by himself during the day while she is at work. Well this has been working for the last couple of months with no real problems. I’ve met the kid, he’s around 22 or 23, functional but still you can tell something is wrong with him.

So a couple of days ago at work he starts calling his mom and telling her that there is a troll in their closet and he is feeding it skittles. She just tells him thats nice and goes back to work..but he keeps calling and saying the same thing. So after a little over three hours of this he starts to tell her that the troll is getting mad and that she needs to come home.

After a few more calls she tells our boss that she has to go home to get him but she will be right back. She calls her son and basically yells at him that he isn’t going to stay by himself ever again..then she drives home and he meets her in the driveway with a hand full of skittles. The two of them walk into the front door and he throws the skittles against the door…his mom tells him to come over by the door and open it so she can show him that there is nothing there.

So he opens the door and lying on the floor in front of her……….is a midget census worker with his hands and feet bound and his mouth taped!!!!!…..

She said she stood there for a second without doing anything..her son ran off upstairs, and she started to untie the midget. She got his feet undone and he ran past her out of the door.

She went to get her son and he was very upset, he told her that he tried to feed him skittles because he wasn’t allowed to cook anything.

So the lady I work with called the police and told them what happened and they tracked down the census worker and pleaded with him not to press charges which he luckily has decided not to do.

Mush had asked if I wrote Science Fiction stories about my bees. In truth, I actually wrote a story That included a bee-like alien (well sort-of), but this was a few years before I started beekeeping.

I looked for it and realized that it, along with most of my stories, have disappeared from the internet. Either the magazines are gone or else the editors did not keep the archived versions around.

I decided to start putting my stories back online. There are a bunch that only appeared in print and I want to get those going, too.

Today I put up two stories.

The first story, Flare Bound, is the very first story that I ever sold back in 2003.

The other story is The Telling, based on the poem Telling the Bees.

Both of these stories come, however remotely, from poems by John Greenleaf Whitter.

The title of the story Flare Bound comes from the Whitter poem Snow-Bound, although the story has little else in common with the poem.

In The Telling, however, I wanted to capture some of the mood of Telling the Bees. Bees are supposed to be told of a death in the family or else they will fly away from their hives. I used this idea to tell aliens with a hive mind about the death of one of the crew members of a spaceship.

Enjoy

Here is a picture of my new hive of Golden Italian Honeybees. Her name is Justine (Gooch for short).

I installed the packages Friday morning and this picture is from Sunday morning. She seems strong and has now consumed 5 quarts of sugar water. The bees convert this to comb and eventually honey. I will check the hive to see that the queen got out of her cage OK on Tuesday.

I saw workers returning to the hive with pollen – a very good sign.

I was stung 4 times trying to get Justine to go into the box. One bee even stayed on my back and stung Erica when I came back to the house.

I went a 2AM to pick up the bees last night. I installed them this morning and one of the packages was very unhappy with me. I was stung three times – twice in the wrist and once in the neck.

Erica had a brush to get the stragglers off me and one of the bees stung her.

There are some pictures on my bee blog of the 2AM pickup. It was raining like crazy so I did not get to talk with any of the other beekeepers.

Over the last few weeks my traffic has been slowly dropping here. I have less than half the readers that I had a year ago. Some of my other sites are growing, but this site is ME. The other sites are work. It looks like things are fading away here.

I read a book on the bus today where the quote “music at the edge of darkness” was used. It is evocative of  melancholy, not unlike the diminution of traffic statistics.

I came in to find my work PC in an endless loop of booting, failing and rebooting.

I am sitting in the computer lab at a computer that is so painfully slow that it is almost impossible to use.

I am listed #894 in the top 1,000 WordPress plugin authors. I have 8239 downloads from the WordPress Repository.  I have written 9 plugins so far. Several of my efforts are dogs, but a few are getting to be popular.

I wonder if they can put a bullet next to my name indicating that I should be watched?

I like writing WordPress Plugins. They are generally easy to write and none so far have been very long. I can write one in an hour or two.

via Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors | daveligthart.com.

Not a good showing for my choices in the Hugo Nominations. The only exception was Fred Pohl, who came up as a fan writer. Pohl, who was a great SF writer has a good blog where he writes about many things, including his memories of the Golden Age of SF. I read his blog regularly and it is interesting to see that Fred may now win a Hugo for Fan Writer to go along with his other Hugos.

My website www.mlbmagicnumbers.com failed badly last night. I get the stats from a variety of websites and they ALL changed their formats. My code could not find out who won and lost last night so there were no stats to display and no way to calculate the magic number.

I spent two hours this morning sorting it out. I am not a sports guy so I had to look up things like the names of teams for cities that have more than one baseball team (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago). I had to translate divisions and leagues so that I could do the standing for each league and division. I have it working sort of, but now I have to build in the redundancy so if one statistics site fails or is late I can try another.

And whose idea was it to call the Diamondbacks the D-backs? That makes no sense. Diamond is easy to say and spell. It is not used consistently anyway. I had to add about 20 lines of code to handle Diamondbacks since I use the name of a team for as an index all over the place.

I woke up this morning, people, I looked ’round for my shoes
You know I had those mean old walking blues. -Robert Johnson

There’s been a Google page rank recalculation. This site is back down to PR3. It was up to PR4 for the last three months, but I lost some mojo, I guess, and it dropped me down. I’ve been checking my other sites and the WordPress Plugin site is now up to PR4, and jukester.com jumped up two points from nothing. Harpamps.com and Harptab.com dropped a point each. JT30.com is my only big site that kept its head out of water.

Steve at rimworlds.com is down to a PR4 from PR5, which surprises me. He has been getting lots of high quality links from some popular sites. I think, though, he has been giving them links back, which in the Google world makes it a wash and undoes the good.

I guess I have to get back to work on my Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) all over again.

I just noticed that my story You Can’t Think About It is now for sale at the Genre Mall. It looks like they also included the Meet the Writer interview that was published in Aoife’s Kiss last month, so I am in it twice.

I have made trouble for myself because I dislike the images create by Poser or Daz3D. The models always have impossibly large and perky parts and particularly vacuous expressions on their faces. I much prefer images created by hand.

Shelter of Daylight {Sam’s Dot Publishing}

Shelter of Daylight is a biannual anthology of science fiction and fantasy short stories, with some poetry and art, published each year in April and October in perfect bound magazine format, and edited by Tyree Campbell.

Issue 3

stories

Tom Humphrey: The Exospatial Theory of Hellenic Origin
Greer Woodward: Home Swt Home
Tyree Campbell: Blindmary
Lawrence Barker: A Small Price To Pay
Ursula Warnecke: The Harper
Kisa Rupp: Spinning
Keith P. Graham: You Can’t Think About It
Maria Alberto: Dark Matter
David Tallerman: Feeler
Molly Schwanz: Disobedience
Jared Millet: The Rendezvous
Robin Mayhall: Payday
Lawrence R. Dagstine: My Own Private Earth
Michelle D. Sonnier: The Escape Of Baba Yaga
Shane Nelson: The Evolution Of Fitzy Adams
John Marfink: If You Can Walk

poems

Jaime Lee Moyer: Journey
Anne Brennan: Appeasing Brigid In Pittsburgh
Marge Simon: Mommy Come Home
K. S. Hardy: Boat Of Bone
WC Roberts: Cogs
J. L. Opskar: By The Old Comic Shop
Amelia B. Winkler: Stonehenge Maiden

features
Meet The Writers:  Keith P. Graham – Interviewed by Shelly Bryant

illustrations

Marge Simon: Mommy Come Home

U.S. Orders: $11.00 + $4.00 S&H OUR PRICE: $10.60 + $4.00 S&H

via Magazines.