Saturday, December 16, 2006

Hello and Welcome

My name is Michael and I decided to start this particular blog with Bloglines to chronicle my writing life and hopefully a new career that will get me to early retirement. I write "this particular blog" because I have three others that I maintain, two of which contains original material.

I first tried my hand at writing fiction shortly after college. I wrote about 100 pages of my first novel which was based on college life (highly invented, of course) and though I got great reviews from my friends, I realized that the only thing I was enjoying typing on my Smith-Corona typewriter were the sex scenes. Hence, the book that began as a racy college tale (in the same category as "Animal House") quickly became pornographic. I suspect that's why my (male) friends liked it so much!

My next writing adventure was a result of an post I did on a technology forum. I took the author to task and apparently they liked my style enough to pay me to carry on an email debate with this guy. This brief war of words (which never got nasty, of course) was followed closely by many, but eventually ran its natural course.

Soon after, the same website asked me to write a weeks work of articles chronicling the daily life of a tech manager. I complied, but made the mistake of not clearing it with the big kahunas. A few months after the articles ran, I got called into the front office and had a stern talking to about my literary exploits. I wasn't too sad when eight months after I quite that organization that they went out of business. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to settle into a regular writing gig with this website because they got taken over by a huge publishing empire and fired all their freelance writers (including yours truly).

In 2002, I started writing my second novel on my commuter bus trips to and from home and my office. This time I was using a laptop and was enjoying the experience a whole lot more. Unfortunately, I got blocked at the end of Chapter 9 and the 800 pages I already wrote got put on the shelf for a while. Here it is, almost at the end of 2006, and I barely looked at that work since 2004.

Last August (2005), I decided to try my hand at screenwriting and in four weeks time, wrote my first script. I posted it on Inktip.com in hopes of catching an insider's interest and started outlining my second screenplay.

I didn't hear about my first effort until this past summer when I got a call from a producer who wanted to talk to me about the script. I met with her and her husband (a known director of cinematography) to discuss their taking on the screenplay to pitch to the studios. Naturally, I was thrilled. With draft option contract in hand, I retained an entertainment lawyer and my wife and I celebrated. That's when the writing gods rained on my parade.

One night in the early fall, I was watching TV and after I saw a movie trailer, I realized I never checked to see if my script's title was available as a domain name. (I HAD checked to see if there was such a movie by the title in IMDB when I wrote the script, but never checked the domain itself.) Sadly, the domain was reserved in July 2005 by Fox Films. A quick Google showed that a movie of the same title with a very similar premise had been announced as a pitch in December 2005!

I was pretty upset about the whole thing, but came clean with the producer and her husband. Even though they were nice and commiserated with me, they basically walked away from the project. There went my first chance to break into the screenwriting business.

All's not lost, though. In my next post, I'll be discussing all of my writing projects that are in progress.

Best wishes,
Michael

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