With apologies to Charles Addams Thing breathed a contented sigh as Esmeralda buffed the nail on his ring finger. As a disembodied hand, he didn’t exactly know how sighing worked, but the fat muscle at the base of his thumb relaxed, and he counted that as a sigh. Esmie chatted while she worked. She knew …
For the past several years, I’ve been on the steering committee for DFWCon, the DFW Writers Conference, put on by the members of the DFW Writers Workshop. Before the pandemic, we’d get 350-400 attendees and had some great keynote speakers. Each year, it takes us several months of weekly meetings to gather agents to take …
I’ve been an art guy my whole life. Ad art guy on my high school newspaper. Award-winning cartoonist on my college paper. Illustrator. Art director. Bar napkin artist. I’ve almost always drawn. So when the book deal came through, I asked if I could submit some cover designs for consideration as a part of the …
Last Friday morning, I received the call every writer dreams of answering. I’d been trading emails with a publisher over the previous month. This time the phone rang. “We want to buy your book.” “Our editor loved it, and when she loves something, we listen.” “Her words were ‘I want to read more from this …
I recently had a publisher ask me to submit the manuscript of a novel I’ve been pitching. This book has been years in coming. It feels like I’ve worked on it forever. The characters have practically become family members. It’s been through dozens of drafts and rewrites. Writers always hear that, but nobody wants to …
Ten years ago, I wrote a movie script. I was freelancing for an ad agency and we had a pro bono client that was an orphanage. That’s understating it. Boys Ranch is an entire community in the Texas panhandle that solely exists to raise 400 at-risk kids that the world has tossed aside. It’s been …
I entered DL Hammons amazing contest on a whim. I had a snippet of a piece I’d done for Daily Science Fiction, which features pieces shorter than 1500 words in a daily email. They didn’t like my piece, but I did, so I edited it down and entered it in the 2019 installment of Write …
I’ve had some personal issues over the last several months. Serious family and personal medical complications because, hey, you can’t go hang out at the hospital for a couple of weeks and not catch something yourself. And when the flu is really bad, apparently it can turn into pneumonia. Who knew? All in all, that can …
You’ve toiled for months writing and rewriting your screenplay. A trusted reader or two have given some quality notes, you’ve polished, tweaked and proofed. You’ve finally reached those end-of-the-rainbow words: FADE OUT. It’s ready to go out. Life is good. But… Before you do anything else, copyright it. A U.S. copyright protects your script for …
One of my favorite websites for screenwriting is also one I dislike the most. Spooky, huh? It’s Done Deal Pro and to visit the forums there is to understand the Dr. Jekyll nature of the interwebs. I’ve encountered some extremely helpful people there. Pro writer Jeff Lowell offered insight and a script to read for …