* 15 July 2020 – Post Update*
– Development Slate has been updated to reflect progress.

In light of all the hoopla surrounding the Coronavirus I was furloughed from my job back in March. This gave me an abundance of time. I thought I would take that time and finish off a lot of writing projects I’ve had on the back burner for… my entire life.

The original impetus into this endeavor was a desire to put a fork into a handful of projects undertaken long ago that I pursued for myself, namely those currently listed on my site, and build a ramshackle portfolio of personal projects.

I guess I should go further back and tell the entire story.

As part of my furlough jamboree and imminent move across the country I started clearing out old stuff from all the hidden crevices of my home in hopes of doing away with some clutter. Among the refuse I found a stack of old hard drives three fat boys and four laptop drives.

I bought a little cable from Amazon to hook them up and see what was on them, why I had kept them. After exploring the drives I surprisingly found everything from my external storage drive in a recycle bin folder. The price for finding the treasure: everything was three years older than when I lost it, circa 2013. But I found a lot, the scripts of course, albeit older versions, but lost family pictures was the huge one. I found lots of other goofy odds and ends that I had long since lived without that are now in another securely archived place I will never look at. Approximately 100+ Gigabytes of information in total.

Now to bring it around town.

With the discovery of my ancient treasure trove of written gold I’ve decided to go back through it all and either polish it, rewrite it, or permanently trash it.

The projects listed tentatively in the portfolio as of this post, which are Star Trek: Gladiator, Able Squad, For Those We Cherish, The Day, and Housebands were already in this process, the last remnants of what I thought was long lost.

These pieces of work are now officially “Phase One” of my polish, rewrite or dump campaign.

I’m going to create individual posts on each project to give a background commentary and link those to their respective portfolio pages, but here is a quick run down:

The Day is already posted and about as good as I’m willing to make it. There is a reason why to be explained later.

Able Squad – The pilot is two, two hour scripts. Originally designed in the vein of the RDM Battlestar Galactica mini-series I split it into two parts for not doing a mini-series. I’ve posted part one, but both parts are getting a polish, a writer’s bible re-write, and a new, shiny pitch bible.

For Those We Cherish – Once a website for my beloved Lamenters Space Marines, all of this mass of background information is going into a shiny PDF document. I might re-develop a site for others to find, but the PDF will be the full body of the work. This just needs completion of the writing and layout work. I would love to hire D1sarmon1a to do illustrations for this, but I couldn’t pay her enough. The book will be layout and text for now.

Housebands – My seminal sitcom is getting a slight rewrite with better structure and a brief pitch bible.

Star Trek: Gladiator – This was the original beast that I had to rewrite from the ground up. A massive amount of work lost in that hard drive crash. By the time I discovered my works during the furlough the script had largely been rewritten over the last two months. Upon reading the original work, it was for the better. This is going to be uploaded to the site imminently. The script is done and making the rounds with a handful of trusted helper monkeys. The pitch bible is done and looks quite handsome. The writer’s bible is nearly done, but I need to go through it again and make sure the ideas are clear.

Once each of these is done, that will complete Phase One.

To give you some further context here is my full development slate (names may be esoteric and could mean little):

Phase One:

The Day (Drama, Short Film) – Complete
(15 July 2020, formatting update, Posted)
Able Squad (Science Fiction, Television Pilot) – Awaiting Proofreading
(15 July 2020, Edits being made, formatting updates, bible re-write)
Star Trek: Gladiator (Science Fiction, Television Pilot) – Final Polish
(15 July 2020, Complete, Posted)
Housebands (Half Hour Comedy, Television Pilot) – Plotting out rewrite
For Those We Cherish (Book) – Assembling layout

Phase Two:

Awaken (Drama, Feature Film) – Currently plotting
One Night With Michelle (Drama, Feature Film) – plot needs fleshed out
Quarter-Life (Drama, Feature Film) – plot needs fleshed out
Obi-Wan (Science Fiction, Feature Film) – Plot complete, weighing whether this is worth it
Mutant Chronicles (Science Fiction, Television Pilot) – Plot needs reviewed

Phase Three

Nicholas’s Story (Fantasy, Feature Film) – Plot needs to be locked in
Filmmaker Guy (Drama, Television Pilot) – May Get Dumped, Mutant Chronicles if so
Mortificators (Modern Fantasy, Television Pilot) – Plot needs reviewed
Jon’s Film (Drama, Feature Film) – Essentially a basic idea I always liked

Phase Four

Dragon and Turtle (Drama/ Fantasy, Comic Series/ Graphic Novel) – Planning

Phase Five

Unforgettable (Fantasy, Book) – Plot done, just yeah… let’s call it planning

You don’t want to see the scrap pile.

Minus the goal of writing a book in Phase Five I think this is about two years of work ahead of me, possibly more… maybe less? I’m hoping less as I’ve found I’ve been able to write quite swiftly as of late. Most of these ideas are done, or are relatively plotted out so finishing each of them should be a few weeks of cobbling a screenplay together.

Phase Four and Five are long term goals, but that will require lots of production planning and those I intend to publish traditionally.

With that long winded dump of personally relevant, publicly useless information I’ll wrap this up and say that there should be some activity over the next few days. As I mentioned I’ll write a post about each project as they get published giving some commentary.

Keep an eye out if you’re interested…

Thanks, Mom.