I know it’s National Novel Writing Month – so you’d expect me to be all abuzz over here on this blog I’ve dedicated to writing.
Well thankfully I’ve just been so busy writing that I haven’t found the time to blog. Till now. Till I got to about 24k words and I just kind of stopped.
So what’s happened?
Well I started strong, wrote 5000 words the first day out of the gate, and then I maintained about 2000 words everyday after that.
I had a loose outline.
I set up a strong writing routine.
I got rid of almost every other possible obligation.
And then upon hitting 21,000 words I started to slow down. I missed a few days and now here I am distracted by television and blogging.
So there’s really only one thing left to do – STFU and get back to writing!
Point being: if you can find way/reasons not to write, you can find things to write about. So get to it.
So in the months and years that I’ve been researching POD and alternative publishing methods I found my way to AuthorHouse’s spam mail. Every few months they check in to see just why I’m not paying them to publish my book yet.
Well for starters this is the exact definition of ‘Vanity press’. I will neer pay to have my work published, that’s not being published that’s being ripped off.
So I finally sent them back an email informing them to either take on my product pro bono or stop sending me emails begging for my monies.
Personally I have a feeling they’ll just keep emailing me, they certainly will never take my ultimatium seriously, because they’d be fools and it would prove that POD doesn’t work.
I know, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. If you’ve paid attention to my life you know I’m cyclical in my projects. So I’ll be back here posting writing tips and tricks and my own progress asap.
Actually here’s a quick life update. I just finished Upright Citizens brigade’s Sketch 201 class. We have a class show, I was in 4 sketches – twice as girls. And I had one sketch up on stage. Video clips are coming. I’ll probably put them on http://samproof.ning.com
So what am I spending all my time on? Napowrimo (and dash30dash)
It’s April,which is national poetry month – it’s also the time when poets from around the world challenge themselves to write a poem everyday for 30 days.
Dash30dash is featuring 5 poems everyday, as well as posting a new poetry challenge everyday.
It’s great, cause there’s a whole community of people doing it and we’ve just launched our own community for poets and artists alike at http://www.dash30dash.ning.com/ it’s growing pretty fast 2 or 3 new faces a day! (btw there’s also people from Script Frenzy in the community)
So thats what I’m up to right now, as well as trying to organize sketches for a one time spank show at Upright Citizes Brigade and writing a new web series.
January has come and gone. Hell just yesterday I wanted to write a blog about what to do after Nanowrimo. Yesterday was apparently months and months ago. Oops.
Gosh darn it, time and it’s flying aspects. See what I’m about to do is create an elaborate metaphor in which Time is the dark side ala Ti Fighters… and as the rebel force you must defeat time to create an amazing story, or novel, or body of work.
It’s really very clever, right? Sweet.
So a month has gone by, I hate to say this but as far as writing goes I’ve done barely any so far. A few sketches, and a decent amount of blogging. But my many faceted focus has taken me from writing. And sending out query letters? I think I’ve sent out two this year.
The time has come to recesses my schedule (which is actually abundant with time).
At the same time I need to narrow my focus, at least on writing projects – two novels, sketches, screen plays, poetry, etc.
Right now I’m going to declare February ‘Funny February’ and let everything else sit. My goal is:
create a sketch comedy packet of 5 to 10 of my funniest short sketches.
film 3 sketches
get 2 sketches up on UCB’s ‘Not Too Shabby’
create a solid 20 minute sketch show (for stage)
I almost added more goals there – see what happens. I open up a little and suddenly they’re all over me. I don’t even know where they came from!. Gold leader Gold leader!
Gold Leader: They’re coming in! Three marks at 2-10! Gold Leader: It’s no good, I can’t maneuver! Gold Five: Stay on target. Gold Leader: *We’re too close!* Gold Five: Stay on target! Gold Leader: [shouts] Loosen up! Gold Five: Gold Five to Red leader, lost Tiree, lost Dutch. Red Leader: I copy, Gold Leader. Gold Five: It came from… behind!
I recently put together a writing group for sketch comedy; live and video.
This Friday I’ll be putting up my 2nd sketch at Upright Citizen’s Brigade’s ‘Not Too Shabby’.
Shabby is a chance for anyone to try out a sketch on stage, it’s free to the audience and the artists.
Tuesday I’ll be having rehersals with my actors. I can’t wait this is the first real rehersal I’ll have organized for a sketch of my own. That’s new and different.
Friday at midnight the sketch goes up – provided I get picked from the lottery system.
Assuming the sketch goes up and the aduience laughs, I’ll take the sketch to video. If they chuckle a little I’ll try to rewrite it. If they boo, then it goes away.
My Connection to MadTV
So this just in. I just signed up for a sketch writing class (also at UCB) with Colton Dunn
Colton was a writer on the last season of MadTV and was on one of the longest running cagematch champions at UCB called by several names though ‘Kaploosh’ and ‘Kadammit’ were the two longest running incarnations.
I also consider him a friend, though probably heavy on the acquaintance side of things.
So the class starts in 2 weeks, and will make Saturdays’ a 6 hr class day for me. 3 Hours of improv, then 3 hours of sketch writing. The beauty of this of course being, anything that worked in the improv class I may be able to bring over to the sketch class to make better. So this works out brilliantly.
My main goal here is:
A) put together a sketch packet to attract an agent
B) write at least 1 sketch I can film per month
C) create enough stuff that I can do a 20 minute show at UCB
Ok real quick let me catch you up. Last week I ended up working on a über small indie project ‘Shore Front Property’. Had myself one whole line, which I’m pretty happy with.
Anyway, the point is, the writer/director introduced me to the Executive Producer. So before I left I asked the XP (I just made that abbreviation up, it so doesn’t exist), how often they took on new projects and let him know I had a few things that might work with them.
He gave me his card and I just got around to sending him an email. So now we wait.
I gotta say the more I think about this the more I think I could straight out make a feature length movie on my own. But the thought that someone else would produce it is even more exciting to me, because they have the distribution connections. Plus, this would get me in to the Writer Guild and getting an agent to sell my other scripts would be almost a lock. Which means getting an agent to sell my novels would be almost as easily foreseen.
So that’s where I’m at, in the land of delusional fantasies.
• But chaulk this up as a submission! -It’s the most I’ve done in like a week. So that’s good.
I’ve gotta get back on sending out query letters and submitting to magazines. Need to get organized.
I’m not even going to bother talking about New years resolutions. it’s obvious, getting published. So yesterday I sat down at borders for a couple hours with the 2009 edition of the writers market and I copied over in to my handy little Excel spreadsheet, all the New literary agents that A) accepted email queries or B) had websites.
I got a pretty big list from there, and that’s where I’m going to start sending my query letters for ‘Gone’ my first novel. In the meantime I’m going to start polishing ‘The Brood’ my second novel, which is a vampire novel. So hopefully I can pull some eyes from the twilight craze right now.
And with that I shot off two quick emails to different literary agents, noted the sent date on my spread sheet and now I wait. It’s my goal to send out 3 to 5 query emails every Sunday. I’m keeping the number small so I can research each agent and customize the email/letter as needed to hopefully attract the agent.
In a previous blog post I mentioned a referring link that promised to return hundreds of views.
And to be honest, because I posted that entry I got nearly 500 views in 24 hours. However the drop off rate was instant and the minute my blog wasn’t the number 1 or 2 Blogs That Mention Alphainventions.com I seemed to lose all traffic from the site whatsoever. even as I feed my URL in to the ‘reading cycle’ to notify readers I didn’t seem to get results (or at least nothing neerly noticeable or worth the time of contiually going back to the site daily to feed in my URL.
So I’ve come to determine that currently unless you want to simply make a blog devoted to talking about alphainventions it’s uses are currently limited.
and with that, let’s get back to talking about writing and publishing!
It’s been a while since I’ve sent a letter too anyone let alone a submission. I know what you’re thinking “Um Sam, it’s the holidays”, yea yea I suck or I do virtually. It’s the path I’ve chosen as a starving artist. Good times.
However today I would like to announce I’ve gotten off my lazy ass (so to speak) and sent off a submission. Now technically I did this via email, so I did all this while on my lazy ass but it still got sent.
It’s nothing big, it’s actually a video submission, and though not a video jam packed with mouth watering fluid prose, or dialogue at all so much, I did write something. “Make video of snowman”. So anyway that’s off to Upright Citizens Brigade and Tomorrow I’m dropping off a DVD of this video and a few others at IO West.
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