Why I Stopped Writing Screnplays

Why I stopped writing screenplays for now

    I’ve made a couple of big changes to my focus in writing, and this is one of them.

For awhile, I was writing screenplays left and right.  That’s a medium that I truely lovelovelove.  I can concentrate on the dialogue and give a bare-bones description of the action.

    Writing prose is a lot more work.  Especially for me, because I love a lot of action.  So, I have to find a way to explain some crazy stunt, in a way that is understandable to the reader.

    Ultimately, I had all these really, really cool ideas but no connections in Hollywood.

    However, if I wrote prose...that might have a better chance of getting my stories out there.

    So, I took those ideas and tried to distill them into short stories.  “Monster Alley” is one that I even tried to write a book about, but for one reason or another it would not work out.  Undeterred, I started using the “Monster” characters of Detectives Rafe Howler and Sofie Frost in short stories.

    I could establish characters and ideas, which I could build upon later.  The idea would be out there, and even more importantly, copywritten.  You can’t copyright ideas, but once you have put it down onto paper, it is yours.  

    The plan, and I do have a Plan, was to first stop writing screenplays.  After that, I stopped working on books, but started to write a lot of short stories that featured my ideas, worlds, whatever.  

These short stories built up my Writer’s Resume.  So, if an agent asks if you can publish, you can look them in the eye and say, ‘You bet your sweet bippy I can’.  

This year marked another shift.  I have proved that I can get short stories published, but now comes the next step in the plan, Books.  So, I’ve been sending out short stories more intermittently.

There was one exception.  World of Myth wanted more of “Liberty’s Run”, so I decided to finish that before starting another book.  You see, I wrote the series in volumes, and 1 and 2 were done.  So, I dove into Volume.  The idea was to write it out in one fell swoop, and then I could break it into pieces later, to fit into World of Myth’s 3,000 word limit per issue.  

From about Spring of 2020 to August of that year, I worked on Vol. 3 and the epilogues afterward.  And seriously, writing the epilogues felt like the end of Peter Jackson’s “Return of the King”.  But, I needed to tie up all the loose ends because...well, I can’t say, Spoilers!  I had written the first 2 volumes of “Liberty” in bits, so it wasn’t until I put it all together that I realized, it’s a whole freaking book by itself.  I was floored.

Shortly thereafter, I got the good news that my book, “SuperhorrorMax” would be published by World of Myth.  So, that’s a step in the right direction for my plan.

Now, to build upon “SuperhorrorMax” to get more novels published.

Then...well, we’ll see for the rest of the Plan.    

To be continued…….