March / April / half-May round-up!

As far as Without/Within is concerned, I can sum up these two and a half months in one word: rejection. I know it's not the most technically polished short out there, but still...you know? Ah well. I still love it. It'll have to go on the DVD of the first feature I make.

 

As for my next project, I have not only decided on what it's going to be, I've already written the script. It still needs some tweaking, but I'm hoping to film it near the end of this year or the beginning of the next, depending on whether or not I get to go on vacation. It's a short film as I want to go over a few more technical things (lighting, mostly.) I recently purchased a book on cinematography written by John Alton called Painting With Light.

 

While film lighting and digital lighting are vastly different due to how sensitive digital cameras are, I thought it'd be a good idea to read a book by a guy whose film noir work is very highly regarded. It did help, and it did give me a few ideas, but it was very much like reading one of Oscar Wilde's home decor essays...which I didn't read, by the way, when I went through and read all the Wilde I could. If you saw my house, you'd understand why...

 

I'm still waiting to hear back from Cemetery Dance about the short story I sent them and I'm prepping another story to send to any magazine with a seven thousand word limit that accepts horror. Even following Stephen King's Second Draft Formula ("second draft = first draft - 10%"), it'd be around 6500 words, but the edit's coming along nicely.

 

I think that's all the news that's fit to print for now.

C'mon Ferris, we have work to do...

I received a NoFUN today (stands for Not For Us Now, the term comes courtesy of my mom and the Housewife Writers) in the form of an informal rejection from FirstGlance Hollywood. They didn't notify me so much as I went to their website and discovered that, lo and behold, I was not on the list of short narrative flicks they'll be showing at FirstGlance 8. So I was depressed for a moment, then perked up because I still have fifteen more festivals to hear from...of course, that could mean fifteen more opportunities for rejection, but all I can do is "pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again." So, while I'm prepping the Romero project (storyboards are done, but I haven't been feeling well for the past week or two...I really need to get on that!!) I've decided that I also REALLY NEED to submit a couple of short stories to a horror magazine. Since Fangoria doesn't carry fiction (understandable -- it's a "news" mag, not a fiction mag), the next best choice is to jump over to Cemetery Dance, which DOES publish short fiction.

 

Here's the link in case anyone's interested in reading or sending in their own story: http://www.cemeterydance.com/

 

So, I plan on popping Ferris Bueller into my DVD player (I don't know why, but whenever I'm home I almost always write with Ferris on in the background...), sitting down with my laptop, and editing a bunch of my stories. Once I'm finished, I plan on reading them over again, fixing whatever I spot, then choosing one or two to send to Cemetery Dance for possible publication.