​Where have I been? My goal was to publish a newsletter monthly, but I ran out of steam back in March.

But that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. It's just...I'm primarily a screenwriter who also writes novels and short stories, and it's a bit difficult to craft a newsletter around screenplays...unless, I would imagine, your newsletter is about screenwriting. The most interest for my books span the months of October through March, so it kind of makes sense that would focus on those months for the newsletter.

​I have been doing a ton of work on the screenplay version of Bad Elf and The Krampus--promoting, connecting with industry insiders, and taking home a trophy for Best Holiday Feature Script at Show Low Film Festival. I met the most amazingly creative people at the festival that I hope continue to be friends inside and outside of my writing career. If you haven't yet read the novel, check out the review by Book for Every Season podcast--it's a short listen (2 minutes), and my favorite line is how the cheerful ending makes you forget all the things you've just witnessed.

My "big" book release this year has been a children's picture book, Herbie Jumps Over The Moon...about a cow who dreams of jumping over the moon. Try as he might, he just can't jump high enough! The majority of time spent on that project was tinkering about in AI art software and using tools like Photoshop to create the images needed to tell a story with a consistent look and feel. The actual story was written many, many years ago for my daughter as a bedtime story, using her stuffed animals as characters. She is now a mother, and for my granddaughter's first birthday I had decided that I would finally put that story down in a book. I think I may take the similar approach with Dingle's Dozen and properly illustrate it. I have this long term goal to turn Bad Elf and The Krampus into a graphic novel, and I think trying my hand at that with Dingle's Dozen would be a great learning opportunity. (Unless I find the right artist to work with, who can help me explore my vision, that is.)

I have been working on a pilot for a television series--The Holler! It's a supernatural, action, dramedy in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer gets Lost where a socially awkward misanthrope becomes ensnared in a strange town no one can ever leave, a town full of ghosts, demons, witches, monsters, and worse…people. He is forced to develop real relationships on his quest to escape them and ultimately sacrifices his chance to cheat the town’s curse in order to save those he has come to love…the family he never had. This one is tracking some interest already, and I'm hopeful that if I can't sell it, that it will at least help me land representation in Hollyweird.

And finally, I have been working on polishing up my latest novel. Some of you have read it on Kindle Vella as Still Skin. Some of you have read its prequel The Hermetic. One of the things I have been struggling with it is the title. Still Skin kinda sorta fits if you squint just right, but I'm not happy with how it plays with the overall theme of the story. While brainstorming title ideas, I realized I had already come up with the perfect title when I wrote the prequel: The Hermetic. I have been amping up the horror and expanding the narrative and hope to have it ready for publishing soon. If you would like to get a free copy once it is ready for publication, please let me know...all that I would ask is that if you enjoy the read to please leave a review once it gets published. 

• Armageddon is at our doorstep and only the holy rollers are left behind. Pissed that their faithfulness wasn’t rewarded, they give in to the true selves they had been denying their whole lives.
  

Here are another three concepts from an earlier post:

• What if I jokingly responded to that Nigerian prince’s email and got sucked up in some international scandal?
• What if the reason my doctor was making me wait for so long was that the patient before me died, and he was trying to hide the body?
• What if, while researching details for a story, the FBI and NSA showed up at my door because my searches eerily matched an actual crime scene?

And some new concepts they get me to see:

• A fringe group follows the plot of a novel verbatim to assassinate the president. When authorities show up at the writer's house for questioning, the writer swears he is oblivious...and he is also learns that this group follows him like a messiah, just as his next book with a plot that triggers Armageddon hits the shelves.
• While waiting for his doctor appointment for a long time, a patient takes a bio break. When he returns, he notices he is the only one in the waiting room, and all office staff have gone missing. He investigates to find the doctors and staff have tied up all the other patients and are harvesting organs for the black market.
• After reverse-scamming a "Nigerian prince" to teach the scammers a lesson, black ops group arrives to put a woman into hiding--The Nigerian Prince is coming for payback! But her rescuers have come just a little too late.

Keep randomly picking three concepts from your library and try to generate 10 concepts per day for a week.

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• What if I jokingly responded to that Nigerian prince’s email and got sucked up in some international scandal?
• What if the reason my doctor was making me wait for so long was that the patient before me died, and he was trying to hide the body?
• What if, while researching details for a story, the FBI and NSA showed up at my door because my searches eerily matched an actual crime scene?

Seinfeld is famous for being “a show about nothing,” but Seinfeld said it was more accurate to describe his sitcom as “a show about anything.” They made the mundane funny and entertaining. I once had a Driver’s Ed teacher who turned just about every boring thing into a causality that usually ended in some tragedy. “If you forget to bring your pencil to the final, you can’t take the final. If you don’t take the final, you fail Driver’s Ed. If you fail Driver’s Ed, you can’t get your driver’s license. If you don’t have a driver’s license, you probably won’t be able to work. If you can’t work, you won’t be able to buy food. If you don’t have food, you can’t eat. If you can’t eat, you’ll die. SO BRING YOUR PENCIL TO THE FINAL TOMORROW!” It was ridiculous, and he was probably serious. But it’s the same sort of exercise…What if you didn’t bring your pencil to the final tomorrow? A pretty mundane detail that ends in your death.

What if?

​Go about your day and just ask that about anything, no matter how mundane.

Remember, the vast majority of the concepts you generate will suck. And that is okay. You need to give yourself permission to be crazy, stupid, out there, and messy when you’re trying to figure out what to write. Don’t edit yourself. The goal is to just have fun with this and generate as many ideas as you can. You’ll then review the concepts and see which ones get your attention, which ones can be tweaked into a better concept, and hone in on the marketable ones.

Always remember, “Sharknado” is a thing. It’s not only ridiculously dumb, but was ridiculously successful. Just have fun with this.

​This first “Netflix” strategy was once my favorite, but the Netflix interface is no longer compatible—especially the way it auto-plays previews. It used to show a grid of movies, where each row more or less contained a different genre…and scrolling through that grid was what helped me generate ideas.
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Luckily, Google offers a great alternative. Search “movies on Netflix,” and results show up in a grid as shown here.

​And here comes the fun. Pick two movies in the same genre, and a third from a different genre or category and try to get yourself to see something by combining the three. 

This question is not asking what it probably seems to be asking.

When I was studying for my MFA, one professor asked the class to write essays on this very topic. I don’t remember my essay. But I do remember the gist of an essay written by a young woman who said that if her writing touches just one person, then she would be a successful writer.

Young and ambitious, I commented that if my writing touches only one person then I would be a horrible failure. And that is true. For me. But obviously not for this other writer.
​
Recently, I see writers stating on social media something similar…that they write “for passion, not profit.” And being a bit older, I understand their point of view. But I just don’t see passion and profit as being mutually exclusive. Why not write for both passion and profit?

I have been produced on stage and in film, have contributed to numerous projects, been published in magazines, newspapers, and have published a couple books.

Yet I still don’t feel successful. Why? Because my dreams are frighteningly huge. I don’t want to touch just one person, or a few. I want the world to laugh with me, cry with me, feel affected by my stories the same way they affect me. I want my name in the credits. I want to walk the red carpet. I want financial success. There is so much I need to do and my time on this planet is waning. As a popular meme asks: Why aren’t we all chasing after our dreams like we’re going to die tomorrow?

​That doesn’t mean I haven’t celebrated my wins. And those wins all serve their purpose in my dreams.
The question I am asking here has an answer that has everything to do with your goal.

When starting out, many writers craft a story that is interesting to them and hope that the world will also find it interesting. Sometimes this works. Most of the times, however…it doesn’t. Consider two movies about unwanted pregnancies that seem to have been written as personal interest pieces—Juno and The Obvious Child. Juno hit it out of the park, whereas The Obvious Child did not.

Although I liked only one, both films are winners in my book because they were produced and released. Those are huge hurdles.

Now, maybe you don’t care to write a film. Maybe Hollyweird isn’t part of your dream. And that’s great! But the approach I take to writing a novel is through the lens of writing a screenplay because my dream includes both…even as a kid I wanted to write a book that was so freakishly successful it would be turned into a film.

The first book I remember reading that was written through such a lens was the original Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton. It was the first book I had ever picked up on a Friday and barely put down until I wrapped up the read on Sunday night. I was as fascinated with the story as I was with its approach. So much so, that I wrote Chrichton to ask him why he had approached the book the way he did. (He even wrote back!) For my goals, writing the novel first as a screenplay makes sense.

And I would argue that if you are interested in writing only novels, this approach also works because it will strengthen your “throughline,” onto which all your subplots and extras can be drafted. If you end up over-writing, it will be clear where the cuts to be made have been written. If your core story falls flat, it is much easier to strengthen and tweak it within the bare bones the screenplay will provide, and you can be more easily certain that all the extras you add to the novel actually serve that core story.

Now, whatever story you write (in whatever format) should interest you. You should be passionate and inspired. But let’s choose a concept to write that is marketable. Why? We want to set ourselves up for success—be it in a film or a novel. Let’s choose a writing project people will likely want to see or read. We, of course, can’t predict what a publisher or studio might want to see, but we can craft a story with certain decisions in mind that will make a story interesting to them.

To do that, we’re not even going to think (yet) about characters and roles, subplots, settings, and all the other fun elements that go into crafting a story. We’re going to create a generic concept that could be written in any number of ways. Consider Bad Elf and The Krampus. The basic concept is this: A Goth elf at the North Pole steals the Naughty List to use as a map to find his Christmas-demon idol, Krampus, only to discover too late that he is on Krampus’ Naughty List. This concept can go in any number of directions:

• Does this involve Santa?
• Is it a Christmas story or a Halloween story?
• Is it a horror, comedy, or a rom-com?
• What’s the theme?
• Is this for adults or kids, or both?
• How does Santa’s Naughty List differ from Krampus’?
• Does this take place in the past, present, or future?
• Does it only take place at the North Pole?
• Etc.

The concept is just an idea, with ideas for characters but not the characters themselves.

So, if—like the earlier examples—what you are interested in writing is about unwanted pregnancy (and who isn’t?!) take away all the details of the story you might have been thinking about and narrow it down into its barest concept. See if it’s still interesting. What makes your concept unique? What haven’t we seen or read before?

If you’ve got a couple concepts in mind, great! If not, don’t despair! The next few posts will give you a few strategies for coming up with concepts. Before you set your heart on any one concept, let’s generate a few concepts. Quite a few. Maybe a hundred or so. (It’s not as hard as you might think. After all, Sharknado is a thing.)

I, of course, am aiming for success. And for myself, success means something specific. And huge. For you, it might just be to see a story through to completion. Or maybe to touch just one person. However you define success, shoot for it.

​That young woman in my class reached success at a very young age, for all these years later, her essay still touches me. I’m her one person. I still think about it as I continue working towards my own success.

We’re going to briefly jump ahead in the process and then revisit this topic later more in depth when it comes time to planning an actual project.

But, sometimes, what inspires you can help you conjure up your what-to-write. And if you’re truly inspired with the project, that inspiration will carry you to The End or Fade Out. (Again…maybe both!)

When I sat down to write Bad Elf and The Krampus, I had many concepts to choose from—thrillers, comedies, rom-coms, paranormal horror. Wonderful concepts. Bad Elf bubbled to the top of my attention for a few reasons.

​I had recently finished and marketed a Christmas screenplay—Joyous Noel. It’s about a misunderstood, semi-orphaned boy who does all the wrong things in order to do something