I've discussed "Sweet Dreams: A Sandman's Story" openly here, as I'm currently promoting it.
For the better part of 2008, I discussed "The Life and Times of Igor" with several Maniacs regularly as I was, in essence, keeping them up to date with my promotions of the comic book version, finding the agent in Oregon, waiting, waiting, more waiting which saw time being filled with various excerpts posted on the now mostly dead blogs at Mania, some more waiting, and then eventually the Dear Writer letter I received.
But I'm not bitter.
Well, not anymore.
Truthfully, I wasn't bitter then -- exhausted, yes, but not bitter. I'd just squeezed another sixty pages out of a story I'd been writing, rewriting, updating, changing, and polishing since 2004.
A brief, full account of this can be read at my MySpace page, you'll find the link in the "Everything One Could Ever Hope For..." section here. (Please don't laugh at the picture, I'm not too terribly fond of cameras.)
"Life and Times of Igor," amazingly, always resurrects itself somehow, and there's always some new detail I can throw into it, and I'm always amazed how I never thought of that before.
The basic idea of the original screenplay was simple: Dr. Frankenstein gets arrested for dumping toxic waste and Igor, suddenly unemployed, needs a new job. He finds odd jobs in rural Transylvania, Utah, and encounters the Wolfman, Dracula, the Mummy, the Blob, Quasimodo, Lady Esmerelda, a bunch of angry villagers, Dr. Jekyll and, of course, Mr. Hyde.
It's not as complicated as you might think. Think "Van Helsing" only funnier.
And without Van Helsing.
I feel there's still a very good chance for my hunchback story to survive, cause we'll be getting remakes of Dr. Jekyll, Frankenstein, and a few other B - Movie monster stories in the coming years.
I still have the original 120 page screenplay, plus the sixty pages of new material for what would've been the comic book. I'm still kicking around the idea of a mini-series for this, as the material I wrote last year serves as an accidental prequel, detailing Igor's lack of interest in baseball, Victor Frankenstein's lack of interest in the Bearded Lady at the circus where he performs, and so on.
There's also references to a Temple of Scienceology and crazed cult members that Igor brain washes (using a mop and Brain-O) in the bowels of said temple.
Victor runs away from the circus to join Evil Medical School, Igor quits his brain washing gig, and they both encounter each other late one night at some weigh station of life and two destinies converge forever.
That's my Igor story.
Another increasingly growing story I've worked on has the overreaching title of "Interesting Times," and it finally grew to have six episodes, all running at two and a half hours or more.
I should probably detail the birth of "Interesting Times" now in print, as I'm afraid I'll forget it.
Fall 2000
I'd officially become interested in ghosts those autumn months. I'd picked up a book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Ghosts And Hauntings," and read through it feverishly. I'd also, interestingly enough, encountered in my French classes a young lady who actively described herself as "Wiccan," along with an interesting person who was actually a victim of poltergeist activity.
"How convenient," I thought. I soon realized there was a term for this: synchronicity. It was as if the forces of the universe itself said Now's Our Chance. Light The Passion And Hold On Tight.
In the fall of 2000, I wrote something like fifteen pages, but had to put it on hold.
Spring 2001
Spring break rolled around, and with a week of nothing to do, I sat down and wrote eighty pages worth of material in five days. I then show it to a person who is still my most trusted literary critic.
She read it, and uttered that famous last word: "sequel."
I railed against her, said she was crazy, and that there was no way in hell I could write a sequel. Doing the first one had driven me crazy as it was.
Up until that time, I basically worked on what was then known as "Once Upon A Midnight Dreary..." for a few months, off and on, while not really taking it too seriously. I'd started promoting what would eventually become "Summertime Blues," and found myself constantly reading any book that seemed legitimate dealing with the supernatural. I read Sylvia Browne, I devoured John Edward, I took comfort in James van Praagh's experiences.
I read countless other books on hauntings, haunted locations, and mysticism.
But I still had no plans for a sequel.
Spring 2002
By this time I knew a lot more about the paranormal world, and realized "Ghostbusters" had gotten it all wrong. I wanted to now make a movie that was, arguably, more realistic than the "ghost in the bedroom" movies Hollywood had been making for countless years.
I'd even found a hook for a sequel, so I started writing what was then called "Shake And Shiver," a sort of homage to Scooby Doo and that phrase which comes from the opening theme song.
I wrote that fairly quickly, and found myself rewriting "Once Upon A Midnight Dreary..." as I was going along.
Then a third one popped up, straight out of nowhere. It was, as originally conceived, to complete the sequence of events which was then thought of as a trilogy. That final episode was to be called "Stranger Things."
From June to December was spent on rewriting those three scripts, plus "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" debuted and I was passionately in love with it. It didn't truly influence the material I was working on, but it did truly inspire me creatively.
I kept working, feverishly.
I kept reading, constantly.
Those mysterious forces behind me kept pushing me forward, and I started having the craziest dreams I'd ever had in my lifetime. Mysterious things started happening in my waking life, such as encountering the spirit world in the form of long dead felines I'd once loved.
And I pressed on, like a madman destined to discover new lands he didn't know he was looking for.
2003
Sometime in this year, a fourth movie appeared in my head straight out of the blue. It was to push "Stranger Things" back to number four while this new one was to be called "Amazing Things," and referenced a line from scripture that Jesus speaks. It also dealt with Atlantis.
So now here I was working on a whole new script that came out of nowhere, and suddenly I was working now on four episodes.
I spent that year working on what was then called "Once Upon A Midnight Dreary, "Shake And Shiver," and "Stranger Things" all at once while embracing this new third episode.
I also suffered burnout badly sometime around summer.
But I kept reading.
The rest of the year was devoted to more reading, more writing, more rewriting.
2004
By this time, I believe I'd officially changed the title of "Shake And Shiver" to "Almost Unreal." The name for "Stranger Things" had officially been dropped, and it was temporarily left nameless.
Sometime in this era, I'd also come up with yet another installment, one set in Louisiana that explored Voodoo. I flirted with this idea, then dumped it, but not totally as I would find out later in life.
So the rundown went like this, 1 - "Once Upon A Midnight Dreary," 2 - "Almost Unreal," 3 - "Amazing Things, 4 - fka "Stranger Things," and what would eventually become Part 5 was dreamed up as well, which put the plot details of "Stranger Things" back another episode and the newly vacant four would become a story about voodoo.
September came, and a friend then told me she'd read a little book she'd think I'd like, and it was called "The DaVinci Code."
I was instantly upset, because the game had been radically changed for me. It also inspired a whole new level of historical relevancy to everything I'd been writing about earlier, so delved into whole new territories of study and it lead me to one conclusion:
I needed to do, basically, a page one rewrite of a lot of the stuff that had come before. My parents also just happened to buy me a new computer in that upcoming December, so I had to transfer all my files to the new system, and a new word processor.
All the work I had done, I now felt, was average. It was okay, but it needed a hell of a lot of work to be really, really good to stand up against the now complete trilogy of "Lord of the Rings" and the works of Dan Brown.
So, I went back to the original sources of material I'd had, and flipped what was once called "Once Upon A Midnight Dreary" on its side, taking it from a different angle, and rechristened it "The Fountain of Light.
Then I started having those strange, mysterious dreams again, along with yet another newfound passion and inspiration. "Fountain" took the original story, kept it basically the same, and made it much more profound and, subsequently, changed the entire overreaching basis of the series.
2005
About one month, and 150 pages later, I and my friend who read the very first draft nearly four years earlier were stunned at what had happened. I then set about revising the other scripts.
I started watching entire new documentaries, reading whole new books on history, and Sylvia Browne herself seemed to illuminate all these things I'd conveniently ignored the first go around.
In between these incidents, I took to revising "Summertime Blues" into a more contemporary form, as I'd been working on it for a good five years at that time. And "The Life and Times of Igor" was officially becoming a major player in my life, so all of "Interesting Times" took a sudden backseat.
2006
I kept working on all the above listed projects in some form or another, tweaking here, adding there, revising this, polishing that.
Then, in February, the forgotten idea of doing a voodoo story in Louisiana came back up. It was to become Part Four, and dealt with the devil himself. That spring "What The Devil Made Me Do" became the first script to go through a first draft stage that was so very close to the finished project that I, amazingly enough, felt could've improve on it at all.
Four years later, very little has changed in Episode Four.
When I finished one of the drafts of "Devil Made Me Do" back in '06, I had to deal with "Igor" and "Summertime Blues" some more, and also kept up my research for "Interesting Times."
Now, from here on, the details get sketchy as it's all blended together too seamlessly.
Sometime, now knowing a great deal more about the paranormal, I'd realized the Part 5 script I wanted to write was going to be too big, and the decision was made to cut it into two parts, which effectively left me at a six part series.
A lot of rewriting, reading, revising, and so on has been the norm since that has happened.
And, as of now, I still have no official script for what will become the sixth and final installment of "Interesting Times." I'm polishing up about 30% of Part 1, the same goes for Part 2, and in either 2006 or 2007 I started a Page One rewrite for "Amazing Things."
I wrote sixty new pages...and somehow lost it.
Burnout hit me hard. Very hard. I couldn't make myself write it.
Part 4 is still in 95% excellent condition, and will not change so drastically.
Parts 5 and 6, though, are up in the air, but more so for Part 6 as the script for Part 5 does exist, it's just going to be retitled.
In the spring of 2007, after witnessing a wonderful documentary about vampires, I'd came up with "Unbitten," and tried to give to a friend to write. She wouldn't make the time, so I started writing it.
It was good, but it got harder and harder to write as it progressed. I finished it, and thanked God that it was over. I never touched it again, though I do like it and feel it's not yet finished.
It doesn't need a page one rewrite, but it's not finished either, and I'll worry about that later.
Late summer came about, and then I came up with the idea of "Sweet Dreams - A Sandman's Story." In about two months I'd started from scratch and came up with something truly magical that got me away from everything else I'd worked on for nearly a decade. It came in at 139 pages, and has stayed that way ever since.
That was 2007, and when 2008 rolled around I said to my friend "I've got to finish the series this year. I've just got to, or all the work will be a waste or I'll go out of my head."
I'd set out a schedule to work on it.
I flat out completely failed to do it, and somehow working on "Life and Times of Igor" again.
2009 And Beyond...
There's lots of work yet to be done. I often look at the stack of manuscripts and research materials and get cold feet, yet I'm continuing my research which, fortunately, I scaled back because it was getting too top heavy.
I still swear I'll finish the six part series.
After all, I made a promise to a few individuals it would get done and they like to remind me every so often that I'm not working on it. They didn't push me when I had serious burnout again when the latest version of Igor was returned last October or so, and I thank them for that.
The work will continue, and I will complete it.
But I've learned I can't be rushed, can't be pushed, and it has to all come naturally or else it'll all fall apart.
But I thank the sources of inspiration that leaked the secrets of the series to me over the course of four years because, if I honestly knew back then it'd evolve to such a level of complexity, I would've flat out refused to do it.
As a side note, this may be the final blog entry I make for awhile, at least. There's promotions to write up, mail off, and other things that need to be attended to.
The most recent revisions to "Summertime Blues" are very nearly complete, and then there's what to do with "Life and Times of Igor" as well, but some other things need my attention as well.
So, until next time...happy reading.
