I had started work on the novel for Cinco de Mayo Massacre a long time ago but I could never get past the first chapter, so I shelved it after staring at the screen with writers block for several days. The story was all written in a treatment I did a while ago, but

After some serious thought I pulled out the 1/2 completed screenplay and 14 page treatment for Bedbugs from Hell. After a lot of thought I finally decided to make this my next official writing project and my first novel that I will seriously attempt to get published. Rather than just call it the same things, I thought I would name the book after the Shady Palms Motel that is the centerpiece of the story.

The great thing about this project is that the story is basically written. Now I just have to fill in the gaps and add some detail. I don’t have to worry about special effects or other film related crap. I can just write the story the way I see it and then it’s done. If nobody officially publishes it I can always self-publish through Amazon.

Given the fact I have little time to write anymore, I think I am giving myself a year to come up with a solid first draft for this one. We’ll see, I’ve always been one to play it by ear, so maybe I’ll fall into a good creative streak and push this puppy out faster.

The editing was long and painful simply because I have had a lot of personal stuff to deal with over the past few months and it has been extremely difficult to find  time and focus on the story.

The script is basically done.  There ware three scenes I want to briefly revisit before I start letting some of my peer take a stab at it…no pun intended. I’m going to shelve it for the holidays and dust the confetti off it after New Years.

More on this in 2010!

As of this moment, the script is at 134 pages; the single largest screenplay I have ever completed.  I know there are some “pros” out there that can scoff at that, but Fuck You.  This is my story to tell, my damn near two years of development and my celebration to enjoy – and you know you were once there in your humble careers as well. For some of you out there, I know you are still wishing you could get to this point. Trust me, I know the struggle, and if you keep pressing forward it will happen for you.

While I am at a very celebratory point with the script,  I can’t take all of the credit however. My friend Kreg contributed a number of twists and turns to this grand story arc and I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t shared his ideas for the script with me. As I have been rewriting, I think I have only further worked those ideas into the story and reinforced them with other bits. While I may have changes the order of things, I feel I served my characters with just cause and realistic situations.

My writing style, as I have learned, is very “organic” in nature. Some writers outline every detail and they are crippled without it. I just start coming up with ideas. Some of them I write down. Others I let swirl around in my head for a while and eventually they find their way out. That is the way it was with this rewrite. I basically skimmed over my notes on the last draft and then I sat down and started writing.  I knew the story already in my head and where I wanted to go with it, so I just wrote. Occasionally I looked at the old draft, but I hardly ever copied anything directly from it.  While the new story may read like some of the original script, there was no copy and pasting.

As I started getting into more heated scenes I found myself having to go back and insert small details into the story. I mainly did this because I’m one of those people that watches a movie and says “How the hell did that happen?” or “Why did that idiot just go into that dark alley?” I feel fairly confident that the story is resolved, the characters are resolved and while I don’t leave anything open for a dreaded sequel, I think the story ends in a way that viewers will be able to carry the story forward in their own minds and be happy with however they see it ending.

There were even a couple of times when I was writing this version when I had to just trust my characters.  We got into a tug of war here and there, and any writer know what I mean. I wanted to push the story in one direction, but my characters would never do some of the things I wanted, so I had to trust them.  I’m glad I did because in the end they surprised me.  The main villain became more sick and twisted that I could have ever imagined, the rogue cop began taking matters into this own hands and blatantly stretching the law to get his man, and the hero, if he is a flawed hero, well, he went off the deep end, but in the end he swam back to the shore to live another day.

So, what’s next for this story? Unfortunately I have one more rewrite left, really just to hammer out some structure issues I brushed off and make sure the continuity flows. I want to pass it around to a few people for a read and then maybe let a script doctor give it a read. There is a Screenwriter’s Conference in October up in Los Angeles. It is my goal to have the script polished and ready for a pitchfest they are having.

In my heart I know this is a good story. It is an original story. And if I have it my way, it’s going to make a damn good movie one day.

For those of you following me on Twitter you may recall I posted a photo of a book called How Not to Write a Screenplay. I bought the book mainly as a reference for scripting items like flashbacks and dream sequences. It also has some great tips for trimming the fat and rewording scenes into the basics while using examples from other screenplays. I tend to be extremely descriptive when I write, so it was a good booster for me and really drove home a few points.

Now that I have my head wrapped around the story more, I’m starting to make things a little more uniform and adding explanations for things that were initially kind of like WTF? I have been having fun adding new frights and gore to the story and developing the characters further along the way. I’m at the point where my characters are starting to control the story so I find myself saying “Oh, Henry wouldn’t do that…” so then I have to forcibly push him in the direction I want with violence or horror. One thing the first draft lacked was a high enough body count for my satisfaction. I don’t want to start dropping corpses like Jason Voorhees on a mushroom bender, but there is an underlying crime story plot, so I’ve started showing glimpses of the violent nature of the crimes rather than lightly eluding to them after the fact. We see the girl get murdered rather than simply mention it in a news report; stuff like that.

The final piece of the puzzle I have plugged in are some the physical manifestations of the main tormented spirit. I never wanted to come out and say there is a haunting going on, but I wanted to explore how somebody battling with stress and nightmares may easily brush of some of the more subtle tendencies of a haunting as coincidence.

Personally, the more I think about it, Old Mill Road can have a creepy ring to it…you know.. never go out to Old Mill Road alone after dark…etc. I’ll play with it a little more before I make it final though. Hell, if I manage to sell the screenplay rather than make it myself, they can call it whatever they want.

As far as script updates, the script was just over 62 pages from beginning to end when I started on this last rewrite. There were number of vague descriptions, location shots were not broken down correctly and, quite frankly, there just wasn’t enough spooky stuff going on. With this new version of the rewrite I am about 1/4 through and the script has already grown to 88 pages. I want to have at least a 120 page script by the time I am done. Hopefully I’m adding some more tension and a couple more scares as well. It all depends how it is finalyl shot and edited, but I think this is a pretty original story we have going here.

Enough hot air for now…back to the grind…

The fires in San Diego back in October 2007 really set the project back because I had wanted to start filming bits for a trailer and playing with makeup for the main ghost character. I had hope to have the film nearly completed by now, but this economic hill we are all climbing had not been making it the easiest. I think somewhere in there I definitely lost focus on the project and I had a few other items taking precedent.

I wanted to shoot Hospital Hill to try and test some effects I was going to use in Redress, but once I had to shelve that project for numerous reasons, Redress seemed to get thrown in to an open grave and have a few shovels full of dirt tossed over it. Then my brain kept teasing me with story ideas for Ghost Lights, so I finally had to sit down and write out that treatment. I started on the script, but Redress keeps whispering in my ear now… I guess that’s one of the things that torments me most right now: I have a tone of great ideas flying around my head, but since I have no actual commitment to any of them now, they all keep trading places in line. One moment it seems like this project will be my next big thing, and then it seems like another.

Just because I have not been actively typing on the actual script doesn’t mean I have not been working on the story at all. My writing partner and I have had several meetings to discuss plot points, camera angles and locations for filming. I have also been giving a lot of thought to the overall ghost design and some of the other elements in the story.

One thing that I have previously touched upon in the story is a roadside memorial for one of the characters that is killed. The more I have thought about it, the more I want to make this shrine a little more of a focal point for a few scenes in the story. Seriously, what if you accidentally killed somebody and everyday on your way to work you had to pass by this shrine on the side of the road reminding you of your sins? I think it would begin to eat at your soul after a while.

I have been spending some time researching the various makeups of roadside memorials. I have an image of this white cross by the side of the road with a name neatly written on it. Someone, we don’t quite know who yet, always makes sure this cross has a fresh bouquet of pink tulips tucked neatly in its vase. Even though it’s been several years since the tragedy, a candle is always burning at the base of the shrine, rain or shine… can make a person start to wonder

Damn…I need to get back to the script!

It feels good to start writing again and the promise of making a new film – especially one that is (I hope) as terrifying as this one. usually when I start writing a story, I know where I want it begin, how I want it to end and then I have a few visions sprinkled here and there along the plot that I know I want to include.

As I pounded down cup after cup of coffee while typing away, I began expanding the story based on my first hand-written draft. My characters started becoming a little more fleshed out and I was able to do some additional research to help tie this piece of fiction into the history of the area.

I have been working hard to create one of those legends, which you could have heard in any small town about a certain building or a creepy house or a particular stretch of the road. I think I have crafted something that will leave people scratching their heads wondering where they have heard this story before as the story unveils itself as if it is based on an actual legend, which is my own personal nod the film like The Blair Witch Project. All of this has spawned from my own personal love for local ghost stories and regional paranormal phenomena, such as ‘ghost lights‘.

When I was younger I was a Boy Scout and we would always stay up late and tell ghost stories around the campfire. Some were legendary, some were completely made up on the spot, but they always made you walk back yo your tent worried to look over your shoulder if something moved in the woods. There are a few elements from those stories from my youth that I am going to try and incorporate into this new film along with a few local California legends.

When I was in 8th grade and living in Santa Paula, California, I stumbled across a book called Ghosts of the Haunted Coast by Richard Senate. For some reason, for my entire adult life, I have always looked back fondly on that book as I believe it was the first “local” type of ghost book I had actually ever encountered. I don’t know if it is because of the first hand accounts told by witnesses or the tales of investigative trips taken by Mr. Senate himself, but I have always been bound and determined to bring a few of the mentioned in this book to life on the screen, and I know there are others out there as well. One of the ghosts mentioned in the book is “Char Man” (a.k.a.: Charman or Char-Man), a horrendously disfigured ghost of a man who was burnt to death in a catastrophic fire and who haunts a spot by Ojai, California.

While this Ghost Lights story of mine does not center around the legend of Char Man specifically, I am making a direct reference to history in the script and hopefully I’ll be able to give people a glimpse of what Char Man looks like in my minds eye.

After sitting on my ass for the better part of a year – well not really sitting, but getting kicked down on my ass and then just sitting there and taking it while the confusion passes – I am starting to focus on “Ghost Lights” again.

The beginning, middle and end are all there. I have been spending the last week brainstorming about the characters and fleshing them out. I have also been trying to figure out how much money it is all going to cost in the end, as I really want to make the jump to HD with this one.

If everything goes according to plan I should have a script finally ready in another few weeks, but I am not making any promises yet.

As I sat on the script for the last year I began realizing that there was so much more to the story that I wanted to tell. I had been toying with the idea of doing a novel for a long while now. Way back in the day I had actually written a number of novels, shorts and poetry. As my creative side boils over with ideas I think it may be best to start churning out more of these as novels.

The nice thing about a written story is that the MPAA can’t tell you what to cut. You don’t have to argue with producers over the script and there are no technical issues with telling your story. All you have to do is get the words out onto the page

As far as who will publish the story and so on, I have no idea yet. I’m going to write the book before I market it. If you guys like my films, then I know you will love the original stories. If everything goes according to plan, I want to eventually write a novelization of Slaughter Disc which will be based on the original short story I wrote way back in high school.

I was getting ramped up to film Hospital Hill this fall and I just recently learned that the studio I was planning on renting has gone out of business.  This really sucks because one of the sole reasons I was going to make this film was because they had an awesome medical set with this brutal looking hospital bed that I planned on using.

At this point we don’t have the resources to film these scenes someplace else locally and we certainly don’t have the $3000 to $5000 dollars a day that the hospital set studios up in LA wants to ass fuck us for.

So, unless somebody has an operating room we can film in, or somebody wants to donate $10,000 so we can film in LA for 2 days, I am officially shelving this project at this point in time.  Luckily, it’s a sweet and short script, so it’s easy to dust off.

Oh well.  Fuck it.  Again.

I’m sleeping in tomorrow.