And that means I have been blogging for about four years. So in honor of that-here is my first entry ever (From May 15 2003)!

So…I wanna be a star…

Well, not really. I want to be a writer. Maybe a comic book or two…and screenplays. When did I come upon this realization? From birth? No. When I was a kid? I wanted to draw. I wanted to draw my little heart out. I created goofy, pale imitations of my favorite superheroes. I can still remember the muscular torsos characters with really short legs. Such as “Turtleman”. Oddly enough, he was not a Spider-Man rip off-no, he aped Green Lantern.

I wanted to draw comic books. I realized something a few years ago. I am a really slow artist. I take forever to draw.

I love movies. Not love like I would love a wife, of course. But I really enjoy them. All kinds. Dramas. Family films. Horror movies. Sci-Fi. Anime. Action. Comedies. Even chick flicks. I like to think about the stories. How they unfold, how the actor did. I fell in love with storytellers. I wanted to be one. And then I saw the Matrix. Dammit.

I daydream stories like that at work when I am tired of listening to the phones. And the phones at work never let me out of the world. Cheap ass phone lines. I predicted Identity by accident…because twenty minutes in, I started thinking “what would make a really cool story”…only to see on the screen that someone else had the same idea. Only they sold it as a script. So back to the Matrix. I thought,”The difference between me and these two brothers is they wrote the idea down!” Well, that and they directed a lesbian sex scene between Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon, but I digress. Why didn’t I(write my stories down, not make movies with lesbian sex)? The first person who kills my story by explaining all the other difference has to go to bed without supper.

So I started. First, I bought some books, including Max D. Adam’s the Screenwriter’s Survival Guide(both entertaining and insightful) and William Martell’s Secrets of Action Screenwriting(it’s not just explosions, guns and brainless babe victims).

And then I started to write. And made two giant errors. I started to write more than one script. Bad idea-but made sense at the time. But you really getting nothing done. You have fifteen scripts-and about thirty pages between them. Second? No backup. Everything was on my hard drive. And one day, George Clooney erased my hard drive. He’ll deny it, but it was his doing. See, I was making a backup CD of the O’Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack(ironic, huh?). And something went horribly wrong. The CD didn’t like the computer and everything went black. When I rebooted, and rebooted….and rebooted…the monitor just SAT there. It stared blankly at me like it was one of the Hilton girls. I had lost everything. Including one nearly finished script. And I crawled into the fetal position. And cried like a girl meeting N’Sync. Now I back up all my work.

So, now I am rewriting my main script…and saving the other ideas to touch on after. Up next…other jobs I would like.

So yeah, I want to write stories that will get turned into talkie pictures that move. And drawn ones that don’t. Gimme your love.