is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Monday
Jan 09, 2006

How To Use This Site posted by kza

(The following is intended for those new to the site as well as co-administrators who are still trying to wrap their feeble minds around the vast, intimidating thing they’ve helped birth.)

Welcome to Spitball! (Exclamation point is mandatory.)

The point of the site is to write a screenplay, from start to finish, from germinal ideas to 120 pages of dramatic goodness. Although the authors of this site, Burley Grymz and Urban Shockah, are ultimately the authors of the screenplay, we invite everyone on the Blog-o-Web to contribute. That creates some sticky conundrums, so, before you do that, you may want to peruse this and this.

Okay, so you’ve decided to contribute — what now?

Well, first thing, read the entries. Burley and I will, in all likelihood, have a running conversation about the screenplay via blog entries, kinda like how those goofs over at SLOG discuss Brokeback Mountain and threaten to post pictures of nude men and women at each other.

(I say “in all likelihood” because, this being the beginning stages of this site, I have no idea how it will evolve. Stay tuned.)

Anyway, so you’ve read about our ideas and still want to contribute. You’ll notice that instead of blog comments, we have a link that reads, “Comment on this post in the forum”. Because this project is potentially huge and unwieldy, the forum is our home base, our Death Star if you will, where all the ideas will be collected and the real work will be done. Each and every blog post will have an accompanying forum topic, so there should be a place for every idea and every thought. But if not, we also have the “Ideas and Critique” board and the “Plot” board — and I presume some of the heavy lifting (collating relevant posts and debuting drafts of scenes) will occur here as well. And while you’re in the forum, why not visit some of the other boards? We’ve got places to discuss movies, books, and TV, as well as a place to talk about your own work, and other specialized boards. Want to bitch about the look and organization of this site? Go here.

(Remember to register to access the forum!)

So that’s kinda how Spitball! is going to roll: Burley and I will post ideas about the screenplay (and eventually, completed pages), and you can provide feedback in the forums, and we’ll listen to your feedback and fold it into the ideas and pages, and you’ll provide more feedback, and so on and so on, and maybe, eventually, we’ll have a completed screenplay at the end of the tunnel.

A screenplay that anyone is welcome to use.

Comments (0) — Category: About

HIDE Down Arrow

What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


 Subscribe to our feed


Our Twitter account, where we note when longer articles are posted. While we're at it, here's Kent and Martin's Twitter accounts.

Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.