is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Friday
Jan 20, 2006

Kick out the Worlds posted by Martin

To paraphrase Tom Robbins: In a world where there are two kinds of people, one kind of person will realize that there really are two kinds of people: the kinds of people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those that know better.

1. In a World where convicted murderers are banished to a planet instead of being put to death, one couple—the parents of a murder victim—want revenge. They plan a trip to the Prison Planet where they will track down the monster that killed their child, and destroy him in the exact same way that he destroyed their lives.

2. In a World where society has shunted its unwanted off to a Prison Planet for centuries, the government is faced with a problem. The Prison Planet is dying. Do they let all of the citizens die cruel and unusual deaths, or do they stage the largest rescue mission ever to bring back to a crowded planet the outcasts, criminals and degenerates that they worked so hard to rid themselves of?

3. In a World where a supreme court has ruled that “cruel and unusual” punishment excludes the death penalty, the first batch of off world prisoners is sent to the new facility on Ganesh XIX, where they will be housed forever. But when they arrive, they realize they’re not alone on the planet—and one by one they start disappearing.

4. In a World where cities have been abandoned for fear of terrorist attacks where people gather, one group of artists braves the the occupied downtown core to rescue a sculpture from a museum. The only problem is—the straggling, violent city dwellers never let country people in, and they sure as hell never let country people out.

5. In a World where society is split into two classes, the New Trade Marxists are pitted against the Transactionists in a televised battle supreme. The loser will banish all of their believers to a distant planet. The winner takes over the one-world economy and will decide forevermore what future humanity follows.

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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.


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Kent M. Beeson

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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

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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.