is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Monday
Jan 16, 2006

Re: In A World... posted by Martin

An echoing voice in my head, visions of fast-cut explosions and action set to pounding, pulsing, throbbing music. I have heard your narrator.

So on a quick reaction, here are my top three that I’d like to see (and therefore, write), with a few of my own notes:

#3 Telepathy as a disease? Keeping a secret when everybody can read your mind? Genius. Awesome. Bravo. Tricky, I’d imagine, and complex, but a concept worthy of the challenges.
#5 Ideas like diseases—much like commercial jingles and memes. Also, because I’ve always loved the Inferno. What about a twist that posits Dante himself visited this land with aliens, and wrote the Inferno as code to the world? Talk about ideas as disease—the Inferno of Dante became the modern hell of the Christians, after all.
#7 We can already figure the market value for a human life, no matter how despicable this might be, but imagine if robotics had advanced to the point where you could transfer consciousness to another being? Then suddenly, the soul would have a value outside of life itself. What if the rebellion was remaining human?

Honorable mention: Robots fighting to help us fight for our humanity? My hat is off, sir.

A question: can we combine some of these ideas? I’ll see if you like any of my feedback first, but imagine that only humans who have transferred their souls (#7) to advanced robots have the telepathy (#3).

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

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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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

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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.