is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Friday
Jan 13, 2006

Re: Sci Fi? posted by kza

A. Unless we were seriously going to explore the idea of “Prison Planet” as a metaphor, of course its going to be SF in some sense.

B. Genre isn’t for marketers. Genre is legitimate framework or window through which to view a story. Every genre has its conventions, and you can play them straight or subvert them. I like subversion myself (or maybe I’m just saying subversion is easier, since playing it straight and doing it well seems much harder to me), but that’s also why The Corrections came up so early in this discussion — one way to avoid the “same ol’ same ol” is to start mixing DNA and create mutants.

C. Yet: SF can mean Star Wars, Star Trek. It can mean Terminator or Alien(s). It can mean Primer or Solaris. It can also mean Videodrome, The Brood, or even Crash (1996). (It’s both cool and kinda sad that those last three are by the same guy.) SF, to me, is about taking an idea or premise that simply doesn’t exist at all in the real world and extrapolating something (usually a story) out of it.

D. Anyway, the point is, when you think “SF” you think of limited boundaries; when I think of “SF”, I think of a lack of them. Therefore, SF, to me, really isn’t a genre.

E. Five Days of Continuous Blogging — I did it!

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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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.