is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Tuesday
Jan 31, 2006

Re:[3] Round Two: Rise to Vote, Sir posted by kza

I know — y’all thought I was gonna post Round Three. Sorry, not yet. Definitely tomorrow.

But a few notes about that last round:

I have no idea how well emotions translate from this blog to the people reading it, but I think there’s a small chance that some of you might’ve been surprised by my vote for La Commune Planet.

If so, your surprise was justified. If we’re talking about which idea I genuinely liked more, than yes, I really liked Robots in Love more than La Commune Planet.

Fortunately for those communards, mere “like” wasn’t going to cut it.

The thing is, my real problem with La Commune Planet, as of this writing, is one of passion. I mean, I named it #3 in my list, and here I was crapping all over it. What happened? I’m not entirely sure, but once in the cold light of day, my previous passion for the idea kinda died out, and as Burley (and gdd, in the forum) expressed their enthusiasm, I began to get a sense of what the problem was.

I’ll save that for its next battle, however.

So why the flip-flop? Well, I thought about it, and came to a couple conclusions:

A) Although I have a problem with it, I realized that it’s not nearly as big a problem that Burley and I face with Rasputin the Translator. As I mentioned to him a few days ago, with that one, we’re either going to find common ground for our differing interpretations (and it’ll probably cruise to the finals), or we won’t and it’ll die in its next battle. Commune, however, as I said before, was a problem of passion, and if in a matter of a week it can go from #3 to #20, then there’s always the possibility of that it could reverse course by the time it has to fight again. In that time, I could stumble upon the way “into” this idea that really gets me excited. This was, in a sense, a “benefit of the doubt” vote.

B) And all of the above wouldn’t have mattered at all if Robots in Love was airtight, but clearly it wasn’t. I asked myself a question: if Robots in Love were all mine to create, if I had total control over every aspect of it, would I do it? The hard, honest truth was that I would table it and move onto something else. It wasn’t ready, and it was going to take a lot of energy to get it to that point. It wouldn’t have been fair to try and vote it through, I don’t think.

Okay, ‘nuff navel gazing. Round Three, coming up!

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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.