is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Tuesday
Jan 31, 2006

State of the Blog: January posted by Martin

Tomorrow we have our one-month Anniversary. Spitball! was officially launched on January 1, 2006. How do we feel about that? What have we been doing?

We started by feeling around in the dark. Shockah’s process is much different than mine, appropriately, because I think our talents and weaknesses conveniently dovetail. As he plans to elaborate in a post on the subject, his process is very much from the inside out—from a small picture to the big one. I tend to work in the opposite way, thinking about the big picture and then zeroing in on the topic from outer space.

But, he stumbled on a great way to break through my initial meaderings about the two words we had picked to define or spark our mission: Prison Planet. Shockah penned a post about some ideas for Prison Planet movies based on the cheesy ubiquitous announcer saying “In a World…”. This started an all out plot bonanza, with each of us giving 25 to the cause, from which we picked 8 each that we’re arguing pros and cons for. In the end, we’ll have one plot to rule the blog, and focus our energy rays of writing on.

This month could be considered the beta month—we only told a few people about us, to shake out some of our systems. We’re happy with the response when we talk to people directly, but so far only one person has joined us in the forums (I call you out in thanks, gdd, and gratuitously link to your fine blog in gratitude). If you don’t know us, please come on into the forums and join us. We’re kind of fun if you interact with us, not unlike wind-up tin toys. If you do know us, where the hell are you? Get yer ASCII in there.

So, what does the world think of us? In a decidedly unscientific poll, Google ranks us 51st if you search for “spitball”, and an atrocious 131st if you search for “prison planet.” Hopefully that will improve over time. Links to us would help, for those of you with the power, will and graciousness to do so.

We will continue whittling down our plots to the top one, and arguing back and forth. Please give us feedback, let us know what you think—about our ideas, the whole thing, and even the design of the site.

To sum up: The state of the Blog is strong, optimistic, and looking forward to a good year. We hope you’ll be part of it.

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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

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.