is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Wednesday
Mar 15, 2006

The Spitball! Tourney of Story Ideas -- Heat #2! posted by kza

Now that Heat #1 has wrapped up, we’re now onto Heat #2, where things really start to heat up! Big Money! Big Prizes! I looooove it!

So, there’s gonna be two parts to this. First, we’re going to determine the order of battle. I’m going to take the first four winners (Rasputin the Translator, La Commune Planet, Little Black Stray, and The Atheist) and order them #1-#4, and Burley is going to take the next four winners (Terminal Connection, Time to Die, Atmosphere [mad props to my late uncle thrice removed], and The Scabs) and order them #1-#4, and the they will go against each other, my #1 vs. his #4, all the way down to my #4 to his #1.

(God, this heat’s gonna be trouble. I like all these ideas a lot.)

Then, the battles will be conducted as usual, with pros and cons, with one major difference: each of us will have to contribute a page-length character sketch of the protagonist for each story (thus, each story will have two character sketches of the same character, and each battle will have four character sketches total).

And that’s about it. Same voting rules, same tie-breaker scenarios, same penalties of forfeiture — unless Burley has some suggestions. Burley?

(Oh, and post your Top 4 anytime you’re ready.)

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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.