is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Sunday
Mar 26, 2006

Weekly Wrap-Up + 2! (3/18/06 - 3/26/06) posted by kza

Kinda like the Funky Four + One More… only, y’know, not.

So this week’s been full of discussion, if very little forward momentum. Sometimes that happens, y’all.

The big thing this week has been Round Nine, The Atheist v. Atmosphere. By Shockah’s estimate, this round probably would’ve been over by now, but Shockah and Burley got sidetracked by whether or not an autistic character is appropriate for the Atmosphere story, and other meta-discussions relating to such, even though it’s highly likely that we won’t be writing any autistic characters in whatever wins the Spitball! Tourney of Story Ideas. Also, Shockah owes a story sketch of The Atheist, one that takes place on our modern-day Earth and not on an alien planet, and he swears he’ll have it done soon, but really, nothing’s gonna move forward until he does.

Then, there was some rules discussion about how to gracefully exit a Round for the time being if it looks like it aint going anywhere anytime soon, known by the more elegant name tabling. Unfortunately, that discussion also ground to a halt, which was so ironic that all the anemics in a fifty mile radius were instantly cured.

Also, Burley is getting ready to do a sequence method analysis of Blue Fuckin’ Velvet. He had a few questions, that Shockah, as designated expert (snort), answered the best he could. We’re all quite excited to see what Burley comes up with.

Finally, both Shockah and Burley posted their philosophies behind creating character sketches for the story ideas. Why? Because it’s fun. Burley, by simply explaining why he likes to name characters, has pretty much volunteered himself to name every character, as far as I’m concerned. (I hate doing it, y’see.) (Another aside: He credits me with “Valerie Plum”, but I’m pretty sure that’s his, too. He has enough names for both of us.)

Odds for next week:

Finishing Round Nine: 2-1
Figuring out rules for tabling: 4-1
Getting hung up on minutiae of space travel: Even
Someone suggests that the “Rasputin” character be autistic: 900-1

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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.