is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Thursday
Apr 06, 2006

Round 9: A big stick posted by Martin

c) Start writing a post on tabling procedures?

I think that this might be interesting for the needlessly complex® rules futures, but I don’t think it’s actually needed in this round. I propose instead something radical:

Both ideas get canned.

I’m not really feeling the love for either of these that strongly, and it seems that the things that interest and pull me in are nearly opposite of the things that interest you and pull you in. I’m taking our disagreements over these ideas as a sign that the ideas weren’t that strong to begin with.

It’s like our friends who have an organic subscription farm (brief plug: fresh veggies, delivered each week nearby your home? Great prices, and great people? If you’re in Seattle, you could do much worse). In talking about farming with them, they said that a field that has sat fallow for many years is amazing to grow in. You have no problems with pests, and everything just goes well. Compare that with a field that has been planted where the soil is robbed of nutrition, and there are tons of problems with pests and the plants don’t grown nearly as well. I think we’re sitting in weak soil with these stories. I think we need a storyectomy. When we’re in more fertile soil I’ll bet we encounter none of the problems we’re currently having. What say you?

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.

Subscribe to our feed

Our Twitter account, where we note when longer articles are posted. While we're at it, here's Kent and Martin's Twitter accounts.

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.