is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

This Day, Tuesday, September 08, 2009, in Fastball!

Tuesday
Sep 08, 2009

Naming Characters With Google Adwords — Martin Ball

Robin Sloan, looking to come up with an evocative and memorable name for his new detective character, ran a Google AdWords campaign as a proof of concept.

But okay, I’ll be honest. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can provide their own intrinsic rewards. There’s an aspect of exploration to it, too: you’re pressing out into new tool-territory, learning about what you can and can’t do.

Robin’s on my radar because he is making an attempt at exactly what I was writing about previously. He’s released two short stories on his website, The Writer & The Witch and Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store with attractive cover designs. Both stories are freely available and can also be bought in Kindle format.

For a novella he’s writing, he turned to Kickstarter for funding. As of this writing, he’s fully funded at his $3,500 goal plus an extra $2,000. These are pre-sold books, with some extras if you funded at a higher level.

I loved the idea of what he’s doing, so I pledged. These kind of models are great experiments into the future of publishing, and seem to be working well for Robin. We wish him luck and are eagerly awaiting our copy of his book.

Fastball! Archives

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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.