Posting again

   I haven't been posting much lately because of Christmas and everything, but I'll probably start posting more now.
   By the way, I did get the stop motion animation kit, so I'm making my own movies now. I'll probably post one of them once I finish one, but right now I'm just playing around with the camera and making test movies.

Script writing

   I have some pretty good script writing software called "Celtx" which was a free download.  I don't know the web adress of the Celtx site, but Googling "Celtx" might get you to it. 

   I heard about it on a script writing website from the company that does NaNoWrimo (ywp.scriptfrenzy.org.) 

   I also once heard that Celtx is good for beginners, but a professional should get this other software that I can't remember the name of, which costs around two hundred dollars.  Honestly, I don't see the point in buying that. 

   I mean, Celtx does everything you need, script formatting wise, and also has story board making software built in to it.  So really, why do you need to spend two hundred dollars on the same software? 

   Um, okay...I should stop.  This is starting to get too much like a commercial.  But seriously, Celtx is worth getting.  I've written about a hundred pages of scripts since I got it last month.

New screenplay

   I don't have much else to post about, so I decided to post an excerpt from a screenplay I started working on last night.

EXT. Deckor city - morning 

JARED HOLMES, age twenty three, is walking through the city through the large crowds.  The song "What I got" is playing, as he makes his way to his apartment.

When he reaches it, he goes in the front door, and enters a seedy looking front lobby.

INT. Apartment lobby - morning

He walks through, ignored by the man at the counter, and goes into an elevator.

INT. Elevator - morning

He pushes the button for the floor his room is on, and the elevator does nothing.  Jared kicks the floor, and it starts going up.

after a second, he has to pry the door open, and then walks down the dirty and old hall to get to his room.

INT. Jared's room - hallway - morning

He walks down the hall, to his door.  He reaches into his pocket, and gets his key.  He has trouble getting the door to unlock, but finally forces it open.

INT. Jared's ROOM - MORNING

He walks inside, pausing for a moment to look at the small room that is his home. 

It is mostly empty, with an old futon to one side, and an oven on the other.  There is a small beanbag chair, which is ripped open.  Jared sees this, and...

Jared: Gregor!

A small dog, GREGOR walks out from the small bathroom, with a guilty look on his face.

Jared: (Continued) Don't ever chew up the beanbag chair again.  I can't...

He sighs, and plops down on the futon.  He turns on the TV, and starts watching a show.

After a few seconds, he glances sideways at the clock on the TV tray beside him that says 6:59, and gasps.

He sits up quickly, and walks over to the window.  He pulls the shade down when a bizarre grinding sound is heard.  Gregor whimpers.

Jared picks the dog up, and opens a hatch on the floor.  The inside is completely dark.  He goes inside, shutting the trapdoor.  The sound of him latching the chain lock is heard from inside.

There is a one second pause, when everything is quiet.  Then suddenly, the sound of a futuristic laser is heard, so loud, it's deafening.  It lasts for a few seconds, and after it stops, the TV and everything else goes black except for the small glowing blue digital clock beside Jared's futon. 

The sound of him unlatching the chain lock is heard, as the trap door slowly opens a crack, enough for him to look at the clock.  It still says 6:59.

He stares at it anxiously, until the number changes to a countdown:

The number 3 appears on the clock, as Jared jumps, and lowers his head, closing the hatch.

2, he latches the chain.

1, the sound of a scream is heard, and everything stops.

EXT. DECKOR CITY - MORNING

The city is very dark like night in the city, as we look down at it from high up in the air.  We hear a faint noise like that of a tornado in the distance.

After a second of taking in all of this, we start to barely make out some dark shapes moving through the deserted city...

   There you go.  I know it isn't professionally formatted like a real script, and that's because when I copied and pasted  it over from the file it was in, it removed all of the formatting, so I had to redo it on here.  And this post box isn't made for script formatting. 

Update

   I disassembled the movie sets for PumpkiNed because my crazy cats were about to destroy them if I left them out in the house for much longer.

   I'm putting filming the movie on hold for right now.  I need some good animation software, which I hope I'll get for Christmas.  Until then, I'll be mostly just working on scripts, and the book my cousin and I are writing, which is going very good so far.

   Also, I just came up with an idea for a story about an hour ago...but I probably won't start outlining it until a month or so, when my cousin and I are almost done, or done with our book.  It's going so smoothly and fast, though, it shouldn't be long until we finish it.

The Vegas Spy is finished!

   I just finished my novel this morning!  It's about 12,000 words, which isn't very long, but okay for a novel written in a month, I guess. 
   It's just a first draft, so it isn't very good yet, but it might turn out decent when I revise it.
   Now, I'm working on a novel my cousin and I are working on.

The Vegas Spy excerpt

I'm at about 11,000 words today (11,302 to be exact,) and I thought I'd post a little bit of my novel.  Here's the first page and a half:

   Thadump, thadump.

   Let me just say that riding in the trunk of a car is no fun at all.

   Thadump, thadump.

   Especially if you’ve just been kidnapped by strangers, stuffed into a burlap sack, and the car you’ve just been thrown in is doing about ninety on a small dirt road.

   Thadump, thadump.

   If I die in here, I want to make sure someone knows what happened.  I want to document this, but I don’t know how.

   I guess I could just recap the story so far, or, just tell what I can remember of it.

   I was staying home alone the night it happened.  My parents and little brother were at a restaurant, and if you’re wondering why I wasn't with them, it’s because I was grounded.  (Hey, I didn’t mean to destroy the garage.)

   Anyway, I had just made myself a sandwich, and was walking across the kitchen, when I saw him out the window over the sink.

   It was a tall man in a black trench coat, wearing a large hat pulled down about halfway over his face, which was obscured by sunglasses and a large unkempt beard. 

   He was standing at the edge of the front yard facing my house. 

   I blinked.  Was he really looking at me?  It was hard to tell because I couldn’t see his face very well.  The part I could see, though, looked very pale and ghost-like.

   I was about to call the cops, when he did something that really freaked me out: with a bright flash of white light, his shape warped, and a split second later it changed to a small child.  I almost screamed. 

   That isn’t possible! I thought. Is it?

   With another flash, the kid became an old lady who looked like the librarian in my town.  Flash.  This time what looked like a pro wrestler.  Flash.  A man eating a banana.  Flash…

   This went on for about seven minutes, when I thought (again) about calling the police.  But I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  I was mesmerized. 

   Just then, I saw the brightest flash of all, and the figure (which at the moment looked a lot like my uncle somehow) vanished.

   Ding, dong!

   Well.  That was a little disappointing.  I mean, I was expecting some explosion or gunshot, or something, like in horror movies.  I didn’t think the doorbell would just ring.  

   Disappointing, yet relieving, but still just a little creepy.  Like someone could still come up from behind and grab me.  I’m a sort of paranoid person, I guess.                               

   So a mysterious man in the front yard changes into a different person, disappears, and then (I think he) rings the doorbell.  What do you do?  This seems like a no brainer to me. 

   But still, I headed towards the door.  I still don’t know what made me do it.  What made me make one of the dumbest choices of my life.

   As I walked through the house, I heard something that scared me most of all, though I don’t really know why. 

   It was a voice coming from nowhere, whispering my name, Brian Montague, over and over.  It was freaky; even worse than an explosion, in some way that I didn’t understand.  

   I then reached the door, and opened it.  I didn’t see anyone there, and of course, that’s when someone (I couldn’t tell who it was, or what they looked like,) jumped out from nowhere, hit me over the head and knocked me out.  I didn’t wake up for a long time.

So there it was.  I'm not sure how good my book is, especially because it's just a first draft, but I'm hoping I can revise it and make it into a decent novel.

10,000 words!

   I just hit the 10,000 mark yesterday in my novel.  It's going pretty good, I guess.  It's just a first draft, though, and not publisher worthy yet.  So...yeah.  That's all.