"What Did You Say?" My Latest Episode of Littlest Pet Shop

This definitely falls under the "...and Other Writing" part of my blog's description. I'm very pleased with how the episode turned out. If you're a fan of the show, I hope you like it, too.

Busy Busy Busy

Clackety-clack

This has been a great week in terms of work and writing-related by-products. In addition to turning in a fun outline for my next Littlest Pet Shop script, I was able to swing by a certain place to pick up my assignment for the sooper-seekrit new project that I've been praying/hoping to be a part of. A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from telling you anything about it at this time (insert "but I'd have to kill you" joke here or, more accurately, a "they would have to kill me" joke), but let's just say it would be an awesome show to work on and I'll share details when I'm allowed to do so.

To give you an idea of how excited I was to be at the certain place, I hugged the producer of the show -- twice -- and I'm not much of a hugger at all. Fortunately, she's a friend and seemed to accept the hugs in the spirit they were intended.

As a bonus, I got a lot of work done on Giantkiller -- reorganizing it from a prologue and seventeen chapters of disturbingly uneven length (the shortest being 917 words and the longest being 14,058) to a prologue and thirty much more balanced chapters.

So, as stated, a great week. Go busy-ness!

Animation Insider

Jinkies! They interviewed you?

I was interviewed about writing for animation over at Animation Insider a while back but, for some reason, didn't post the link. Must be my impressive humility at work (or my addled brain). While you're there, check out the rest of the site. Even if you're just a little bit into animation, you'll groove on the fun interviews with folks on all levels of that branch of the showbiz tree.

Novel-wise, things are cruising along nicely. Doing a little bit every day to make the end of the month publish date happen. Currently, I'm trying to finalize the cover (a lot of the promotional stuff hinges on having that locked down). Very early feedback from one of my proofers is positive. Let's hope that trend continues!

Scooby Doo in "The Siren's Song"

Unhappy Fish Freak

Hey kids! I wrote an episode of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated that'll air this coming Tuesday (6/14/11) on Cartoon Network at 7:30/6:30 Central.

I think it's a pretty cool episode with a fair chunk of the series wide story arc being revealed. That's one of the things I'm really enjoying about this Scooby manifestation -- we get to learn about the back story of "the gang" and that maybe all of these seemingly random monster events are somehow interrelated. Anyway, the show's producers have a lot to keep in mind since they're not just generating the typical Scooby Doo "monster du jour" story lines we're used to seeing.

In this episode the gang battles Fish Freaks, there's a fun Scrappy Doo reference, and Velma makes a "special friend." Check it out and let me know what you think!

R.I.P. Captain Lou

One of my very first writing jobs was as headwriter for the live-action portions of the infamous "Super Mario Brothers Super Show". It was something of a grueling "trial by fire" experience but also a lot of fun. We had great guest stars on each episode (Eve Plumb, Donna Douglas, Maurice LaMarche, and Cyndi Lauper, to name a few) but the real heart of the show, the man who made it fun, was Lou Albano.

Gregarious, lovable, self-deprecating and kind -- he was a hoot to be around and kept the mood up when we were struggling under crushing deadlines. He also (gasp!) actually appreciated the show's writers and that we were doing our best to give him funny things to say. I'll always think well of him for that.

Rest in peace, Captain Lou. You were a good guy and I salute you.

A Productive Week

Been a busy little robot this week.

Got my Script Frenzy screenplay over to the agent on Thursday. I'm very happy with how it turned out. Hope he likes it. I changed the name from "Timer" to "Nick of Time" for reasons stated earlier. Here's how I pitched it:

"Aimed at a youth audience this is a "flexible" script -- existing comfortably, imo, in a number of niches ranging from a big budget live action/cgi extravaganza through a Nick or D.C. original movie (personally, I'd love to see it as an anime style flick in the vein of Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle", but we can talk about that)."

Agents always ask which niche you see the script falling into -- I'm guessing it helps them decide how they're going to position it. You'll note that I'm not going public with any of the script's content as I'm a little superstitious/paranoid about describing that kind of thing until the agent's had a chance to look at it and it's out on the market.

Got a significant chunk of my outline done for "Caden Brave", my 2009 NaNo effort. All of the main characters are laid out. They're archetypal, but that's how I roll.

Twenty more days until the National Novel Writing Month kicks off. If you're still thinking about joining in, now's the time to sign up and start working on your outline. If you decide to go for it, look me up under the author name of "sillyroger". We can be "buddies" and motivate/annoy each other into action during November.

And finally, got my second Scooby script approved. These are a hoot to write and I hope the kids enjoy watching the show as much as I do writing it.

My Day Job

I'm very happy to report that I recently completed a script for the new "Scooby Doo -- Mystery Inc." The half-hour series is being produced by Warner Brothers Animation and will air on Cartoon Network (not sure when, but I'll let you know as soon as I find out).

This gig is extra cool for me because, well come on, it's Scooby! It's also most excellent to be working (aka getting paid) in what happens to be my favorite broadcast medium -- television animation. For me, it doesn't get much better than that.

And it's Scooby!!!

Gasping for Breath

A little fried right now so this'll be a quickie. Had a very productive weekend. Finished a (hopefully) final polish draft on Leonard and sent it off to Agent S. This pass focused on the main character's motivation for continuing the quest through impossible obstacles. I'm happy with how it turned out.
Punched up my animation proposal and added sample story premises -- sent it off to the animation agency for notes.
Finally...reached 32k by Sunday night!

Grinding It Out

So far so good with NaNo. A week into it and I've got a little over 17k words. That puts me well on the way to my goal of 20k by this Monday and 30k by next Saturday. I love the little burst of nervous "I've got to write if I'm going to reach..." energy that this challenge provides.

Liking what I've written so far although it's feeling kind of sparse in terms of description and humor -- but that's what I'll focus on fixing in December. Right now my task is to get those bytes down on virtual paper and not worry about the fancy stuff.

On a semi-related note, I'm finding the little NaNo calendar thing to be kind of irritating. I'm sure it's because of my lack of understanding of the subtle interaction between statistics and percentages, but I'm not liking that the days keep changing colors even though the word count is already known. It makes my tiny brain pucker and reveals why I steered away from the sciences. I think next time I'll just go for a straight bar graph word count widget (try saying that three times fast).

UPDATE: Decided to chuck the calendar altogether and go for a straight word progress chart. I'm more concerned about meeting word goals by date than by daily percentage. Fascinating, isn't it?!

In other news, I've come up with a bunch of fun story premises for the animation proposal. My animation agent offered some interesting insight when I told him of my plans to write a pilot script. He said pilot scripts are best written to help the creator figure out what his show is going to be about -- not necessarily to show to development execs, etc. He said that pilot scripts are more about setup and less about story so they really don't give a good feel about what the actual show is going to be like. His suggestion was that I make the script more "first episode" and less pilot. I think that makes a lot of sense so I'll probably write both -- the pilot for me and the first episode to show to others.

Coming Along Nicely

Finished the rough outline for Magic Man and will take the next few days to flesh it out. Ten days to NaNo! As of today, I've got twenty-five chapters. If it's anything like last time, I'm sure I'll discover things along the way and add a few more. The outline itself is a little over six pages.

In a surprising burst of creative energy, I also find myself with a nearly completed proposal for an animated show. The idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while and last week I decided to write a few things down. Amazingly, these "things" kept coming and soon I had enough good ones to organize into a pitch-worthy "mini bible" (5-6 pages). The idea itself is action based with a healthy dose of comedy. At my most delusional, I would hope to compare it to The Incredibles.

I like this idea so much that I've actually convinced myself that I can do both the NaNo challenge and write a spec pilot script for my animation proposal. How insane is that? Very. I still have to squeeze in the "final" polish edit for Leonard that Agent S expects by November. Good grief! That loud scream you'll hear at the end of November will be the sound of pressurized steam escaping out of my ears.