BrevityTV.com has so far been a big, stress-inducing effort to juggle a whole lot of balls at once. I am definitely underslept, and my current nasty headcold is probably a direct result. I started to resent Brevity a little bit earlier this week when I had to interrupt my amazing writing flow of 65 pages in 5 days and return to paying full attention to Brevity.

But then I get reminders of just how much fun the whole thing is and why I’m doing it. Like this:

The still frame is from a piece called “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.” This was the third script we selected for production, and she was actually one that I wrote. I get to see a rough cut at tonight’s meeting, so I’m excited for that. Just gotta keep crankin’, and I’ll definitely be glad to get the whole thing launched on January 14th.

OK, what with not posting in the last month, I forgot to share one of the biggest developments in my world lately. My effort to build a sketch comedy army to take over the internet?… We have a name!

Sure, we’ve had a name for several weeks now, so it’s sorta anti-climactic. But I’ve yet to share it with you, the good people of my blog readership.

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Wow.  You give yourself permission to go a couple of days without posting, and look what happens.

Well, I’m back in the world of the blogging, and will soon make up for my absence.  A few final new show reviews, however belated, and some newly requested comedic monologs for women are on their way.

The good news is that the time I neglected ScreenwriterGuy.com was time spent nurturing other things.  My comedy group for the net now has a name and a few projects shot, and a few more shooting soon.  I’ll be experimenting here with posting video soon, in preparation for the beta test of that site.

Oh, and the coolest thing I’ve done lately?  40+ pages of screenplay written in the last 72 hours!  I’m off to find a nice lunch place now, and see if I can continue the streak.

More soon.  Meanwhile, with the WGA restarting negotiations today, happy thoughts towards a peaceful, quick, and prosperous outcome.

OK, I’m not fanatical about checking the stats of who visits my blog. (Well, not as much as I once was…) This morning, however, in a fit of procrastination, I did take a look. Normally, you can’t tell much about the people who come to your site, beyond an IP address and what part of the country or world they’re visiting from. But today, one of the referrals to my site was from someone’s e-mail account. And, for whatever reason, I was able to see a person’s name. Seeing the opportunity to procrastinate further, I googled the person. He is the assistant to the executive producer of one of the shows I recently reviewed!

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I was lucky enough to encounter a fun and challenging writing exercise this weekend. It started with my posting a few months ago of a comedy monologue for women. I mentioned that if anyone had a certain type of character they’d always wanted to play, then I’d be happy to write a monologue for the first five people who asked. Well, a woman named Jenni had an audition coming up, and she contacted me asking if the five were used up. (They weren’t. In fact, there are still four left after this.) Jenni was going to audition for a musical comedy. She had her song picked out (nothing less than some JOURNEY, believe it or not…) and for some fool reason figured I’d be the writer to give her something to put her over the top. I asked what kind of character she always wanted to play, and Jenni’s response was… <drum roll…> A serial killer.

Putting aside my worry over what that might foretell about Jenni’s psyche, I tried to tackle creating a monologue. I gotta say, it was really, really hard! First of all, you have to make someone who kills people come across as likeable. (The second season of Dexter premiered this weekend. That helped a little.) Then, it’s a twist that the killer is female–not the way we usually picture chain murderers. And once you’ve created a likeable murderess, you must make the whole thing funny!

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