Crusaders, Vol. I, Preface - "Up, Up, and Away"

     So here we are, NaNoWriMo 2011 is upon us.  And this year I've decided to take the plunge!  And what better to write than the series I've been stuck on since, well, this time last year.

     Crusaders is a series I've been working on for a while now.  Set in the same world as Shots and another series you may see here someday, it follows the misadventures of a number of different people in the city of Barton, Massachusetts.  In a world like our own, kids across the globe are saturated with comic books, TV shows, cartoons, movies, toys, and video games all telling kids to believe in fictional superheroes.  But as we all know, Batman isn't going to solve our mysteries, Superman isn't going to defeat the villain, and Spider-Man isn't going to deliver our pizza.  When a domestic dispute takes itself to a city rooftop, no one's going to fall out of the sky and save the day.

     Until today.  On a cold April night, one man with a video camera spies a flying man careening through the sky, and the world takes notice.  While the people of Barton search for this mysterious stranger, it isn't long before one man vows to take this power away and pull the city into his grasp.

     So follow along in this 30-day adventure spanning 25 years in the city of Barton, and who knows, maybe there'll be a light at the end of the November tunnel.  Here we go!

d

The Party Train, Preface - "Art Imitating Life"

     This next one is actually something I wrote in the beginning of 2010 as a stageplay, which was produced as a part of WPI's New Voices 28 festival.  Some minor alterations have been made, but the story itself is unchanged.

     As much as I'd love to take credit for coming up with this series of unfortunate events, this story is actually based on a completely true story of what happened to me and my two best friends one spring night in 2008.  Any bits that aren't true are either misremembered bits (one detail of Alex Mantel's story has been fixed) or tweaked to help the story (Rob Pulley was actually two people: the one at the party, and the one with the same name as Rob Desrosiers).  And actually, as of now (two and a half years later) those were the only two untrue portions of the whole story.

     Punchline?  The person who inspired Mae Plantz has a best friend who was my landlord's daughter and previous tenant two years ago.  Awkward.

     And no I won't say on this blog who is who in real life.  Do the homework if you really wanna know.  Cheers!

d

The Stuff of Nightmares, Preface - "Sweet Dreams"

     So, this wasn't planned.  At all.  I fully intended to post the first part of Shots next, hence my prologue post before.

     Then I went to bed.  So, 4am for those keeping score.  And I had one of the most bizarre, disjointed, and vivid nightmares of my life.  And thus, The Stuff of Nightmares was born.  I forced myself, at 8am, to do anything to prevent myself from falling asleep, back into that haunted battlefield.

     So, enjoy this tale of war against the Ghosts.

d

Shots, Preface - "Start at the Beginning"

     So the first thing I've chosen to publish to this blog is a story called Shots.  It was an idea originally conceived in 2009 as a short film screenplay, as part of a "pitch competition" held by Broken Wall Films, following the completion of the Something Remote film and web series.

     While it ultimately lost (to an eight-part web series), I continued to rework the story and mold it over time, eventually connecting the narrative to other stories I had invented over the years.  The connections aren't made obvious in Shots (and really, the story should be considered solitary, for now anyway), but in its current form it is in a sense a "pilot" for a complete universe of characters and locations and events.  Sometime in the future, I aim to publish at least the two stories that branch from here outward (Davian City Blues, a story I've been working on since 2003; and Crusaders, a much more recent addition to the narrative).  A character named Connell Vito (whom you'll meet over the course of Shots) actually sets off the entire Davian City Blues story, on the same day this story takes place.

     As an added bonus, I've recently started operating my own independent film company called Two-Bit Pictures which, hopefully in early August, aims to produce a short film version of Shots.  But that's a ways off and all subject to availability and all sorts of other things.  Something to look forward to.

     Well, I've gone on too long.  There's more I'd love to say about Shots, but I always feel it's better to let the story do its own talking.  Enjoy!

d