Heya!

Heya!

Hello, welcome, thanks for dropping by. I just started this blog so I thought I'd provide a little primer on who I am and what I'm trying to accomplish, as well as a few interesting anecdotes to liven things up... which essentially is what everyone else with a blog does, but different!

Who I Am

Well, I'm Mike.

More Specific

Since you're at least a little curious, I'll provide some quick snippets just to give a general idea, if you're really curious I suppose I could answer questions, but just go with it for now.

I'll be turning 25 this year. I have my BS in Biology from Philadelphia University, I'm a med school dropout, I work in the adhesives field fixing problems with industrial glue (why yes, it is a sticky situation) and I'm engaged to a supportive girl, May.

So... Screenwriting?

It's not just screenwriting, I want to direct what I write, see it come to life. At the moment though I want to break into the industry as a screenwriter. I'm not against seeing someone else use what I write, in fact I'd love it, which is why I started this blog, to help get my name out there along with the people that took all the good blog names.

I started writing as a lark in medical school. I say a lark because I did it during class and kind of stopped paying attention to what was going on. It's kind of a good indicator that what you thought you wanted to do really isn't what you wanted to do when you can so easily entertain yourself doing something else during it that in turn is what you actually want to do (no, really). I just wish I hadn't taken out a $50k loan to find this out, but hey, these things happen. So in early 2005 I left school and tried to find a day job to support myself while I worked on my writing.

Thing started off kind of shaky, since being a Biologist I really had no training whatsoever in anything having to do with writing. My first draft of a screenplay more or less looked like a list of what I wanted to happen as opposed to anything coherent. I mean, I could have made a movie from it but it would have made Eraserhead look normal if anyone else picked it up.

So, over the next year and a half I wrote several screenplays, rewrote a few, then I actually started researching how to write an actual screenplay. Since I wanted to direct them I wrote them as shooting scripts, which of course is a silly mistake in retrospect, but hey, what did I know?

I had entered the screenplays in a few contests to unanimous results that they were improperly formatted, so I bit the bullet and bought a few books. The first one was The Screenwriter's Bible which really showed me that I had no idea how to format a speculative script, and Story by Robert McKee which showed me that I also had no idea how to do a coherent narrative.

A few months later and two books under my belt I was ready to rewrite my scripts into usable formats. I started first with Vengeance, my mystery/thriller story that I particularly enjoyed. I finished the second draft a scant few hours before the March 1st deadline for the Bluecat Screenplay Competition and sent it off. I also signed up to attend Robert McKee's Story Seminar at the end of the month, so hopefully that will go well.

That about sums up where I am now, and this blog will track what happens next. I hope you stick around.