I’ve always had fun putting things together.  Although, oddly, not jigsaw puzzles.  I got the board game Mousetrap.  I never actually played the game I would just assemble the trap and make it go.  Or try to rearrange it to work.  In my backyard, I would build these goofy Rube Goldberg contraptions, kinetic art, that would crack a nut or kick a football.  All out of found objects that were laying around the yard and house.  As kids, we made super 8 home movies, war movies and comedies that I would edit together after assembling some of the special effects.  I would make mix tapes, not just from cassettes, from VHS tapes and records.  There’s just something fun about creating something out of found items.  Maybe that explains my attraction to screenwriting, assembling whole movie stories out of words.
 
One of the things I noticed as I began my journey toward Kindle publishing was that Amazon actually had “book trailers.”  A couple of writers on WA had produced them as well.  They were good.  One of the amazing things about the computer age is that with Moviemaking software anyone can put together a video promo now.  The downside is anyone can put together a video promo now.  Many of the trailers I saw were dreadful.  They were endless text superimposed over public domain images and went on for minutes and minutes. 

And here’s where my radio program started to focus me onto Kindle more and more.  I could create a killer promo with professional sounding audio.  I just had to figure a few things out.  I had recently gotten some new software, Pinnacle, which edited movies, but also made it easy to convert video into digital.  I had gotten it to do family videos, but it was going to come into play now.  I obtained permission from the Radio Troupe Leader to use excerpts from show.  I got a photo of the Rockefeller Tree we took a few years ago, and then, remarkably, I found a version of “Silent Night” that the artist, Lee Byung Woo, had put online with permission for anyone to use!  I had known basically what I wanted to do, but this song was perfect; a few notes and pause where I could insert the dialogue. 

I scanned the radio show for bits of dialogue that would give the flavor of the book.  The stuff you can do with a computer is amazing.  Super 8 you actually had to cut film to assemble it in order.  Mix tapes you had to stop and start and swap out sources and change how you had the audio plugs to make a copy of something.  But here you just load up what you want, copy the part you need and paste it where you want.  I had music, graphics, dialogue, photos, fades, dissolves and wipes.  It’s amazing.

The audio fell into place really quickly.  A few key lines.  A catch-phrase.  A set up and punch line.  I got a couple of photos to pan through the frame with a graphic counterpoint the dialogue.  But it was all over a black screen.  It seemed longer than it was.  Someone asked me if it was for radio, since the visuals were so sparse.  So I took my opening shot of the Christmas tree, zoomed in tight.  But it was very static.  So I segmented the photo into sections, slightly panned every other section, then did a pixel dissolve between the section and it looked like the lights were twinkling.  That’s what was needed.  It’s no great work of art, but it came out really well.  And I found myself obsessing over it as much as the book, trying to get it ready as my publish date approached.  It was a great place to hang my “ad campaign” on.  And it wouldn’t be the only place.

Okay, so I sent off the radio version of “Lost Claus” to The On-The-Air Radio players.  And a few months later I learned I placed 2nd in their contest!  I won $35 (all gone now) and the play would be produced and recorded in front of an audience.  This was very cool.  Alas, I was unable to attend ($35 wasn’t enough to gas up for the trip), but they posted the recording of the show on their site.

It sounded really good.  Got the laughs and seemed to go over very well.  The leaders of the group had very complimentary things to say about it.  This, frankly, emboldened me to pull out the novella and give it a go on Kindle.  So, I had to pull the script out of Script Thing, a script-writing software program had does have a novel template which is totally incompatible with any other program, converted it to a text file, loaded it into MS Word and began to rework the story, formatting, updating, cleaning up, fixing typos.  I pulled in a couple of gags that I created for the radio script.  Then in a daring move, I re-did the ending to leave it a little more open.  Gasp!  Was I thinking sequel?  Well, some of the logic behind Kindle publishing is that book series tend to do better than one-offs.  And as I said earlier, I had a couple of plot lines and such in the hopper.

I roped some friends into reading it.  Then, really pushing my luck, I got a friend who does copyediting to proof it as a favor.  She caught the remaining things that my eyes were glazing over.  I guess she liked the way it came out as well, because after that, she decided to set up a Gotham Editorial Services and cater to ebooks.

So, the end of October comes and I pull the trigger and set up my account and publish “Lost Claus” at Kindle.  And it’s puttering along.  So far, I’ve stayed in the top quarter of the Kindle rankings.  I’ve done the free promotion days and gave away over 1,700 copies.  The reviews have been very positive.  There is a sequel in the works, a short story for a planned anthology being put together by a crew of professional Hollywood writers (and me) for February, with the proceeds going to charity.

Is it a happy ending?  The jury is still out.  It’s been a positive thing but there’s nothing life changing about it thus far.  We’re hanging in there and I have some concepts for the future.  There are script to write, and jokes to create and funny bones to tickle. We’ll see.  If I wanted a sure thing, I wouldn’t have tacked my hopes to my writing.  And so it goes...

One of the advantages of being in the Writers Guild is that you get to join some awesome writers groups online. One such place is Writers Action BBS. It's a fascinating place where writers of all ilks, skill levels and success go to whine and complain about being writers.

I've been on it for years now and in the last few months there's been a lot of talk about this new Amazon Kindle self-publishing  deal.  For years I've heard and read about vanity publishing, where you paid someone to publish your book for you.  And I've heard and read that they are basically scams.  But this seemed different.  Then one of the writers at the BBS, Christiana Miller, had dived into the Kindle pool and found it very exciting.  She was involved with an anthology and then took one of her stories and turned it into a Kindle book and published it at Amazon.   And from all accounts her book, "Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She's  Dead," is doing remarkably well.  She was so excited by the the Amazon program that she started talking it up.  And started posting links.  And giving advice.  And really making such a notion sound feasible.  And that's when I started getting antsy.

My success has been limited. I'm not admitting anything that isn't acutely true.  I'm picking up a few bucks writing jokes for angry pundits or getting a piece in Reader's Digest.  Or getting really excited about a staged reading of a script or too excited about joining a workshop only to see it go into hiatus.  At one point I actually had business cards printed to hand out at these things.  But I digress---I was going to have to do something proactive.  The day job was a joke.  My script had made the semi-finals of a contest, only to fall short of making the finals.  I couldn't get any interest in my newest script. The WGA demoted me to
"stand-by." My manager quit the business.  Even the angry pundit felt my jokes weren't angry enough.  

Things were bottoming out.  Writing scripts and sending out queries was the equivalent of putting messages in bottles and tossing them in the ocean.  

I was going to need a bigger bottle.

As I’ve made quite clear around here, I’ve written a book and published it for Kindle at Amazon.com.  It’s very exciting because it’s been a while since I’ve had my work thrown out into the public arena.  It’s a story that’s very close to my heart.  It was one of the first screenplays I wrote; one of those stories that fell from heaven into my lap, you know the type; it pretty much wrote itself.  The characters, the beats, the plot twists all just flowed onto the page. Now, I’ve told the tale about the script here.  But it didn’t quite end there. 

 After the heartache and cursing had subsided, I de-Pee-Wee-ized the script to get it back to my original story.  I didn’t just revert to the old version,  I incorporated some parts and notes that had worked during the massive rewriting process.  For instance, I had an A-List of elves and a second team of one-joke Pun-ny Named elves.  The whole B-Team got promoted while the nondescript elves of the first draft got lost.  The original elves were all bland and interchangeable.  The One-Joke Punny Elves developed distinct personalities and patterns of speech that grew out of the joke that created them.  It's funny how that happens.  Anyway, the parts and set-pieces of the Pee-Wee script that worked but didn't fit "Claus" got grafted unto another idea I had and I turned that into “Peking Duck,” a comedy/mystery featuring a female lead instead of a Pee-Wee lead.  But “The Kringle Project” or “Jingle Bell Blues” (as “Kevin” the producer-in-waiting had re-dubbed it) was back in the query and submission rotation.

That rotation failed to rotate mostly.  Conversing amongst friends and online folks, I made the decision to “novelize” the script.  I had played around with the format in the past to little avail, but what was there to lose?  Not a thing, as it turned out.  No one wanted to see it in book form either.  I got a nibble once from a small publisher in Baltimore that a friend of mine had some success with.  It was during my waning years with “The Prairie Home Companion” when Garrison Keillor had stopped using my material and had stopped responding to my emails.  That seems an odd point of reference but it came into play.

You see, the small publisher saw that PHC credit on my resume and assumed that I could just go on the radio show and plug my book and make it a best seller for him.  Unfortunately, I told him the truth about my standing with GK and his Minnesota Mafia.  Oddly, I never heard from the publisher again.

So there we were.  A story in script and book form just sitting on my hard drive.  It would take some kind of new technology to get them off of there---