20100827 Print On Demand

ROAD KILL is now out there in a physical form on Amazon.
Does this mean I'm finally a novelist?
We can all dream...

20100823 ROAD KILL is Published in Paperback

A banner day, today. I arrived home to find a box of 5 proof copies of ROAD KILL the novel available for my review. The cover image is now light enough to see that it’s a girl lying naked at the bottom of the image, and all the corrections I made from the first proof are complete.
(CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE A LARGER PICTURE)

So I logged into CreateSpace, clicked the Approve Proof button, and got the confirmation.

ROAD KILL in paperback form is now available as print on demand from here: https://www.createspace.com/3472518

It might be up to 2 weeks before it becomes available on Amazon, and there is potential for it to be picked up by other booksellers and libraries.  Smaller royalty, there, but every sale is going into my ROAD KILL movie budget fund.

So, if you are interested in reading the book, before the movie gets made, here’s your chance.

It’s a hell of a good read…

Mark E. Poole

20100816 Filling the Pipeline

A creative person is like a shark.  We have to move forward or die. I was preparing the final proof edits for ROAD KILL when the idea for a cover for its sequel popped into my head.

I have only a title, outline and tagline, but I haven’t put one word to paper except for a few snatches of dialog. But bouncing about the back of my head was the cover idea. I just didn’t have any time to execute it. So one morning, at 4 AM, I got up and used the few minutes of “me time” to craft a mock up of the cover, using the same template as ROAD KILL (RK).

I did all the work in Photoshop(PS). I know just enough to do basic tasks in PS. I know a lot more about After Effects(AE), so I try to adapt the workflow I know there into PS. AE is meant for video, and I’ve used it extensively. PS is for stills, and I’ve not had much need for it. But it is a standard, so I’ve taught myself how to use it. One day I might take a full course, but I doubt I’ll ever have the time. I just bother Bill Spangler, my favorite photographer, and worry him with questions until I get the result I want. He made the mistake of helping me in the past, so now he’s stuck with me.

Quite frankly, I think it's more effective than the RK cover. The ice blue tone and pale white skin match the title and theme so well. The background is a backlit shot of an ice-cave. I did some careful cropping and logo placement on the model.

(CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO SEE LARGER COPY)

I have made a Black & White copy to go in the back of ROAD KILL, as a teaser for the next novel. It is to reinforce the message that this is a series.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Mark E. Poole

20100813 Lucky Day

"It is written, so shall it be done."


ROAD KILL script has been entered into two screenplay contests just this morning.

• 2010 American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest (Francis Ford Coppola's production house)
• 2010 Expo Screenplay Competition 

Janice and I met on a Friday the Thirteenth almost 18 years ago, so we consider those our lucky days. I hope it grants me readers who are not too jaded or overworked to appreciate my script.


Give my work a fair shake, and I feel I've got a good shot at least the semi-finalists spots.  We all have our dreams...


Mark E. Poole

20100812 Horse Races

If you are independently wealthy, or doing a micro-budget film, you can produce your screenplays without additional funds from an outside source. I am not the former, and the latter almost caused me to go bankrupt.

So for my next film, I vowed (to myself & Janice) that I would find the money before I even started pre-production.  To do that, I wanted to write a story in the vein of the Coen Brothers ( who’s quirky films I have admired since their first in 1984, BLOOD SIMPLE.  They interject their films with a wry bit of dark humor, and they are a fun romp all –around.

So I wanted to write a simple script that had that feel. By the time I was finished, I sink a Cadillac in a creek, blow up three more cars, knock the windows out of a small downtown, and destroy a bridge. Toss in a car chase, an actress tossed about in a moving truck bed, and dangling off the side of a bridge. So now I’ve got myself a load of stunts and practical effect elements that takes it into a big budget. Silly me.

As a director with one low-budget film under his belt, it is hard to attract money to something as chancy as movie-making, especially in this economy. So I have to resort to some other means.

I am talking marketing.

The novelization of the script helped me resolve some issues, but it also allows me a way to generate audience interest in the film. I am also entering the script into screenplay contests.

I am choosing the contests carefully:

2010 Expo Screenplay Competition

From their site:

The Expo Screenplay Competition is one of the industry's most prestigious screenplay contests.  Since its inception, it has offered some of the biggest cash prizes of any screenplay competition in the world.  The Grand Prize includes $20,000 plus a publicity campaign and multiple forms of access to the industry.  In all, the contest offers more than $33,000 in cash prizes.

However, the cash prizes have always been merely part -- and, we believe, the lesser part -- of the prizes and benefits this contest offers  From its inception, the  contest focused on giving its winners publicity, visibility, and prominence. We call these services the ACCESS PRIZES.  The strongest focus of ths contest is on access to  the industry --  getting winners' and seminalists' names and scripts past the gatekeepers to the movers and shakers who turn scripts  into movies and TV shows.

Zoetrope Screenplay Contest

From their site:

The contest's aim is to seek out and encourage compelling film narratives, and to introduce the next generation of great screenwriters to today's leading production companies and agencies.

The winner and top-ten finalists will be considered for representation by William Morris Independent, CAA, The Gersh Agency, Exile Entertainment, ICM, Oasis Media, UTA, The Radmin Company, Energy Entertainment, Dontanville/Frattaroli, and The Firm.

Their scripts will be considered for film option and development by leading production companies, including: American Zoetrope, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC Entertainment, Paramount Classics, Lionsgate, Icon Pictures, Working Title, Dimension Films, Frelaine, Michael London Productions, Number 9 Films, Next Films, Pretty Pictures, This Is That, Roserock Films, Benderspink, Astrakan Films, Industry Entertainment, Nine Yards Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Jim Wedaa Productions, Robert Evans Company, Fortis Films, Jean Doumanian Productions, FX, and Ziskin Productions.

I encourage you to follow the links to learn more.
These both have deadlines that are fast approaching, and I will enter them after one last read-through.
So it’s a big step, going up against possibly thousands of other scripts. I think I’ve got a good, tight script with punchy dialog, engaging characters, and a satisfying conclusion.
By doing this, and hopefully placing well, it will lend credibility to the quality of the work. This could also generate the level of interest required to generate the funding to make my film.


I have a two year plan to get everything in place to make ROAD KILL a reality. So this is the beginning of a series of horse races to get a shot at the big prize, the realization of my story.

Mark E. Poole

20100811 Alpha et Omega

I put the final changes on the screenplay for ROAD KILL last night, with the help of my proofreader and wife, Janice.

With that, I’ve come full circle. RK started as a screenplay, but I had some issues with it, so I shelved it for a while. I then turned to the novelization to work through those.

 By going to the long form, I could explore the motivations and get deeper into the characters a bit. I added a few extra scenes, eliminated others. The book is 99% complete, I am going through a proof copy and have marked up about every other page. The cover also came out about 20% too dark, so I fixed that with the help of my friend and photographer extraordinaire, Bill Spangler of Rose Island Photo.  I need to go back into InDesign and make the changes, reload it to CreateSpace, and order another proof. The plan is to have ROAD KILL ready in paperback by the end of August 2010, if not sooner.

Adapting it back to a screenplay took a lot less than I thought, but it still was a massive effort. I wrote new scenes to replace interior dialog. 








Below is an example of one I really like (forgive the formatting it doesn’t translate in the blog):

INT. SHERIFF’S OFFICE - NIGHT

Jax’s office is dark. Light comes from a old stereo. A blues tune plays. Jax leans back in his chair. Half empty bottle of top shelf bourbon open on the table. Tumbler in his hand.

FLASHBACK TO:

INT. JAX’S CHILDHOOD KITCHEN - DAY

Lower-class kitchen with 1960’s era furnishings.

YOUNG JAX (14,) with a buzz-cut in a white t-shirt and jeans. He eats a peanut-butter & jelly sandwich. A beat-up ball glove and a half-empty glass of milk atop the Formica table in front of him.

Jax hears something outside, walks to the back door with the half-eaten sandwich in one hand. The sun shines on the screen door, so it is hard to see out. YOUNG SOPHIE (14,) appears at first as a shadow at the screen door.

As she moves closer, Jax sees a blonde mane frame her high cheekbones and pouty lips. Faded hip-hugger jeans cut off into short shorts, a man's white dress shirt tied off below her breasts. She is barefoot.

YOUNG SOPHIE

(dreamlike, coy)

Jax Hayes, this is one fine summer day. You come on out here and play with me.

The sandwich drops to the floor, makes a mess of peanut butter and jelly on the clean linoleum, as the shadow of the closing screen door crosses it.

BACK TO PRESENT

It’s not Shakespeare, but I like it. In less than half a minute, I was able to show how long he’s known the girl, and foreshadow the destructive nature of Jax’s (the lead character) relationship with his ex-girlfriend Sophie. She left him almost 3 decades ago, but he’s still holding out a torch for her. I know it’s tough to judge out of context with the rest of the script. Jax leaves his baseball and PBJ childhood simplicity for the feminine wiles of this mysterious siren, making a mess of things in the process. Not bad for a thirty minute re-write.

I have two contest deadlines I will now meet; I will explain why they are important to me in my next blog.

Keep writing!

Mark E. Poole

20100806 No Rest for the Wicked

Community

Went to Fright Night Film Fest last weekend in Louisville. It was great to reconnect with my friends in the KY film community, and meet some new ones. 

They had many films playing that I had to duck out of. Just no time to sit through a full movie for one reason (got to talk to my friends about their projects), the other was that the majority were unwatchable.

Someone asked what movies I would be watching. I told him, “Directors don’t watch movies, we criticize them.” I know that sounds arrogant, but it’s also a curse. After making a movie, it’s almost impossible to enjoy another without picking it apart. And then there are some that aren’t worth the effort. If the filmmaker doesn’t care enough about his craft to learn some basics about story, lighting, or sound, I feel no reason to spend my time on it.

I am not being mean, I am trying to help. I sat down with a very earnest director after one screening and gave him a few pointers because he has some real potential. He’s got a good thing going and he knows he has some challenges to surmount.

So if you are planning to make a film, and want some free advice, here are some basic points to keep in mind:

Lighting

Most lacked sufficient lighting for proper registration, flat, featureless lighting, or shot actors in front of bright outside windows. 

Just because your camera can capture an image in low light, doesn’t give you the excuse to ignore proper lighting.  It just comes out looking muddy, or blown out.

If you cannot afford a full light kit, the basic item is a China Ball, which will set you back a whopping $5. It’s a 200 watt light in a paper lantern. What it provides is a nice soft light that can wrap around your actors faces. Should not be your sole lighting source, but many of the productions I saw could benefit from this addition.

Move your talent out from in front of windows on a sunny day, unless you front light them to match, or want it to look like shit.

Sound

Get an off camera mike. Pay attention to any noise in the area. Compressors, dryers, AC, anything. If that’s out of your control to turn them off, then do ADR. Cranking up some music to try to hide it will just trample over your dialog. ADR is a fact of life even on big-budget films.

Foley is your friend.

Story

Too much to go into detail about, but damn, there were so many crappy stories out there. Retreads of retreads. I saw maybe two novel ideas, only to be disappointed because it took 20 minutes to get to what should have been the 5 minute mark.

You have to wonder if the films even had a script, because they sure as hell haven’t read any books on scriptwriting. A good one is How to write a movie in 21 Days  Viki King. At a bare minimum, you need to read SAVE THE CAT by the late Blake Synder. If you follow his guidelines, you’ll at least have some structure to the piece. I am not advocating a slavish devotion, but at least have a good reason to deviate from it, besides ignorance.

And one last thing – cut the crap!  What I mean by that is we do not go to movies to see the mundane minutiae that makes up our daily lives. We do not need to see people walking, talking, driving, or sitting, unless there is something else connected to it that advances the story.

The only time watching someone just drive was hip was in 1984 when MIAMI VICE overlaid footage of Don Johnson driving around Miami in a Ferrari with Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. So that’s it. We are so done with that. You don’t need to show your character driving from one location to another, unless they are getting serviced while driving or something INTERESTING.

Screenplay Competition

I mention this because many scenes in ROAD KILL have people driving. But I have those only to reinforce the overall theme, and move the story along. They are not on grocery runs; they hit potholes, wreck, get blown up, receive blowjobs, etc.  These car scenes move the story forward.

I am entering the ROAD KILL screenplay into the 2010 Expo Screenplay Competition. I have high hopes for this. I reached 3^rd in last year’s online short competition, so I hope to pit my script against the heavy-hitters in this year’s completion.

Wish me luck!

20100802 First Sale of ROAD KILL

This is a fun shot (click it to see larger):

It is the dashboard of my Amazon Kindle sales page, showing my first sale of ROAD KILL.
Awesome!


Got a message from the buyer (I've removed his last name in case he might have an issue with people knowing his buying habits):

Hi Mark, 

 Just purchased your book... I thought, $5, what the heck, I blow that on nothing every week of my life. 

 

I’ll let you know what I think – not that I’m a contributing member and all :)

 

Looking forward to it…. 

 

Jim

Which is why I positioned the book at $4.99.  I want the buyer to say, "It's what I spend at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Let's give it a shot."


But hey, it's a my first SALE. Very excited.
-Mark E. Poole

20100728 Sample ROAD KILL for FREE

ROAD KILL is PUBLISHED!

How would you like to read the first SEVEN chapters of ROAD KILL for free? No catches, nothing to buy?

Read on!

First, I got this email at 7:44 PM last night:

Congratulations - you’re published!

Congratulations! The title(s) you recently submitted has been reviewed and successfully published to the Kindle Store.

So ROAD KILL is published on Amazon. Wow, that feels some kind of special.  All the hard work to write, edit, and get it ready, and now it’s out there for people to read (The paperback book edition is still in-the-works, since I haven’t received the proof copy yet!).

This is the Kindle edition, so people can download it to their Kindle device, or a FREE Kindle-for-PC viewer.

And that is how you can read a sample of the book.  Kindle has a Try it Free box on the far right of the page with the words “Sample the beginning of this book for free.”

If you own a Kindle already, select that under the Deliver to: pull down, and hit the Send Sample Now button.

If you don’t have a Kindle, no problem, you can install the FREE Kindle viewer. I personally have the Kindle for PC. But you may have an iPhone or Blackberry.


See the links below to add your device of choice:

Read books on your computer or other mobile devices

	Get Kindle for PC
	Get Kindle for iPhone  Also works on iPod Touch
	Get Kindle for BlackBerry
	Get Kindle for iPad
	Get Kindle for Android

Here is the link to the book:

http://www.amazon.com/ROAD-KILL-ebook/dp/B003XF1H9M

Do me a favor?  If you do download & read it, please leave a review on Amazon.  And if you like it, buy it!  If you want to wait for the paperback, that’s cool. I’ll post that link when it’s ready.

Thanks for reading!

20100727 Giving Birth

Over the last week, I went through a marathon of activity, with one goal in mind – to get my book ready for proofing by Sunday, July 25, 2010.  And I made it.  There was a toll, by Sunday noon I had a migraine from eyestrain and lack of sleep.  I have a fulltime job to pay for my creative activities, so pulling double duty to fuel my dreams is a given. I am sure many of my acting and filmmaking friends can relate.

Birth involves pain and sacrifice.  I had to push myself out of the comfort zone of endlessly tweaking a little here and there in a futile effort to achieve perfection, and get down to brass tacks and push this baby out into the cold cruel world. It’s tough, because there are all sorts of bullies on the schoolyard ready to poke fun at the strange new guy.

You don’t think that’s a part of it? Trust me – if you are on an endless treadmill of adding this and making a slight change to that, ask yourself what you are afraid of. If these incremental changes are taking longer than it took to write the first draft, then you may be in the grips of the fear of letting the world see what you’ve been touting as your great masterpiece. 

In your mind’s eye, your work is a grand, fresh idea, and perfectly executed. When it hits paper or is in the editing bay, taking your ideal concept to physical form is a harsh reality. Alfred Hitchcock once said the film was never as good as the script, everything after that is a series of compromises. The same with other works of art.

Anyway, during the last week I taught myself enough about typesetting and the use of Adobe InDesign to produce a very nice manuscript of a quality worth printing.  It’s not perfect, but I am very proud of the accomplishment. The proof copy will arrive on Thursday (7/29/10), so I am excited. I will write more about how I got to this point in later posts.

Mark E. Poole

20100720 Ch-ch-ch-Changes

I have been teaching myself how to do book layout with Adobe InDesign, which is supposed to be a great way to lay out a quality hardcopy of your book. That appears to be true, but it’s not the easiest thing to master. I have been able to get some results, but it will require me to split my one MS Word doc up into 50 separate files (one for each chapter), and apply styles to the text, etc. In short, it’s a lot of work. But it sure looks nice, so far. I’ll go into a little of that in another post.

What looms in the back of my mind is, “why bother to do a hardcopy edition?” especially when I read this morning (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/technology/20kindle.html?_r=1&hpw) how Amazon’s e-book sales had outstripped hardback sales (143 sales of Kindle for every 100 hardbacks). We all know that is where everything is going, eventually. And with the present Kindle, there is no need for the fancy formatting, because it disregards that.

Here are a few reasons:

• I’ve been doing a lot of business travel lately, and spending a lot of time hunkered down in waiting areas and sitting on the tarmac with fellow conscripts, I mean travelers. And most people who are reading are clutching a paperback book. I have seen maybe 2 Kindles in 20 flights. I looked about on one flight and every person in the seats around me were reading a paperback (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is the current fave).
• Hardback books are grossly overpriced. Spend $26 for a novel? Not in this family.
• Kindle sales may be outstripping bloated hardback book sales, but I bet paperbacks are still kicking the Kindle’s shiny little butt. 
• I am not knocking the Kindle, in fact I plan on reaching a wider audience than with any hard copy. But I still want to have a physical copy in my hands, something for someone to stumble across in a few decades, and say, “hmm, what’s this?”
• I also know that later editions of the e-books will be able to support proper book formatting, so learning this now will give me a jump on the change-over. I love learning this sort of thing, and it keeps me out of trouble. So far…

Mark E. Poole

20100718 The Writer’s Bane

I was going to hold off on this subject, for when I was to speak of preparing the manuscript for publication, but Evan Peters changed all that.

The subject for the day is now typos.  The reason is that I threw up my mock-up of the ROAD KILL book cover yesterday, and Evan read it over. And he found a missing word. This kind of shit drives me crazy. Not Evan finding it (for which he has my thanks), but me missing it. I’d like to say it’s a rare occurrence but that’s a load of BS.

In re-reading the back copy, Janice and I found at least 3 more and some clumsy writing. In just a few blocks of copy.

Now imagine you have a book of a couple of hundred pages. Spelling errors have been virtually eliminated with modern editing systems (I use MS Word for novels, and Final Draft for scripts). Grammatical errors to some extent are at least flagged.

 With ROAD KILL, we have read, and re-read it, each time finding at least one error on every single page. EVERY time I read it. We even printed the entire thing out, and found more. I put the novel away for a few months to come back with fresh eyes and still more.

Are our brains wired to gloss over mistakes, once we are too familiar with the materials?

A bunch of common mistakes:

• Using one word, when you intend another: “Quite” for “quiet,” or “there” for “their,” or “your” for “you’re.” They are spelled right, and sound right, but they ain’t right.
•  Crappy punctuation: Commas where they shouldn’t be. Missing question marks.
• Missing Quotes: Leaving the end quote (“) off the end of a block of dialog.
•  Missing words: You’ve just left it out and don’t realize it’s missing until you read it out loud.
• Adverb reliance: My first draft was peppered with them. It’s considered the realm of the novice. I went back and rooted those bastards out, targeting the “ly” words. Slowly, quietly, wistfully. I did leave in a few, but not more than one every 3 pages, instead of the 3 per page I started with.
•  Clunky sentences: Using 8 words when 3 can get the job done.
• Using the same word twice in the same paragraph or even sentence: “Claire knew she had to go, because she had to be there,” becomes “Clair must go; she had to be there.”
•  Passive voice: I’ve done almost three decades of business writing, and passive voice is the style you adopt for that. You don’t say “We’ve changed the HR polices.” It’s phrased as “The HR policies were changed.” It’s less confrontational. And it’s weak, lame and lays there like a plate of cold spaghetti noodles. This took the most time on re-writes, but it was the best thing I did for the book.

Some tricks we used to clean up my manuscript:

• Have someone read it aloud back to the author. Janice did this while I sat in a chair with my eyes closed.  Hearing her stumble over a mouthful of dialog due to a poorly worded sentence was painful.
•  Print it and read each sentence starting from the bottom. After you have read the book a few times, your eyes just skim over the words, and the errors.

I sent out the book to a group of friends, not only for typos, but plot holes and bad logic. I have built up a mental picture of the character, and know why they might react in a certain way. I also know why they may act differently in a certain situation. But the reader isn’t privy to all that, and if I haven’t dropped breadcrumbs along the way, the result is a leap in logic that makes absolutely no sense. Fresh eyes can alert the writer to these issues. You have to have a thick skin, and go into it knowing that these people are going out of their way (and dedicating valuable time) to help you. It’s much better than to throw it out before thousands (you hope) readers and find it then.

Thanks again for Evan, and today’s topic. I’ve put a corrected version of the cover out for your review.

Mark E. Poole
(Note: after I published this post, I have found and corrected 5 different errors. Grrrrr)

20100717 Judging a Book

This may seem obvious, but cover design is vital to getting your work seen. Not just for on the shelf, but as a tiny (49x75-pixel) thumbnail on Amazon.

On top of that, the spine and the back have to do a lot of work, enticing the potential reader to actually scan the text there, gain a small measure of understanding of the book, and the author, if you are a relative unknown. If you are lucky, they may take even a peek inside. All that just to try to get them to drop a few bucks and get a few hours entertainment from your extended labor of love.

I have posted the front cover in two sizes, and the full book jacket layout for now. I will go into why I made these decisions, and how I made the cover myself, using Photoshop and Aftereffects, in a series of posts yet to come.

For now, look it over and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Mark E. Poole


Click on the images, to see it at a larger size:

20100713 ROAD KILL Origins

I found my original synopsis for ROAD KILL, dated 03/29/2009.  After a few weeks or months of scribbling snatches of dialog, ideas for scenes and characters, I use the synopsis to gel everything and give me a framework to shape the tale.

Here is the first paragraph:

Modern Film Noir set against the backdrop of corporate corruption and government complicity in awarding state highway contracts.  A sheriff takes a murder investigation down the twisty back roads of his rural Kentucky county.  He finds greed, corruption, duplicity and desire on his journey.

What is gratifying, now that I have a polished draft, is that it actually became just as I had laid out. Some of the details changed (the setting is now Virginia, not Kentucky, and some of the character names were changed), but most of the situations and the tone are all there, before I got really down to writing the first draft.

That is not to say nothing changed. The act of writing the story takes you on voyages of discovery. For example, I knew I would have a hit man (Blackheart), and in the process of trying to make this a unique individual, I ended up giving this person a much larger role. Blackheart is a fantastically complex and sensual being, after starting life as a three-word description on a character roster: Female Hit Man. And her world view actually helped account for the seemingly random acts of destruction.

The idea for the story came from the real-life scandal in Kentucky involving a former governor and a road contractor, and allegations of bid rigging. The governor tried to stymie the investigation by proactively pardoning everyone involved from any wrongdoing, before they were charged with anything. Much as I tried, I couldn't work that into my tale, because it was so implausible that it strained credulity.

So that became the impetus of the actions of the bad guys, but I told the story from the perspective of a small-town sheriff. I made the bad guy a long-time school rival. I also used the consequences of shoddy road repair as major plot points.

Sheriff Jax Hayes is still the same guy I envisioned, a combination of Marshal Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) in APPALOOSA, and Police Chief Link Mattocks (Brian Keith) in THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING.  He is cool as a cuke, despite everything crashing and burning all around him. It’s helpful to have a firm idea of who your characters are so you understand how they will react in every situation. I’ve had characters take over a scene and move it in another direction, because the fully realized person would not react in a way I may have envisioned when I only had a sketch outline. Character is action.

So make your plans, but allow the story to flow in organic ways, once you get into the fleshing-out stage.

Mark E. Poole