A Meetup Group of My Very Own!

Yes, you heard me right! A Meetup Group of my very own to meet and encourage local writers like myself to hone their craft and hopefully become published or produced someday. Well, not that I have much power to produce my own material, never give advice on publishing, but it's my group, and I've got some awesome members and I'm quite content.

So now I have my very own writer's meetup group after over a over a year of searching and nothing left to write. Where as a year ago, I had proudly completed my third script, for Episode 4a, despite adversity and minor imperfections, today I have nothing left to say for my own writing, at least with respect the Project: Kronosphere, has for the time being dried up. But do not fear, my friends, for this is not the end, it is only the beginning, and the moment is being prepared for...

The story of how I got this meetup group is itself an interesting one. As you can see from my previous posts, there's a gap of over a year between my last post in 2009 and my first in 2010. And although I have another draft post for April 2009 that I've yet to complete, there's still quite a bit I've yet to tell y'all.

You see, in January 2010, while scanning the occasional meetup.com spam new group announcements, I read of a new writer's group just around the corner in the town of Reston, Virginia. And what's more, it wasn't restricted to only Women or at an inconvenient time. Don't get me wrong, though, I happen to think Ruth Ghobadi is doing a wonderful job with her group and I would encourage any women who finds the time convenient to join her group of writers A.S.A.P. But, since I'm not a women, and that time's not for me, I could never be bothered.

But then Verge Writers was created, inspiring a whole new set of writers! It all began on Thursday, 11 February 2010. We all gathered at La Madeline, in Reston to meet the inspirational creator of this all new, writer-oriented meetup group. I was nervous. I ate and ate, stuffing my face in nervous anxiety, I even lost the organizer's name card when I was fumbling to get back into my car. It was both exciting and scary. Would they like my piece? Would they enjoy Project: Kronosphere? It was time to find out. Finally, a group that allowed men and was held at a descent hour: Sundays at 16:30.

So I came; I shared; I enjoyed; I engaged; I befriended. Week after week, I gave more of myself, my story, to my new colleagues. And they gave me their opinions. Some of them were positive; some were negative, and some got worse over time. But you've already read about that. I even made new friends with them on a few of the Social Networking sites: Facebook¹ and Twitter. And it's through these contacts that I discovered Susan Diranian's Loudoun County Writers Group, but that's a story for another post.

So I diligently attended each meeting at the group organizer's apartment each week through the month of March. Then came April, and calamity after tragedy canceled meeting after meeting after meeting. Not having the full story from our esteemed organizer, I was not the only writer more than a little frustrated with the inconsistency of our meetup schedule.

If that wasn't bad enough, the organizer for a group I like to call Digital Animation for Fun and Profit was going to have a demonstration of audio recording tricks and techniques she'd picked up in her work with video voice-over production. I was very excited — audio recording is just the skill I need to learn, seeing as Project: Kronosphere is almost certainly going to be a radio series, even if it's never broadcast. Sound is my bread and butter. So I read the meeting description; it says the meetup will take place Tuesday, 13 April 2010 at the Panera Bread in Reston Town Center at 7pm. So I make my way over to the Panera only to find there's no meeting. I check my iPhone and it turns out it's been canceled and moved forward a week.

So a week later, on 20 April 2010, I head on over to the Panera bread again. The meetup was changed to a webinar, to be sure, but the meetup location still said Panera bread. So I arrived at Panera, met another group member and we both scratched our heads: the meetup leader could not be found! Needless to say this made me rather cross. It seemed like very meetup was canceled in April 2010.

As May 2010 rolled on to the scene, the missed Verge Writer's meetups got to be overwhelming and I'd had enough. I decided to counter-program an alternate meetup for the Verge Writers to correspond with ever meeting that was canceled. Every time the organizer scheduled a meetup, I scheduled one around the same time at the Panera Bread — at least one good thing came out of the Digital Animation for Fun and Profit: discovering this great meeting location! This went on for one more week until finally, we were able to attend a meetup that wasn't canceled on Sunday, 16 May 2010, when our esteemed leader announced that she was stepping down as leader and was looking for someone to take over.

So I volunteered.

The next day, I got a letter from meetup.com that was an invitation to take over the Verge Writers group. I clicked the included button and was immediately presented with a bill for $72 for 6 months continued service for the Verge Writers group. I was none too pleased by this. I personally think there's nothing really value-added that Meetup.com is providing over services like Google Groups and Yahoo! and informed my members that once the 6 months continuation expired, I may be moving us to one of these services.

I figure what happened is the original organizer bought the less expensive 3-month service for the Verge Writers group and in April that expired so rather than keep paying for a group she was having trouble attending herself, why not had it off to a more dedicated member. So I don't have any animosity toward this action, just that I think meetup.com is itself quite overpriced. In fact, I'm very proud of our former leader since she's told us she's going to India in August to council victims of the slave trade in that country. I of course wish he well in this and every future endeavor!

The first thing I did when I took over Verge Writer's is to change its name. Verge Writers never settled well with me, because, being fluent in French, I always read this as "Penis Writers". So I felt the name had to change, but to what?

I'm quite fond of alliterations — just like the leader of the Washington Singers and Songwriters Circle. So although it's a bit more Texas that I'd generally like, I chose the name the Reston Writers' Roundup! I even gave it its own sub-domain in the timehorse.com hierarchy. But apart from that, and a few other cosmetic changes, and moving the regular meetings to Tuesdays at 6pm, the group is still pretty much the same, with the same mandate and goals for its members. I've even opened the group up to new members since the the unfortunate purge of 29 March 2010 (29 March has never been a good day for me, but that's a story for another blog).

On Tuesday, 25 May 2010, we had our first meeting at the Panera bread. Most of our regulars were there and it was great seeing everyone once more. Next week, we may even be getting back one of our long lost and greatly missed friends, a victim of the purge.

Of course, nothing's perfect, and there are still some minor problems with the group. There are members who come to a meeting and then disappear or who join the group but never even come out to attend a gathering.

And there's one member who has some beautiful poetry she wrote on Microsoft Works. The thing is, no-one I know has a copy of MS Works, and this means her wonderful piece is pretty much visible by no-one. Fortunately, I found NeoOffice, which can, to some extent, read MS Works files with the .wps extension. So I opened the file in this and exported it to PDF so that I could share this member's work with my fellow enthusiastic writers. When I did this, the author unceremoniously removed the file, claiming it wasn't the right format. I searched quite a bit for find NeoOffice so I could read her file and was quite miffed when she just took the PDF file down. I've continuously tried to extend my hand to this member to work with her to convert the piece to PDF while still preserving the integrity and presentation of her work, only to be rebuffed and ignored. This really bugs me, but there really isn't much I can do. I've thought about kicking this member out of the group, but for now I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, that's the story of how I came to own my very own Meetup group! Woo!

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¹My Facebook profile is restricted; only my Facebook friends can see it. To become my Facebook friend, you'll have to request me via e-mail, but I don't want spam so I'm not including that here. Instead, if you really want to friend me, feel free to leave a comment in this blog with a link to your Facebook and I'll be happy to friend you, my dear, sweet reader.

1 Page = 1 Minute

One of the oldest adages in modern day cinema is the simple formula which is the ratio between the number of pages in a screenplay and the number of minutes the final production is likely to end up running.  This ratio, for simplicity, is set to 1 (ONE).  That being the ratio, this ratio being the number 1, one half be not enough and one and three fourths is right out!  The way this ratio can be ensured is by very specific formatting of the text of the script and proven statistical probability that for a given number of lines with a given line width and a fixed point size that a minute of final screen time shall be realized.  Thanks to this basic rule, a production company reader can quickly and simply count pages in a submitted script to estimate its approximate running time.  Thus, the key to achieving this ratio is proper, meticulous formatting of the potential script.

When I started writing scripts for Project KronoSphere, I decided to use the reStructured Text mark-up language for its simplicity and raw legibility.  As reStructured Text does not explicitly define specific screenplay elements such as Act, Scene Number, Scene Heading, Slug, Action, Dialog or Parenthetical, I am forced to use more generic elements when writing and formatting my raw script.  The basic approach I currently use is as follows:

• Title is underlined and overlined with number signs (#)
• Story Name is underlined and overlined with asterisks (*)
• Story Sequence is underlined and overlined with equals signs (=)
• Acts are underlined and overlined with hyphens(-)
• Scenes Numbers are underlined with circumflexes / carets (^)
• Scene Headings and Slug Lines are underlined with tildes (~)
• Action is straight paragraphical text, unjustified and without indent in 72 columns
• Speaker is a field name, without indent, on a line by itself and followed immediately by the corresponding Dialog
• Dialog is a field value, indented by 3 columns, unjustified and extending not past column 72 in paragraphical form
• Parenthetical is on a line by itself, interspersed with the Dialog elements, with a custom role assignment of action over the entire line of text

Specifically, a raw script may look something like this:

As you can see, such formatting is rather easy to read, which is why I chose it.  The part that reads *various script headings* is an italicized placeholder for where things like character lists and descriptions would go. Here, the single asterisk (*) around the placeholder makes the phrase italicized, where as the double asterisk (**) around the phrase Goodbye causes this to be rendered in boldface. One important idiosyncrasy to notice is that on the third line of Voice's dialog we begin with a backslash (\) character to inform the text parser to treat that line as text and not as a comment since all comments begin a line with two periods (..). Because the parentheticals are marked as action, the document needs to know what the role action means. I thus have a comment (..) after the title blocks to define the role action as the generic character class action. Also, for the sake of editing and spell checking, there are a number of lines I always put at the tail end of my documents which appear as comments (starting with ..) so that they can be read by the editor but are ignored by the parser. Although the editor and spell checking parameters can occur at the end of the document, the role definition needs to appear at the beginning, which I find annoying to the point where I am looking into the docutils code to see if I can change how role definitions are matched with their uses.

Initially, and still in some of my older script, the dialog elements all bunched up as one continuous line following the Speaker's name, as well as the Action elements being continuous without breaks. Also, I didn't have a markup for Acts originally, and the markup currently used for Act was then used for Scene Number instead. Also, back then, the Scene Heading and Slug Lines were originally both underlined and overlined but are now just underlined. However, such differences do not change how the parser reads the script; the line length and line breaks within a text element are ignored by the parser. However, one serious difference is that parentheticals are now specifically marked up as action, where as before they were treated as normal dialog text. Also, I incorrectly used pause instead of the industry standard beat, for example:

When I find the time I will reconfigure these older scripts to better match the format as outlined previously as well as make some other consistency formatting changes. Specifically, a lot of my initial scripts contained foley notes which I am planning to hide with some specific formatting techniques as yet to be determined.

After I settled on a uniform formatting for my scripts within the reStructured Text guidelines, the next step that I faced was a way to turn that flat text file into something prettier.  Specifically, I found a small web server written in Python by Mr. Jon Berg and modified it to use the docutils publish_string function to transform my reStructured Text into colourful HTML.  This turned the above template into:

The colour is achieved with a GET Query by setting a character name to a colour, such as "Voice=red". Although non-standard, this is meant to give any potential actors an easier time identifying their lines. The main flaw, however, with this script is that in an early run-through of an early draft of Episode 01, we found the average run time of a page of dialog to be 1 minutes, 45 seconds, which, as I said before, was right out! Another annoyance, as you can see, is that the dialog between Voice and Joyce B Foist is not aligned: the indent of Voice is much less than that for Joyce's dialog.

As I worked on the first few scripts, I worried less about formatting and more about getting the story out. However, soon after attending my first Washington Screenwriters Meetup, as well as completing a first draft of Episode 04a, I decided it was time to get the formatting finally right. The first thing I did was to add the proper margins to the HTML page format. This was not easy, and I'll save the details for another post, but eventually I got the various page elements, such as paragraphs and table entries to align — the most recent change was actually a few days ago, so this is pretty cutting edge! I also set the page rendered font uniformly to the industry standard of Courier, 12 point. This, however, caused its own problems because most browsers render Courier as Courier New, which is a thinner font than Courier and is a sure sign of an amateurish script. Thus, you need to explicitly set your browser to render Courier as Courier and not Courier New to see these pages correctly. Finally, before tackling the problem of Character and Dialog elements being displayed horizontally instead of properly vertically, I used CSS to fix the dialog spacing so that Voice and Joyce B Foist's dialog would appear aligned, as can be seen below:

Although that looks much more realistic, and is actually a good hybrid between scripts for Radio plays and those for Television, Cinema and Animation, I wanted to get the Dialog elements to properly render vertically, as you see in the visual media formats since this would finally bring me in line with the 1 page = 1 minute rule. Since I used reStructured Text field lists to specify the Character and Dialog elements, the default docutils rendering is in an HTML table and thus always horizontal. In order to change this behaviour, I needed to add a series of Regular Expression replacements in the rendered HTML before displaying it — turning the table elements into div elements — before transmitting the HTML to the client browser. It's handy being able to role your own web server, isn't it? So, without further a dieu, here is the current version of my near Hollywood perfect screenplay format:

One final note: the boxes where you see each page rendered are made small to fit in this blog, and in fact the only way to make the page look like a true Hollywood script at this point is to view it in a browser window that is exactly 8 ½ inches at 72 dots per inch (DPI). However, when printed, the script should come out properly, all be it with the minor nit that a page break can currently occur in the middle of Dialog or Action lines. It will take a more robust document language, like LaTeX, to provide that level of perfection.

I hope you've enjoyed my first tutorial on how to turn reStructured Text into a screenplay formatted using Hollywood guidelines. This also concludes my posts referring to the events of my writing life which occurred during the month of February. I finished the first draft of Episode 04a and most of these formatting edits by the second week of March when the next Make a Video meetup was scheduled, but to find out what happened then, you'll just have to read my next post...

Meetups, Script Writing and Getting Downtown

Well, it's about bloody well time I has a update already, hadn't I?

When I started this entry originally, I was planning to report how I had finished writing Scene 13 of a planned 16 of Episode 04a.  Now that that script is mostly complete, it seems I should focus instead on the beginnings of the production side of my saga.  So, to that effect, I would like to present a continuation of my series of stories revolving around my experiences with various meetups and social gatherings in and around Washington D.C.

When last you heard from me, I was telling you about my adventures in Green Screen at the The DC Podcaster Alliance.  Man, that was fun and informative.  But, there's more.  Since then I've joined a bunch more Meetups including The Washington Screenwriters Meetup, Digital Video, Audio & Animation for Profit and Networking and the newly resurrected Arlington Screenwriters Meetup, each with its own sets of highs, lows and adventurous experiences.  In this post, I shall be discussing my escapades with the first of these, the Washington Screenwriters Meetup.

On Saturday, 17 February 2009, a bit before noon, I drove my car over to the Herndon-Monroe Park & Ride and waited for the Fairfax Country Connector 950 (pdf) to take me to the metro so I could get downtown to my first meeting of the Washington Screenwriters Meetup.  Strangely enough, the WMATA website suggested I take the metro to McPhearson Square and then take the 52 Metrobus down to the 14th Street Borders Books and Music.  This last step I found to be quite silly because by going one more stop to Metro Center, I'd just have to walk 2 blocks East along G Street and another block along 14th to get where I wanted to go.  I actually did try to get off at McPhearson Square that day and walk down 14th Street NW the 5 short blocks necessary but crossing New York Avenue is a pain, so Metro Center is my preferred stop for this destination.  But enough about my commute.

So, I get to the Borders and assume automatically that the meeting will be in the coffee shop of the store which I spot upstairs.  I order a white hot cocoa from the barista and have a seat next to the nearest electrical outlet so as to give my poor, starving iPhone a bit of extra charge so he can get me safely back to the Metro thanks to his clever GPS.  I sit there, drinking my cocoa and observing the people coming and going, scanning an old Project KronoSphere script draft for the pilot, waiting.  I was a half-hour early; apparently, walking is much faster than taking a bus.  Eventually, the meetup sponsor, Matt, shows up.  I don't recognize him per se and there's no way he can know what I look like, but I have a feeling he's the guy and I introduce myself.  We chat for a bit and he mentions a book that spent years on my Wishlist, The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by one Mr. J. Michael Straczynski -- my hero!  You see, I sometimes imagine my serial as a radio drama and nobody can cover experience in writing radio drama like Joe Straczynski in this book.  And indeed, it's the serial nature of the Great Maker's Babylon 5 television series which first inspired me to create my own rich tapestry of people, cultures, worlds, times and space.  But more on this later.

So I return to my lonely, charging iPhone and allow Matt to continue to set up his meetup table.  As more people arrive, I return to the gathering place, my phone now sufficiently charged.  There I meet many interesting, aspiring screenwriters, most of whom dream about the glamour, fame, glory and riches with the aspiration of having a Hollywood blockbuster hit commissioned based on their script.  But, don't get me wrong, we are all writers and none of us want to sell out.  We each have our stories, our children, that we long to see the light of day and each of them are hard-working and very thoughtful individuals.  The only contrast I can draw with my own goals is that I seek not fame or riches, though would never refuse either.  For me, it's all about the story, and as a story, it's not one you could tell in a mere 90 minutes.  That is why I write for television or radio.

Only by limiting myself to television or radio can I achieve a true serial drama, with ups and downs, highs and lows, trauma, tragedy, joy and elation.  As I've said before, my second lowest rung of productional aspirations is radio but it may be that in terms of financial commitment and potential popularity, radio has the best potential to allow my story to be told.  So, I presented my tale as radio and received a number of accolades for my original approach to story telling.  I don't honestly know how well radio can accept the return of the idea of the serial drama after what seems like a half-century of market loss to television, but the lowest of rungs for me was always podcast and even if I was able to produce my show as radio, I would want to see my story released in that digital format.  None the less, I learned a great deal from these discussions and have a page of notes that I may transcribe here at some point for the edification of others.

Anyway, so the meeting progresses and the thing is, Matt, clever individual and documentarian that he is, has pipe-lined 3 of his related meetups each to follow the other in logical succession.  I, of course, came to the first of these, that for the aspiring Screenwriter.  So, as we are discussing the finer aspects of Hollywood screen plays and productions, a series of editors, filmographers and incidental musicians start to trickle in and I am happy to chat further with each of them.  One fellow, Paul, is an accomplished musician.  Another women, whose name I forgot, was an aspiring cinematographer.  Many of the screenwriters, including myself, continue to socialize and meet all the newcomers as topic shift from writing to production.

Then, an hour later the actors start to stream in.  I didn't have a chance to interact with many of the actors and really only spoke to one woman who is an aspiring voice actress.  Her appearance was fortuitous since she may make a great candidate for a demo production of Project KronoSphere as an audio-only presentation, even though I think I believe her vocal register is a bit high for one of my female regular characters.  None the less, I shall keep her and all that I've learned in mind as I progress in my quest to bring Project KronoSphere out of the dark shadows of my mind and under the lights of a studio production.

Finally, as things wound down, I left the Borders and made my way home, wiser, happier, more fulfilled and in eager anticipation of my next scheduled meetup with the Digital Video, Audio and Animation for Profit and Networking at the Fairfax County Public Access studio on Saturday, 14 February 2009.

It's not easy being Green... or Blue for that matter

I attended the DC Podcaster Alliance meetup over the weekend and much to my delight, the topic of the day was using Chroma Key (commonly referred to as Green Screen) in your podcast. Although at times it was slow to explain or information too basic or not much use, the talk given by Ray, the author of the Produce Picker podcast (see comments), was excellent and rather enjoyable. The meeting was crammed to the gills as this talk was apparently a very popular topic. I previously attended a meetup in November which was about legal issues with respect to protecting your podcast which has me seriously thinking about designing a trademark for my production company, TimeHorse, Multimedia — as well as simply incorporating, like the folks at Green Dragonfly, LLC.

I do dream of Project KronoSphere being a live-action drama, with real actors and computer generated special effects, and Chroma Key would make that a lot easier. None the less, the Computer Generated Images (CGI) alone are quite beyond me, having cut my chops on POV-Ray many a moon ago only to be completely frustrated with how difficult it is to create even the simplest of landscapes. And POV-Ray would only generate a single frame of video, never mind animating this creature or that monster or even a simple moving table. And then there is the problem that a proper drama should have 3 cameras to switch between close-ups and long shots, and I don't even have one. Finally, I think it will be deathly hard to get simple voice actors to voice Episode 4a, never mind do live-action. It all boils down to who will do it for a proportion of the money I plan to make on this, which is currently $0? I might be able to do all the male voices for a given script, but I'm at a loss when it comes to sounding feminine. I will probably ask folks in the various clubs and associations I belong to, asking for volunteers, but let me finish the script for Episode 4a first, and then worry about actors.

Finally, as a follow-up to yesterday's post, I was thinking of attending The Washington Area Novel Writers' Critique Group this weekend, but was too knackered and decided to bugger it off instead. I'm still pretty bummed out about the incident from a couple weeks ago, so I haven't make any progress on Episode 4a since my last update about it. Finally, for those wondering about the title: on film it is often easier to use blue as the Chroma Key rather than green.

Progress at last, Scene 8 version 2 takes shape

Well, after the events of 14 January 1988 — oh, wait, no, we don't want to get into that lamentable tale from my past — I mean the more recent, sad tale from just over a week ago, 14 January 2009. On that day, I broke a month-long writer's block and started writing the second half of the Episode 4a script. After I finished the first part, Scene 8, I decided I should check my latest work into my Subversion repository for safe keeping. Before I check my update in, I wanted to do some final formatting which, long story short, caused all of what I had just written to disappear. (Stupid Aquamacs) So then I went for a walk outside in the cold without a coat to try and cool off because I was in shock that the technology could behave so abominably. As I completed my mile-long trek, I was treated to my body's propensity to bleed through the nose. Maybe one day I will have some surgery to get that fixed, but that's another story. Returning to my desk, I proceeded to add regret to injury by sending out a rueful message to an on-again, off-again, fair-weather friend, whom I ostensibly first met on 14 September 1987: another lamentable 14. This action caused this friend, my muse for the creative spurt, to promptly cease all association with myself. No doubt this was because of my tendency to come across as both needy and arrogant and my unfortunately regrettable habit of phrasing things passive-aggressively, even though I don't mean to. Some people smoke, I write passive-aggressively. Bugger, can someone please invent some passive-aggressivitol?

Anyway, so here I am, sick with another cold thanks to the walk my mother would have advised me not to take if my mother ever paid attention to whatever I was up to on any given day, and I have good news to report! No, my muse and I have not reconciled — that must wait until emotions are less flared and an apology worthy of the wrong can be conceived. No, after stumbling and blundering over what the new first line of Scene 8 should be and who would speak it, I had a breakthrough! I now have the first half of a new version of the lost Scene 8 crafted much to my satisfaction. It even has ideas that I would have added to the original had I though about it again, though I still have the sinking feeling that I may have lost some gems from the original in the retelling. There is still the rest of the scene to write from the part where they sneak past the mid-section of the Red Dragon, but progress is progress and progress has been made!

In some ways, writing is like recovering from an addiction: you can't say the productive streak will last forever, but you just have to take it one day at a time...

Welcome

I decided, after writing an e-mail to a dear, dear friend and fellow writer which promptly caused her to delist me from her list of friends and mark me enemy number 1, that I may as well just create a public blog where I could let whoever is interested know how my progress on the Project KronoSphere dream is evolving.

As of today, here is where things stand:

• The Series Bible is stalled because it is difficult to work out the 500 year genealogy of the main protagonist. This genealogy is dense and may end up containing over 1,000 names when complete, thus making the exercise of generating so many for the most part off-screen characters consistently quite tedious. It is so complex that I wanted to write some software (in python) to try and help manage all the various links (keeping a google spreadsheet as the back-end database). This project is currently languishing, meaning the Bible is also quite stalled. None the less, the first 3 generations have been properly generated and there is a running narative that covers each person from their respective generation.

• Also working on setting up Script Note files — breaking up the once large file that contains an unstructured list of program notes — for each story and trying to come up with a Production Coding system that I can use for naming Stories. These Codes would be Writers Codes and may not be the same as true Production Codes because when actors are brought in to record the various episodes, they may be produced in a different order.

• Episode 1 Script is complete with a first draft. Some edits are required, including a few extra minutes of dialog but nothing major.

• Episode 2 Script [part 1 of 2] is complete, though I need to add another scene to the tag because I think Episode 3 should focus on its events and not focus on off-screen events that may have occurred between the two.

• Episode 3 Script [part 2 of 2] has been started, but is on hold due to both requiring more research and the desire to get Episode 4a done sooner.
  

• Episode 4a Script is half-done. This episode occurs chronologically between Episodes 4 and 5. I have notes for the remaining Scenes which require writing and did have a complete Scene 8, but it was lost due to a calamity with the Aquamacs editor. When Scene 8 was written, my muse and dear friend mentioned above had broken a month-long writer's block; now that I have lost my friend and the text of Scene 8, I am again blocked, fearing that rewriting Scene 8 will never be as good as the first. I milltuppled the undo buffers in Aquamacs and Emacs but too little too late, and that won't bring back my friend! None the less, I want to have this script finished soon -- indeed, I wanted to finish it by 31 December 2008 -- but even finishing it by February seems unlikely at this point. I really miss my friend!

• No idea yet how I will get [voice] actors to appear in the Project KronoSphere pre-pilot pilot (Episode 4a), but I will face that when Episode 4a is finished.

Well, that just about summarizes the state of the Project KronoSphere concept as of today. I'm not sure how often I will blog here, but if things pick up, expect more posts. As it is, now this blog is all that I can write due to the current block and I've said about all I can say now.

One last caveat is that I may eventually move this blog to the official Project KronoSphere server at project-kronosphere.timehore.com; for now, enjoy it here on Google Blogger.