Manuscripts Burn


MANUSCRIPTS BURN

"Manuscripts don't burn"
- Mikhail Bulgakov

Hi, I'm horror and science fiction author Steve Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key.") Welcome to my blog! You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon. You can e-mail me here, join my mailing list here, or request an e-autograph here. Free on this site you can listen to me recite one of my own short works, "The Thing Under the Bed."

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

THE NEIGHBORS ARE ZOMBIES: PROLOGUE PART DEUX

Uh. Yeah. So. Did you check this space on Monday? Yeah, probably not, I assume. Or, if you did, you didn't care enough to start griping. Anyway, the truth is I had gotten so used to not updating the blog that I just plain went to bed last night and forgot about my over-the-weekend promise. Anyway, I could just backdate THIS entry, but I won't, as I've said before, I prefer to keep this blog censorship free, management blunders and all.

Anyhoo, I thought you might all benefit from a brief introduction to this new manuscript before I actually start burning. Which, I know, is kind of a cheap way of doing an already tardy update. But, you know what? After all the hours of free entertainment I assume I've already provided you with, you can indulge me. Have I ever forced you to endure the story behind the story before? Most likely yes, I assume, although I can't recall any specific examples. So feel free to post links in the comments section pointing out my obvious flaws to me. That's what you internet types like to do, isn't it?

Anyway, this brief introduction keeps ballooning. So, here's the story about this script. Round about...let's call it...2004...someone apparently pitched a new reality show to Bravo (yes, I know this is now the Gay Network. Actually, I probably knew that in 2004, because that Queer Eye show had already come out. But I digress. Yet again.) So, the premise of this show, and I'll be damned if I remember it's proposed name, because it certainly never made the airwaves, was that folks from around the country would write scripts for television comedies, send them in, people would paw through them, choose the best, and give the scriptwriter a certain amount of money to produce it. Or maybe the script would be produced by professionals, I forget which.

In any case, the whole point was to bring sort of an American Idol ethos to the fun and fabulous world of scriptwriting, which I can assure you is actually quite a boring procedure. Go figure this show never saw the light of day. Anyway, for whatever reason, despite having never written:

a) a comedy
b) a television pilot, or
c) anything remotely funny (any actual humor in TTROTB-M!!! is purely coincidental)

I naturally assumed I would be the best candidate and immediately win the Bravo grant. Or whatever the prize actually was. So, drawing on personal experience, I wrote a three camera sitcom about a family of zombies trying to make it in the 'burbs. Brilliant stuff, I know.

Here's where the hitch came in: I was in the army at the time. An officer, no less. And I, unlike some of the more prosecutable members of the officer corps, actually took the apolitical nature of the job seriously. So I didn't want to accidentally get caught up being famous for something other than being an officer, and all the nasty PR issues it could cause (ah, to have dreams again) so I was certain I couldn't submit it myself. So I slapped a friend's name on THE NEIGHBORS ARE ZOMBIES, sent it off to Bravo, and promptly waited for the show to, apparently, implode and never be produced. So, rather than waste a perfectly good script written on-spec with no future, I felt I would share it with you good people. So watch this space (seriously) tomorrow for the first bizarrely plotted scene in the epic. For now, I bid you adieu.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Enter your e-mail address in the box below and click "Subscribe" to join Stephen Kozeniewski's Mailing List for Fun and Sexy People. (Why the hell would anyone ever want to join a mailing list?)