I have written valid works for stage and screen–both big and little–since 1993. Valid but on an amateur level. Actually, I wrote my first screenplay when I was 10 years old. I wrote a war movie which didn’t make any sense, and I followed it up with a spy film…also made no sense. My parents were supportive, but they didn’t have a problem telling me how the scripts were utter no-content piles of confusion.So I aspired to do better.

I wrote a comic book–never published and shown to only three people I think–when I was a teenager. Eventually, my mother felt I had a good visual style to telling a story and she suggested I learn to write and direct movies. So off I went.

1993, I wrote, produced, directed and starred in my first shot-on-video movie. It was a short by the title The Running. It was written on a type writer; an actual typewriter. Do you millennials even know what that is? Basically, it’s a contraption for writing which forces you to type entire scenes over again just to add a couple lines of dialogue.

No wonder the movie was only 45 minutes.

Anyways, it didn’t end there. I produced a handful of other manuscripts with that old technology–if it can even be called that. A couple other screenplays one of which was a three hour epic about a detective attempting to infiltrate a gang of Neo-Nazi’s in Boston. It was called 21st Nazi. It’s terrible. It’s contrived and makes little sense. But at least it’s long!

I remember the rewrites on that opus. Thanks to the typewriter, rewrites were a pain in the ass for a three hour script. I have such disdain for the entire pile of paper because of that process. But it’s the only three-hour screenplay I’ve ever written, so I kept it and read it from time to time. Just as a word of advice, a shitty script doesn’t get better with age.

Luckily, I promise not to upload any of my terrible “learning” pieces into this blog. All you will find are my credible works for screen and stage, which is where I truly figured out my medium of storytelling. Hopefully, you will agree as I continue to grow as a writer from that 10-year old screenwriter who confused his parents with his work. Sorry, Mom and Dad.