Fire-Wired Blog

Update : As was expected, The 2020 Snake Alley Festival of Film has been delayed due to Covid-19 concerns. No dates have been set, but the hope is now for the fall. Seeing as the USA is not New Zealand (where they made the hard choices and have effectively eradicated the virus), I'd call that optimistic. I guess the old saying is right; you can lead a country to quarantine but you can't make it shelter in place. I'll update again when there is more share. I am excited .  Last fall, I got the lightning strike idea that I needed to adapt a story my Grandmother wrote as a child into a screenplay. That may sound slight, but this story is incredible; it is the story of my Great Grandmother Martha Adams giving birth during the German invasion of Belgium in World War I , followed by her braving the war, losing her husband, remarrying and moving to Illinois, and then personal trials galore up until her death in 1976. It is a story that would make Scarlett O'Hara say "Than...

10 years ago I learned about an awesome challenge called the " Script Frenzy ." The idea was for writers to take the month of April and write a 100-page screenplay or other creative project. While I thought the challenge event was an incredible idea I never actually participated before the  official project was sent out to pasture after the 2012 event... But then March 30, 2017 rolled around and I discovered the perfect story to frenzy onto the page and today I have a 101-page script. No this is not my first screenplay. But it is the first one I've gotten to the point of typing "The End" and still felt the absolute NEED to produce. I won't bore you with details of the screenplay other than it's an adventure-drama-romance set in Iowa's Loess Hills and loosely "based on actual events." As I've recounted on here   many times before I love cinema and a long term goal of mine has been to write-direct a feature film. Am I delude...

15 months ago I left the journalism world, this was a really hard decision. Growing up I routinely watched the nightly news while my mom prepared dinner. I quickly fell in love with the storytelling aspect of a journalists life and the fact they were reporting on something different practically every day. So following my dream to be a rockstar, my life's ambition was to be a reporter.  In route to that dream I carried a videocamera with me practically everyday, worked for a few news radio stations, PA'd at local CBS is San Francisco and eventually became a small town reporter and T.V. Producer. So why did I drop the dream? Two reasons: my mortgage and the hope to one day provide sole support to family, so my wife can be a stay-at-home mom (her dream). While I may be out of the journalism game at the moment, there is a simple way to keep the dream alive; freelancing. Back in February, I applied to the local alternative newspaper, Cityview , for a freelance tech col...