I finished my screenplay I started two months ago, when I read that "How to Write a Movie in 21 Days" book.  It obviously took me longer than 21 days, but honestly, a first draft from scratch in two months is pretty damned good for me.  It's a first draft, though, which means it's very rough, the characters are only sort of vaguely there, in dribs and drabs, the story needs work, and the dialogue is almost certainly temporary throughout, but you have to have the first draft before you can go on and do anything else, so there's that.

I joined a local writer's group, oh, about six weeks ago.  There's only about seven or eight of us, but it's been nice to get out and do some workshopping and talk about writing with other people.  I've missed that atmosphere, even if it isn't quite the same as the kind of workshopping one gets in a class.  Everyone else in the group writes either poetry or short essays which are often at least semi-autobiographical, so it's been kind of interesting to get feedback that isn't always so screenplay-specific.  And, it's also prompted me to try my hand at prose, which aside from a two-page short story I wrote in lieu of a paper for Greek Mythology at USC, I haven't written since high school.

I thought I'd post a few of the stories I'd written, just for fun.  All are 1000 words or less - there's a flash fiction contest coming up that I'm going to enter, I think.  No need to read if you're busy, or critique if you do read - just wanted to share.

Day 21 - Favorite ship.

HAHAHA like I can pick just one. Let's face it - shipping is important. Sometimes that brief hand-hold or peck on the cheek is all that saves an otherwise mediocre episode. You need to see characters grow and evolve over the years, and no better way to do that than to see relationships grow and evolve as well. And, you know, shallowly, sometimes you just want to see attractive people make out.

So I narrowed it down to the top five. I couldn't cut any more than that. In chronological order from when I shipped 'em.











Yeah that last couple made it on the list! Why else do you think I managed to watch the entirety of seasons three and four in eight days? (Okay, it was like 30% ship, 60% the show was just that good, and 10%...because...I have a crush on Bruce Boxleitner. I mean, come on!)

Day 20 - Favorite kiss.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - 6x08 - "Tabula Rasa"

Buffy's been through a lot, including being brought back from the dead when she really didn't want to be. Alienated from her friends, feeling overburdened, she ends up turning to Spike as a kind of comrade-in-arms, confidante, and punching bag. Down in the dumps, he shows up to be there for her, but she wants none of it, and so he leaves. Or so we think...

For Holly, Photoshop resources 1 and Photoshop resources 2. There's gradients, bases, light effects, and a few other assorted things like masks and textures. This represents, like, eight years of saving things from various places, so that's why I had to split it up into two zipped files - it should do you, though, heh.

I thought I'd do a mini-tutorial on using them, since my early attempts at these kinds of things without actually knowing what to do led me to create monstrosities like this:



Like, I don't even know WTF I was going for there.

So, I did two different things for this icon. First, I took my base and topped it with a bright gradient layer:



I set the gradient to Pin Light at 80% to get this:



Then I put the following light base on top, Screen, at 100%, to get the final icon:



I'm a big fan of combining a texture and a light source, or a gradient and a texture, to get a variety of effects. I generally tend to use light sources on Screen, Overlay or Soft Light, but Pin Light or Hard Light can be interesting sometimes, too.

Here's another one. The base, and then the two gradients I used:



I duplicated the first gradient, set the bottom layer on Screen at 20%, the top at Exclusion at 20%; the second gradient I set to Soft Light at 100%. That gave me this, once I added a Selective Color adjustment layer to bring the blacks up a bit:



So not a huge change, but I find that fixing things like brightness and contrast work better with gradients, gradient maps, and flood fill layers set to different properties and opacities just looks cleaner than using the contrast adjustment layer, for instance. Then I used this texture, set on Linear Dodge 100%, and added a flood fill black layer set to Soft Light on 20% (this is my favorite way to bring up the contrast a little bit, because for me it's easier to adjust the opacity on that layer than to fiddle with the contrast bar).



Finally, if you use a light source like this one here, any of them from the folder "light effects" from the user awnp, you MUST set it to Hard Light - well, you don't have to, but it won't look right otherwise.



With this one, I had to put a layer mask on the light effect layer so that it wouldn't cover up their faces - I usually just use a black to transparent gradient to get rid of the part I don't want, but you could brush it out, too, depending on what you were getting rid of. Anyway, hope you get some use out of this, and hope I wasn't too pedantic or anything; I was going to upload my folder of icon tutorials I've saved over the years but it was over 500 mb so yeah.

Iconnnnns. Seriously though, I post these more for my own benefit and as a reference, and I know that none of you watch the show, so no big; feel free to skip, heh. Although number 11 is probably one of prettiest, if not the prettiest, icons I've ever made.

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.