An Excellent Screenwriting Blog

If you are looking for some day to day, real life adventures of a screenwriter and by chance have not yet stumbled on his blog already, then let me introduce you to David C. Daniel's Screenwriting by Blog. David is really putting it out there and gives you a ring side P.O.V. on the daily challenges, victories and near-misses of getting a polished spec script into the hands of the right person -- along with some lessons learned from some of the not-so-right people out there.

In this post, Learning from My Mistake, he recounts his misadventures in writing a treatment for a script re-write for a dubious chap he calls, "Lonnie." David agrees to take it on and turns out the work over a weekend. But then...

The silence was thundering. I called Lonnie after a week. Nothing.

[snip]

I knew I might get screwed going into the thing so I wondered why I was irked. Then it hit me: I was pissed because I wasn't given the courtesy of a good lie or even a half-assed line of crap. I was supposed to be happy with zilch. I began to suspect that Lonnie intended to submit my treatment as his own or some such nefarious act. I also wondered if Lonnie really and truly owns the script-in-question. But I also gave Lonnie the benefit of the doubt: Maybe he's been real busy, maybe the producer never got back to him, yadda-yadda.

I was in a quandary. Then inspiration struck! I dialed Lonnie's number, got his voice mail and left the following message: "Hi Lonnie, it's David Daniel. I figure since I haven't heard from you by now that my treatment isn't under consideration. I've decided to make it available on my weblog as a writing sample. I wanted to let you know just in case it is with the producer. Thanks, bye."

My phone rang five minutes later...

Go read the whole story and the rest of David's excellent blog.