I meant to mention this earlier, but with all the fun of Conestoga it kind of fell through the cracks. A while back I got to wondering about my short story “Reunion” and the movie deal with Blackridge Entertainment. So I e-mailed Dean for an update, and was beginning to think I’d fired another message into the ether. But no, he called just minutes before I went into my first panel at Conestoga.

The news is that there really isn’t much news. They are still “very interested” in pursuing the project and have not given it up. They’ve paid to have three versions of a script written — a 30-minute script, as originally planned, an hour-long script, and a full-length feature film script. So, the company has made a sizable financial investment, but at the moment there is no real activity. Nothing to start getting excited about, anyway.

Dean assured me the film will get made in some format, and that it will be a quality production. “We’re not talking about something you’ll find on YouTube,” he said. (That may not be an exact quote, but he said it wouldn’t be YouTube quality.)

I have to say I’m pretty interested to see how they’d turn the story into a feature film. Or even milk the story for an hour. The events of the story happen in about 20 minutes. I suppose with some flashbacks to the accident and life before the boy leaves for the city it could be an hour.

At any rate, I don’t think about this project much. It’s my first — and so far only — film sale, so I’ll be very excited to see it when it happens, but for now memory of it only bubbles to the surface on rare occasions.

I do want to turn one of my stories into a script, though. A short script. I’m wanting to enter the Bare Bones Film Festival and I need a short, low-budget film that is set in Oklahoma. Oh, and I need the time to write it. Yeah. School starts in about three weeks and I still need to finish The Fetch and do some more revision of The Puppet King to meet my summer goals.

I did manage to squeeze out a short-short story today. It’s called “Judgment.” I’d been wanting to do a short-short for a while for a certain market, but didn’t have an idea. Deb LeBlanc provided the idea in her Saturday Conestoga panel about getting out of the box. Now I don’t even remember what it was she said, but it sparked a mental image and a story just fell into place around it. It flowed easily today, and I’ve already sent it off to that market (something I may regret; I haven’t sent something off without Literary Buffet looking at it in a long, long time).

Now I need to do one more chapter of The Fetch before calling it a day. The wife actually wants to read the ending, which is a very good thing. She didn’t like Ulrik, but she likes this one.