even a scatterbrain hits something

I finished a solid draft of the rewritten fatal girl script and started tearing apart another one for the same season.

Then moved to writing something else, of course. Here's the story...

UNCLE GEORGE'S HOUSE PARTY

That's the name of the script, but long before that, it was a scenario I published in Serendipity's Circle (1996-2000), the gaming zine Steve and I made in support of RPGs before they were called TTRPGs. We specialized in weird games - anything that WASN'T sword & sorcery, supers, or scifi - with a special focus on "modern day supernatural investigation" type scenarios.

Taking a game scenario, and making it into a full script is often a unique problem, since (by nature) a game scenario tends to NOT have the main characters in it (since those will be the player characters), so the first chore is to decide what characters to slot into the protagonist role, since you already have the antagonist(s) and setting. And what will make those protagonists special and interesting.

I did a lot of this a few years ago (2012, maybe) and set the overlong script aside, since I couldn't decide whether to leave it about an hour long or lengthen it into a full "audio movie" format. But it never FELT complete. All the major beats were present, but it felt like a shitty movie that could be a good movie, if I fixed it.

[As a side note, this same story was once played out, LIVE, at a convention where we laid out a floorplan in one of the ballrooms, stacked chairs to make some of the walls, and strewed the place with red crepe paper to simulate the horrible bloody murders. It was fun, and my father was a fun Uncle George.]

So now, I've made a good start on fixing UGHP, and I feel kind of bad because i think Contendo Media (the German company that has remade a lot of my scripts in German) got the old version and thought it was good enough, so their version won't match whatever I finally come up with. Ah well.