Happy Holidays to you all!

I'm taking some time off from work over the holidays to work on some personal projects, and I think I may have gotten some pretty decent work done.

For example--this painting:

And this one:

Both of these were inspired by pictures graciously sent to me by my best friend, who knows me all too well.

Speaking of my best friend--she got this for me as a combination xmas/birthday present. It's a huge and a beautiful book. I'm almost afraid to handle it, it's so beautiful. I won't be making notations in the margins and highlighting this one, believe me. Since it's full of seminal horror stories from the beginning of the twentieth century until the recent past it's going to be quite useful to me, too.

And that same friend is the co-author of this book. I'm reading it now, and can recommend it to you, as well.

I've also been re-reading my draft of the screenplay for the pilot of this TV show I've been mulling over. It needed some tweaking but, overall, I'm happy with it. I may need to trim it a little bit--at 49 pages I think it's just a tad too long--but that's about it. I've also written a draft of the treatment for the pilot and began writing what will become the series bible--explaining the setting, characters, tone, back story, all that.

I still can't give many of the details except to say that it's a horror-based show. There's definitely room on TV for one of those--most of the shows on TV now that have a darker tone are more action/adventure with horrific overtones, like Supernatural.. This one will be more pure horror--each episode will be designed to scare the viewer as much as possible, hopefully by telling a cracking good story where the characters are interesting and in dreadful peril by a terrifying threat.

We'll see. My writing plate, as I've mentioned, is about to get a bit fuller--I'm waiting on a contract to write the screenplay for a film, along with the treatment, from the film's producer, and that one will need to take priority. In the meantime, since I know what this film is about, I've been doing some research on the theme, the background that will give birth to the story.

And I'm now a year older. A half century plus one. Damn. There was a time I never thought I would have made it this far.

Tomorrow is the holiday, too. My own plans are to continue working on the stuff I've been working on, maybe do another painting or two, and maybe even plot out another project that is becoming interesting to me again.

Whatever your plan is to celebrate the holiday--whatever you may call it, xmas, Festivus,, Saturnalia, etc.--or if you don't celebrate it at all, have fun, in any case!