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In 2013, my Gemini buddy Hilary Hemingway and I spent a week together, writing the first draft of a script for my novel, Ghost Key, initially published by TOR/Forge Books. She’s am author and screenwriter and was teaching me the fundamentals. Eight drafts and months later, we felt we had a completed script. She added an entire new layer to the story – a medical mystery angle – that enhanced the original idea in the novel.
The script didn’t go anywhere, Ghost Key went out of print and is now available as an ebook. Through a sequence of odd events, I recently decided to take another look at the script – only to discover that my Final Draft software didn’t work on my new computer. I downloaded an updated version, to Final Draft 10, and ran across something called Ink Tip, which partners with Final Draft.
The idea with Ink Tip is that you can submit a script, logline, and synopsis and for $60, it remains on the Ink Tip site for 4 months, where it’s supposedly seen by producers etc. There’s also a site called Blacklist which does the same thing, for less $ per month. This lengthy explanation brings me to the point of all this: the logline.
A logline is the pitch for the idea. After endless rewrites, here’s the logline I used for Ghost Key: A government biologist uncovers the shocking truth behind the quarantine of a Florida island, where inhabitants are being seized by ancient ghosts.
And this led me to wonder if we’re living primarily in loglines. In this trump era of lies and more lies, of hourly scandals, where every media outlet is fake news and the Dystopian prez speaks to the country through his Twitter madness, who has the time or inclination to absorb anything else?
A special prosecutor closes in on the Dystopian prez who reveres his Russian handler.
Russia has dirt on the U.S. prez.
The mad hatter laughs wickedly whenever a young child is torn away from his parents at the border.
An obese, 71-year-old, whining dictator with orange hair makes fun of overweight women, older women, women of color, women who are smarter than he is, all women. He boasts that if Oprah runs against him, he’ll win.
I think my favorite logline, though, hasn’t fully happened yet:
Fat Boy, the 71-year old mental case, wanna be dictator, and illegitimate prez is exposed as a pauper, racist, misogynist, criminal, and traitor. He’s now doing 20 years to life with most of the republican members of congress who were complicit in his attempted heist of democracy.
Now: back to Ghost Key. Somehow, being seized by ancient, malevolent ghosts seems far preferable to a world in which the republicans hold onto congress in 2018 and Fat Boy wins in 2020. By then, we may well be living in a Dystopian universe of blatant racism and hatred toward “other,” with Roe v. Wade a footnote in history, breathing toxic air and fleeing inland from the coasts, with corporate giants and banks reigning as the true kings.
Yeah, give me evil ancient ghosts any day.
