My latest screenplay is at the top of the list. My earliest screenplays are garbage, but they’re all here. I also share most of the drafts that I still have of all my screenplays. You can read why here.
I Give Up
A teenage gladiator crosses a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of the witches that kidnapped her psychic brother.
This is my Balls Out; just giving up on rules and sanity and writing whatever craziness I wanted to write.
Future drafts are going to change a lot; this one is nuts.
Good Enough for Me
When a supervillain falls in love with her arch-nemesis, rather than continue to fight, they do their best to make the relationship work.
A romantic superhero action-comedy; it’s a big genre soup and I’m trying to play them all relatively straight – though I don’t mind bucking some of the more predictable tropes.
The Dragonslayers
When a half-dwarf finds herself out of luck and deep in debt, she risks everything on an unthinkable heist – stealing from a stellar dragon’s planet full of treasure.
A fantasy story wearing sci-fi clothes. I had a lot of fun taking fantasy things like elves and orcs and wizards and dragons, and figuring out what their spacefaring society would look like. Eventually, this was the result. The first draft is very setting-focused, but by the final draft I cut it to be more plot-focused.
The Destroyer
After years of searching for meaning, an alcoholic waitress develops inexplicable powers that hint at a greater purpose. But the more her powers develop, the more she learns to fear her role in events to come.
Before The Destroyer, I used to write exclusively from strong outlines, even if I eventually wound up ditching them; this was the first one I let grow organically, and that eventually became a big part of my process.
Smoke and Mirrors
When the daughter of a recently-passed sorceress is taken as an apprentice by her mother’s greatest rival, she must decide if he is friend or foe before his mysterious plans come to fruition.
This screenplay started out being co-written with Cassie, but life got in the way. She’s always been a big part of my process, reading my stuff, giving notes, so we tried her having a bigger part of the process, but then she went back to school and just didn’t have the time.
To Live For
After she causes a car accident that kills her twin sister, a teenage girl joins a reluctant suicide club and pushes them to do the deed.
I struggled with this one for a while, but ultimately I just never felt confident enough to call it finished. Suicide is a rough topic and if I couldn’t handle it properly, I didn’t want to handle it at all – and these drafts just don’t handle it properly.
Shadows
When a sorceress finds herself hounded by a wizard-eating demon, her only hope of respite is to steal magic from the elves.
I wrote the first draft of this one in a single week while my wife was out of town, just to see if I could do it. I technically could, but it was so bad I didn’t consider it to be salvageable.
Gokhan
A shaman must travel to a distant land to kill his former apprentice before she can establish herself as a cruel goddess over the locals.
This one was loosely inspired by Star Wars. I started thinking about what it would look like if it was just fantasy, rather than science-fantasy. I’d also been reading a lot about Genghis Khan at the time, which wound up being a large part of it as well.
Gokhan was originally called “Messiah,” and the early drafts reflect that.
War of the Bands
In a world where music can be used as a weapon, a teenage rocker joins a literal battle of the bands in order to eventually fight his absentee father.
Originally written in a single month as a part of Script Frenzy, the now-defunct screenwriting version of NaNoWriMo. As you might guess from a screenplay being written in a single month, it saw a lot of revisions; of the original 140 pages, I probably only kept about 50; it’s now a much more reasonable 88 pages.
Treason
When a secret policeman falls in love with the woman he’s supposed to be spying on, he’s forced to decide between turning her in, or helping her escape.
My second screenplay, but my first screenplay that I couldn’t pretend was trying to be bad. It is bad, though. That said, I like the idea enough that I might write it all over again someday.
Kill the Beast
An ex-cop teams up with a group of vampire hunters to find the monster that killed his partner.
This was the first screenplay I ever wrote, and it is terrible. I wrote it after watching a bunch of B movies and thinking, “That can’t be hard to do.”
I was wrong.