Brad Vance Author

By now I should be telling you to run buy Would I Lie to You: The Audiobook, but… it’s been in “brief review” at ACX for 23 days and counting. I use the acx-check plugin in Audacity before subbing, so I know the files are a-ok. At least they have customer service that doesn’t respond in seconds with a form letter that says “I do understand your concern” (a real instaletter I got from KDP once). Sigh. Just another impenetrable mystery behind the walls at Castle Amazon… Anyway! Conning Colin comes out next Friday! And here’s a BIG ASS sneak preview 🙂 Harrison Dillon adjusted his knit tie in the mirror one last time before he left home to meet an important client. His navy blue Todd Snyder suit fit him as well as its twin had fit Ryan Gosling, when he wore it to the Golden Globes, and its pinstripes were just as flattering to his strong, lean frame. He checked his skin for any flaws or creases, brushed non-existent dust off his [MORE]

Here’s the link! Not *quite* ready to do a postmortem, but it’s not looking good. I know, I should be radiating bang-the-drum positivity in every direction right now, but… Shit, if I was that guy, I wouldn’t need a Kickstarter 🙂 THAT SAID, there’s still time to make it happen, it ends early Tuesday morning. And **thank you** to all of you who signed up to support it! Hey, it was a learning experience! If you want to get KS itself to find your KS exciting and promote it, your best bet is to create a cool, physical product. I discovered there are about 12 billion people out there who will claim that they can “successfully promote” your KS, and who prove their aggressive marketing skills by sending constant emails asking me if I got their mail about promoting my KS. Oh, and then there’s the ones that say “I had a KS and I want to warn you not to be fooled by marketing scammers! Instead, click on this Google Docs Link Which [MORE]

BUY IT HERE! Yeah, I got it converted into a MOBI 🙂 If only because the Internet told me it wasn’t possible. God, I’m sick to death of arrogant people making these huge pronouncements. “Humba dumba, if you want to convert your screenplay to Kindle, it can’t be done, humba dumba.” “Humba dumba, your first screenplay will suck. And your second, and your third, humba dumba.” “Humba dumba, all first drafts are vomit humba dumba.” Well, first of all, you CAN make a MOBI of a screenplay. There are certain caveats, of course. First off, Amazon doesn’t support the right indent (thanks to Bey Deckard, who told me the right indent thing just wouldn’t happen in Kindle and saved me a lot of wasted time), so you can’t get that centered column of dialogue, but otherwise, yeah. It can. Here’s what I did. I use WriterDuet for screenwriting. Exporting to RTF and putting it in Calibre gets you everything left-aligned, [MORE]

Busy busy bee. Trump is coming to kill me and my pills are $40k a year without insurance, and I better make buckets of ducats if I want to live… That’s the final cover for Conning Colin, coming June 2nd! I’m pretty happy with it; it’s a light romcom but it’s still got enough Brad Vance Mark of Quality(TM) thought to it that you won’t forget it the moment you finish it (hopefully). All the acting classes and screenplay experience I’ve had the last six months have been transferred to the characters, one’s an actor and the other a budding screenwriter – which means it’s all tax deductible now, yay! The Kickstarter has 8 days to go, and isn’t at 50% yet. My plan now is to beat the drum on Facebook and Twitter for the last five days, and see what happens. 20/20 hindsight tells me I should have set the goal lower, even if that meant foregoing Scriptfest/Pitchfest, but too late now. It’s interesting to see the fate of [MORE]

Tick tock, Clarice! Click here to support the Kickstarter! Here’s the summary of the paid eval (scored 6 out of 10) from the Black List (okay, I got it for free via Franklin Leonard via /r/screenwriting, but still!). You can read the whole thing but you’ll have to go to the Kickstarter page 🙂 This is a low budget romantic drama with some excellent characterizations and strong emotional struggles for the main characters. This could have strong appeal for indie, festival, and LGBT audiences, with the military and animal angles adding unique elements to the story. The action can lose focus at times and certain elements are underexplored, leaving room for further development. Just between me and the six of you who actually visit this blog to read about something besides Josh Lanyon or A Little Life, I’m “at peace” if I don’t get the Kickstarter funded. Hey, I’m only in debt a few hundred (more than I already am) bucks on evals and [MORE]

And off to ACX for what, as you can see in this screen shot, is allegedly a “brief” review…which a different screen will tell you is 10-14 days, so in whose mind that’s brief… Took me long enough to finish! I recently went on Flovent, and that’s been an amazing change in my breathing and, therefore, capacity to narrate without huffing, snuffling, etc. Mostly! And I have to do it at the butt crack of dawn, before coffee, before the birds and the cars and the people and whatnot get started, so there’s been that obstacle. Oh yeah, and my gut trouble, which is now under management via you know, not eating things I really like. So, I’m going into production mode now, and I figure, I’ve already got Marc and Jesse and Leonid in my head, so why not just go on to Strength in Numbers? It’s also shorter than Lie (50k v. 70k) so it’s an easier “get.” (Though since Amazon prices audio at a “words by the [MORE]

Here it is, new and improved. And here’s the Kickstarter link! Yeah, I cogitated on the notes I got from the WeScreenplay pro reader, and incorporated them into the story. I removed the infodump when Tom and Jamie first go to lunch, and stretched out their revelations a bit. The info is there, Jamie sees Tom’s ankle and knows he has prosthetics, he sees Tom hesitate on going into a crowded restaurant. Tom originally revealed he’d lost his legs, and that he had PTSD. I left the PTSD reveal out this time, had Jamie notice the legs, and Tom acknowledges that. After which, originally, Jamie infodumped like this: JAMIE  I’m HIV positive. Oh, and gay if you hadn’t figured that out. He dares to look at Tom, he’s not horrified. JAMIE (CONT’D) I meet guys, and I tell them I’m poz, and sometimes I see them freaking out, but then they think they hide it. And I just… I don’t talk about it now. I don’t try and date anyone. So I don’t have [MORE]

Cross-posted from the Kickstarter update, and YES I’m going to harangue you again to help support it HERE: http://kck.st/2ppS8cU The last six months have been really transformative for me. Not just as a writer, but as a person. I’ve stopped thinking of myself as The Writer who ‘just writes,’ and started turning myself into the creative person who’s a multitool. I’m taking a short filmmaking class (and just snagged the lead role in one of the films we’re making), and I’m hoovering up every bit of information I can get, about lighting, camera angles, blocking, storyboarding, sound… The class doesn’t cover editing, so I’ve asked the director/teacher for a Dropbox dump of all the video and sound files from one of the films (about 4 minutes long), and I’ll “figure it out myself” and learn to edit on my own. I have Camtasia Studio, and the Internet tells me that Lightworks is both free and awesome. And hey, I’m a fast learner – I went from knowing jack [MORE]

That’s right folks. All of it over the $2,000 funding goal. So spread the word 🙂 (Edit, if you want to look up my contribution history to IAVA and other orgs, it’s all under my real name, Orland Outland, which is the name that *sounds* like the preposterous pseudonym…) http://kck.st/2ppS8cU I’ve told this story before, but now’s a good place and time to tell it again. When I wrote A Little Too Broken, there were all kinds of “military romances” out and about, mostly hetero, and mostly quite awful. They exploited the “new adult” “I’m broken” trope and created Navy SEALs, Special Forces dudes, all Heros with Dark Secrets, all written without the authors giving two fucks enough to even Google PTSD. It reeked of exploitation to me – profiting off the suffering these authors were dropping into their crappy soup for flavor. The fact that veterans were coming back with Dark Secrets, and it wasn’t the kind [MORE]