I think story ideas are like that too. Loglines. They lose their punch over time in your own mind. It’s not until you get them in front of fresh eyes, or pitch them to new ears, that you realize, remember, or understand for the first time in a lightning-strike epiphany that, yes, you’ve really got something.

Earlier today, just for shits and giggles as my writer friend said, Andrea Brown literary agent Jennifer Laughran (@literaticat) held a Tweet-a-Query challenge via her Twitter feed.

TWITTER QUERY CHALLENGE! Pitch me your (real or fake) book in ONE TWEET. Must include type of book (YA, MG, etc) & an irresistible logline.

Well, it just happens I’m working on a Young Adult novel. Or will be, after I finish The Last Screenplay I Ever Write (blog post on that coming soon). The plan is, actually, to novelize my screenplay Troop 51 Saves the World. This is, frankly, a kick-ass screenplay that I had a lot of fun writing. I know that’s terribly braggy of me to say, but honestly I don’t say that about all my scripts, and besides, I have plenty of self-doubt in other areas to make up for it.

But the point is, I’ve pitched this one before. As a screenplay pitch, I found varying degrees of success which seemed entirely to depend on external factors (they have a movie like that in development, they aren’t doing “kid” movies anymore, they just read about a similar project…) and not on the pitch itself. So I’ve lived with this idea for along time and kind of forgotten if it had any punch to it.

Jennifer’s Tweet-a-Query was a fun, no-fail way to send up a test baloon. So I Tweeted.

12yo overachiever leads world’s worst boy scouts in earning toughest merit badge yet – saving the world from alien invasion.

Well, the 140 character limit doesn’t lend itself to elegance. But that’s the core of the idea. The one I’ve been living with for two years, the one I pitched at Screenwriting Expo, the one that got the script to a couple of quarter-finals.

I was stunned by the reactions. The positive, I’d-love-to-read-this-one reactions. The winner was to be determined by vote in the comments of Jennifer’s blog entry, and my query garnered a lot of enthusiasm.

In fact, I won.

I was very humbled and happy. Because I had forgotten. Because the joke stopped being funny for me.

I feel very encouraged now. I always knew this story was a screenplay. It is now a young adult novel as well. And it’s a very different thing to write a book you know people are already excited about. I’ll be querying Jennifer when the novel is done.

And next time, I get more than 140 characters.

Firstly, I’ve recently decided that ten years of nothing-but-screenwriting is enough. I hope this screenwriting thing pans out eventually, but even if it doesn’t there’s a great wide world of other kinds of writing out there. Time to broaden.

Secondly, after years of swearing I would never buy a Kindle, I bought a . . . wait for it . . . Kindle. What? I had gift cards. I’ll write more about the Kindle itself some other time, but now that I’ve got one, my interest in the business of ebooks has grown.

I also have this limitless capacity for self-inflicted torture, which is really handy for a writer to have. So I decided at some point I was going to teach myself to create a Kindle book and publish it. With Halloween coming, a creepy little story like Miss Spyder seemed the natural choice. Originally published in a small press horror magazine, the story would have a new life. As a free ebook, there was every reason to believe it would spread like religion. Or the Ebola virus.

Reality. Best laid plans. You know how it goes.

So, in no particular order, and mostly as a stream-of-consciousness, here’s what I learned from my little self-published ebook test-balloon.

1. No one is motivated to get something that is free and available in great abundance for an unlimited time. I understand why this is, I just didn’t didn’t understand the extent to which is was true. Have we been trained by television infomercials to ACT NOW because SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED? Or is this just hardwired into our brains? Either way, the sad truth is — people have so much on their plates right now you must generate a sense of urgency to get them to act.

2. The day you need a social network it’s too late to build one. I had let my blog fade from the consciousness of the scribosphere, and that didn’t help when it came to spreading the word about my story. If you’ve got a major project on the horizon, don’t wait until launch to establish a web presence. Build an audience before  you need one.

3. Ebooks may be the hottest new thing, but not everyone knows how they work or what to do with them. Even the more technologically savvy amongst my friends were baffled by file formats and reader software. Some people I know didn’t understand the difference between the application itself and the ebook, or that software could enable you to read on other platforms besides the Kindle. We have a long way to go before a Kindle file is as easy to use and read as a PDF.

4. Apple doesn’t make things easy. You can’t download a Kindle file on the iPhone, store it in a folder, and read it with Kindle for iPhone. Apple won’t let you download files all willy-nilly from the Internet (just the occasional PDF apparently). I didn’t learn this until several of my friends asked me how to read my story on their iPhone. Turns out you can only read content purchased through the Kindle store on the iPhone. Since I was giving away my story for free((At 700 words, I really didn’t feel comfortable charging even a minimum .99 cents in the Amazon store.)) — no iPhone for my friends.

5. PDFs don’t always do what you expect. Thanks especially to some jerk-ass font makers who won’t allow their precious fonts to be embedded in PDFs, if you aren’t careful you can create one hell of an ugly document. Rasterizing fonts creates something that looks like a horrible fax document from the 90s and swells the size of the PDF beyond reasonable download territory. Again, this is a case of the world not catching up/keeping up with the way we use technology. It’s silly to sell a font…excuse me…license a font and withhold permission for embedding or for use on web pages, etc. Just what the hell else is a font going to be used for these days?

6. If you wait to release your story on different platforms, you squander whatever buzz you’ve built up. By the time I got the PDF together for those that had difficulty with the Kindle file, the moment had kind of passed. It’s why I never bothered with the epub version.

Epublishing is definitely the future but not everyone lives there yet. It’s probably best to plug in to Amazon’s store to reach the widest audience across all platforms with the least bit of hassle. Unless you are a name-brand author, there is more to be gained from the visibility and accessibility of Amazon’s book store than there is to be lost from Amazon taking their cut of your sales.

Anyone else have experience with or planning to publish digitally? What have you found out so far?

I haven’t attempted to write a play since my brief love affair with Beckett as an undergrad back in the 80s. That attempt at a degree didn’t take. Neither did my playwriting career. Though playwriting never completely fell off my radar (nothing ever does), I’ve been so intensely focused on screenwriting for the last ten years there’s been little room for anything else.

Fortunately for me, accomplished playwright, director, and fellow UCLA MFA scribe Cecilia Fannon teaches playwriting right in my back yard at SCR. Her students gush about her and now I can confirm — she really is that good.

So what have I learned from my little foray into playwriting?

Playwriting is hard. Like all other kinds of writing when you are just starting out, expect a steep learning curve and sore writing muscles after your first few workouts.

Playwriting is easy. Sometimes when I get into a groove, I just go. And there isn’t a worry about wrapping up a scene in two pages or keeping up a breakneck pace of the plot as in screenwriting.

I’m no expert. I constantly felt like I was playing catch-up in workshop critiques. My entire frame of reference for ten years has been movies. Now someone is talking to me about Pinter. Okay — I better find out what a pinter is.

I’m better at playwriting than I ever thought I would be. I have to say — it’s really nice to try something new and find out you’re pretty good at it. Maybe I got lucky with my first play. I probably couldn’t have written this well ten years ago. I’ve had a lot of practice writing tight, developing character, shaping story. Some of that translates.

Having a live audience laugh at your jokes and applaud at the end is highly addicting. After years of being picked apart in workshops, it’s supremely gratifying to hear people react in all the right places. Listening to my writer’s group gasp at the realization of the final twist in my play was something I’ll always treasure.

A live reading tells you more about your work than a typical workshop critique. There is some alchemical reaction between page, actor and audience I don’t quite understand yet, but I have to say — I had no idea what I had written until I heard it performed. It’s the difference between drawing a technical schematic of an atom bomb and actually setting one off.

For those of you who have waited so patiently for the next Scribometer update, my heartfelt appreciation to you. The most requested feature — multiple instances — has been incorporated into the upcoming release. You can now track as many projects as you like at the same time.

The new release will hit the update servers this weekend. Keep a lookout for it. Happy writing.

If for some reason you enjoy visiting actual web pages, and you make a sad, lonely habit of visiting here, then you should know that 1) this is sill a work in progress and 2) some things that are gone may reappear, and some things that are here may disappear.

The important point, even to those of you reading this in your feed, is that this is no longer strictly a screenwriting site. I’m branching out. This blog will be accordingly broadening its focus to include playwriting, fictionwriting, and other ings that catch my fancy.

Thank you and good night.