SCRIPTING A DUNGEONS & DRAGONS™ VIDEO: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

(This is the full version of the blog post. When recording for video, I had to get used to noise suppression all over again. The software cut a few opening syllables from several sentences. I went in and edited the audio rather than doing a second take.)

Usually, when it comes to making YouTube videos on roleplaying games and boardgames…
   Wait a bit. You can’t hashtag board games. That’s where the one-word spelling comes in, and I am stuck with its utility now…
   When planning videos, I’ll have an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons™ explanation or something along those lines. This needs props. I film those, with one eye on the general idea. Okay, I’ll talk about this game, that publisher, and those hobby accessories.
   If I have those hobby accessories, I’d damn-well better film them. And if I don’t have the items to hand, I’ll film around them. This is how JAWS came to be a much better movie than originally envisioned. If you can’t film the broken rubber shark, film around it. Show the shark’s viewpoint, not the malfunctioning shark prop’s flippery-floppery. Rely on John Williams. He’ll see you through.
   Repeat as needed.
   For assorted copyright reasons, I won’t be relying on the score from JAWS in my video. Spielberg maintained Robert Shaw’s sobriety throughout the production by running the actor through a game of Dungeons & Dragons™. Shaw insisted on playing a cleric called Mr Blue.
   John Milius dropped in as Bear “The Bear” Bear. He and Shaw dangled Wizardy Chappie over the cliff until he revealed the secret password.
   Wizardy Chappie was played by Richard Dreyfuss, who then lied about the password anyway. This is why JAWS was a nightmare to film. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
   Lights, camera, action. Place a prop. Film it. Replace it. Film the next one. Switch camera angles. Leave a camera in shot for the sheer hell of it. Film the next thing. Usually I’ll be listening to someone else’s roleplaying video in the background as I film mine. How many shots will I manage in an hour? Enough.
   I drop those snippets into the editing software and strip out the random audio. Yes, I may move the order of shots around quite a lot. And I might have to ditch footage. Shoot things again. Or shoot a new item that I should have included in the first place.
   With the order of shots arranged around an idea, I write up a script. Shots lend themselves to talking-points. That’s why I film them in the first place. The script is done. I record the audio. That audio is edited. I throw the audio track onto the video compilation.
   That’s when the real editing begins. I extend the length of a clip or shorten it, in keeping with the narrative pace. After that, I look at the visual gaps I’ve left behind. Those must be filled. I’ll use clips from previous videos. Or I’ll film more new stuff. Maybe I’ll repeat a clip several times for effect. Gradually, I fill those pesky gaps.
   I might cut more audio out. You realise you’ve made a point that is…bullshit. It’s a technical term. There’s a statement based on shifting sands at high tide. You misread a source. Or you contradict yourself with wild abandon. The primal audio flies in the face of the civilised video evidence, and you retreat to higher ground.
   Usually, not always, I make time to throw in a roleplaying fact. These roleplaying facts are utterly fake. You’ll know this by the phrasing. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
   Or a boardgaming fact, depending on the topic. Rarely, I find that I don’t use the phrasing at all. It’s a thing on the channel, but it doesn’t define the channel. Dry understated caustic humour? That’s just the default setting in Scotland.
   For this entry, I decided to script a blog post and make it the audio for a YouTube video as well. Some people use the term DungeonTube. I asked Doctor Google about this and encountered requests for directions to The London Dungeon by means of underground rail.
   There was also pornography.
   DungeonTubers, apparently, cover topics in dungeons: specifically, that’s Dungeons & Dragons™. Generally, there is also pornography.
   Already, the wearisome term DungeonTuber has gained a pejorative aspect. Whether they’ve accepted corporate cash to shill out products or not, some roleplaying game hobbyist YouTubers…
   Damn it, I half-typed Hobbit YouTubers and I’ve lost the train of thought. It’s underground, and heading in the direction of a London-based dungeon. Hobbit YouTubers. I’m not here to disparage the height of certain or even uncertain YouTubers.
   My point, misplaced in the mists of typing, is that DungeonTuber is heading for a change in meaning. A YouTuber who makes videos about dungeons, dragons, dungeoneering, delving, and the organised looting of ancient temples…could be described as a DungeonTuber.
   Potatoes in The Temple of Elemental Evil are far too easy to describe as dungeon…tubers.
   Anyway. Point. The term is shifting to occupying the space of little more than an insult for house shills, real or imagined. YouTuber accepts money for plugging dungeon products. Oh, a DungeonTuber.
   I take in a whole load of YouTube videos on roleplaying games. There isn’t one channel presenter I can think of who uses the label. We’ll go out on a limb here. I think that’s unlikely to change.
   You always go out on stout limbs. And always fall from shaky ones.
   Speaking of presenters. Yes, we all have limited time on our hands…and around our elbows, I guess. So while recording videos, I listen to YouTube videos in the background. These are accidentally recorded onto my video clips. That’s why I strip out the audio.
   To save even more time, I listen to virtually all YouTube videos at double speed. If you start off with a fast high-pitched voice, I might listen to you at 1.5 speed – otherwise only bats can hear you.
   Why don’t I watch them? Many dungeoneering and dragon-ish YouTubers are talking heads. Low on visuals. I don’t need to see them to hear their points.
   This channel is the other way around. You see the props, miniatures, maps, and so on. My channel was based on watching a particular type of video. I won’t name the exact one. A quick check shows the one I’m thinking of has been taken down since.
   With one eye on making boardgame videos, I watched a video that was all about seeing players having fun. You couldn’t make out the board at all. The camera might as well have been in a field next to the venue.
   I went there to see the board. And, barely seeing the board, I decided I couldn’t make videos of that nature. If I want to illustrate a point in a discussion on this channel, I’ll throw in an illustration if I have to. Here’s the board. The bar is pretty low, but I still vaulted it.
   Now that I’m typing this up, I know I’ll fill in gaps in the video editing with previous shots of game boards. If I show you a game in a video, I could show the box, the game, the components, a few third-party accessories that make gameplay flow more smoothly…
   But at least I will show you the game, and not a distant shot of the house it was played in. From space.
   What else to say of making videos about boardgames and roleplaying games? I used to make videos weekly. Life got in the way. Now I make them when I feel like making them. Often, I feel like making them and life gets in the way.
   The one thing I haven’t been able to shake is cardboard damage. I open and close many a box here at this table when the cameras aren’t rolling. Preparation isn’t everything, but it’s where I start and so should you.
   As a result of all this cardboard activity, tiny particles drift across the black felt cloth. These bits and pieces build over the course of a few seconds into unacceptable levels of snowfall. I wave a magic wand and vacuum the hell out of the surface to make the gaming table semi-presentable.
   Another feature, and this may not be for you, is the unconnected background. I’ll populate the background with items from a different video. Either I use stuff I filmed last time or things I’ll put in videos next time around.
   This is a working game table. Often, I’ll leave the wooden organisers in the background with coins on prominent display. Those are signs of a Buffy game rumbling along. Buffy is a roleplaying game that uses drama points to generate twists in the plot or handy bouts of healing in the heat of battle.
   And I don’t like to disturb the display. Mustn’t knock the coins down into the abyssal depths at the back of the table. Players need drama. So the roleplaying display features in the background.
   No virtual tabletop for me. I run the table from here, in what Mary Shelley refers to as the deserts of Scotland. My players are scattered across the Cosmos. We may be in several countries, operating at different times, but we are united by different dice around the same table.
   And that really is a roleplaying fact. Here's the video.

UNEARTHING STAR WARS TELEVISION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

“You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” James T. Kirk, Battlestar Yamato. Episode Three: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

I think the most annoying think about the character Ahsoka Tano is that she’s called Ahsoka and not Ashoka. Whenever I go to type this name out, I have to correct something that shouldn’t have to be corrected. Rewind. Fix that name. She’s Ashoka.
   Now a rather annoying/endearing/but truthfully annoying side character can come along in a STAR WARS show and call her Ash for short. Lightsabres hum into life as she jokingly takes offence. You can’t shorten her name as it is. She should be Ash. But I see from the space wildlife documentary ALIEN that this seat is already taken. Ahsoka she must be.
   I tuned in for the first episode of – checks notes – AHSOKA. It’s the habit of streaming companies to drop two or even three episodes of a new show on you, providing a mini-binge so that you can get into the show’s stride or rapidly walk away if the whole thing isn’t for you.
   AHSOKA started off with two episodes available. I watched the first one and stopped dead. There seemed to be a lot of things going on in the show that weren’t really things going on at all. Let’s have a shot of this motorway leading to a tower. I guess that’s meaningful, somehow.
   Here’s a ceremony starring Clancy Brown. He’s portraying a guy, I guess. We’re waiting on a famous rebel from the rebel days. But she’s so rebellious that she doesn’t turn up for the ceremony. Going off to that tower is her priority.
   To quote Al Pacino, I am…over-fucking-whelmed.
   After I watched the first episode I wasn’t pointing at everything, DiCaprio style. I had the distinct impression that I’d missed something. Like, oh, I don’t know, an entire television series. Unnervingly, there were multiple guides online telling me about the sort of homework I had to do…just to follow this show.
   REBELS somehow passed me by. Apparently, aside from a few other things on the list to watch, this was the thing I should have watched first. I didn’t head straight over to episode two. Instead, I started watching REBELS. The format is short enough to make it easy to mini-binge.
   Around twenty minutes per episode.
   Pretty soon I was pointing at everything, DiCaprio style. That was in the AHSOKA opening episode. And so was that. This. Those. Her. Him. That there. Jesus Christ, it’s Jason Bourne Clancy Brown.
   What’s REBELS like? It’s full of STAR WARS cheese, and is all the better for that. Stormtroopers still can’t shoot for shit. Droids constantly save the day when they aren’t clowning around. Other film ideas sneak onto the show with varying degrees of success…3 GODFATHERS, JAWS, other STAR WARS movies...
   I shouldn’t have to do homework to catch a show. Okay, yes, I should watch a few STAR WARS movies first; I’ll grant you that one. But don’t you get the feeling that the world was a much better place before we started numbering World Wars and STAR WARS films?
   Hailing from the world of boardgaming you’ll just end up confused by ANDOR, which isn’t a series of Tolkien-lite boardgames packed to brimming with cardboard pieces. ANDOR is set around the same time as REBELS is – leading up to the rebels actually getting somewhere against the EVIL EMPIRE®.
   In STAR WARS, Episode IV: A New Marketing Strategy, the rebellion finds the somewhere it gets to is between a rock and a hard place. This means the odd cameo in ANDOR, and more of the same in REBELS. Spoiler alert: stormtroopers are in plentiful supply.
   The format for REBELS is one of a spaceship with a crew acting like an extended family of misfits. STAR TREK crewmembers, with less planet-hopping and plenty of STAR WARS. The rebels spend far too much time on the one planet. That’s where the levels of disbelief reach cheese-laden proportions.
   But we waive that point. We do not press it. We look over it.
   To wipe out the regular cast of rebels would mean destroying the whole planet they are constantly using as their base. If only the EVIL EMPIRE™ could come up with some sort of handy beach-ball sized gadget to crush that problem. Maybe a bit larger. Need to look into the physics of that.
   Away with the concept of physics in STAR WARS, and also STAR TREK. Never let science get in the way of the story. If you did, the main cast would be dead after the first firefight in a cupboard. Hangar. I meant to type hangar.
   Noisy infiltration of Imperial Base? Check. Last-minute daring rescues? Check. Bickering rebels who must band together to face the greater threat posed by the Disney Empire®? Check. Clunky references to STAR WARS movies? No, they have to be MacClunkey references.
   We’ve been down this path before. THE MANDALORIAN ran for two series. And then it became the BOBA FETT SHOW. Then it went back to being THE MANDALORIAN again. If you weren’t interested in Boba Fett and skipped all of his episodes, returning to the regular show after a self-imposed gap would leave you wondering about a few things.
   Making the later episodes of Fett’s show essential viewing for the next Mandalorian series is all about the business of getting people to watch both shows…and less about the business of telling a good story. It’s like, oh, I don’t know…
   Doing a 2006 Superman sequel to a 1980 Superman movie while ignoring the really rubbish Superman films made after 1980. So the thing is…26 years go by, but in the movie Superman has been away for five years. Everyone is recast for reasons of a quarter of a century going by. Some of the music score and dialogue is reheated from earlier movies…
   And the plot is a mix of Lex Luthor restructuring American real estate from the first film…while throwing in a dash of Lex Luthor turning up at Doc Savage’s Superman’s Fortress of Solitude from the second movie. We’re ignoring Richard Pryor and Nuclear Man from later outings. Thankfully.
   Superman Returns. I watched it once. And I’m still waiting for that movie to start.
   You can watch two watchable Superman films, skip two skippable Superman films, and still come to the conclusion that the fifth Superman film was not required.
   Luckily, there’s only one movie about a shark called JAWS. Then there’s Highlander. There can be only one. That lone movie, The Matrix, is terrific. Those two ALIEN documentaries and the two TERMINATOR films…so glad no one continued with those franchises. There isn’t a ROCKETEER animated series. I don’t know where you are getting these lies from.
   Though there is a TERMINATOR television show that allowed Dean Norris to appear in the movie and TV versions of the story. We cut that much slack to the accountants and other bean-counters.
   What is my Superman point? A franchise that continues after a gap means nothing to the viewers who missed the earlier stuff, no matter the quality of the material. That’s what we learn from Boba Fett. Here’s Ahsoka. She’s been in those pesky CLONE WARS. Fair enough.
   And she’s already had her live-action debut in someone else’s show. Miss REBELS and you are left staring at a lot of deep symbolic landscapes that have shallow symbolism for us. So much for episode one that stopped me in my tracks.
   Disney owns MARVEL, and the problem of how much homework you need to do is even more pronounced over there in the superhero setting. Away with the physics of superheroes. The question you must ask is this: do I REALLY need to watch this, that, those things, and all that other stuff just to follow the latest show?
   In the case of AHSOKA, I don’t think I had any choice. I was forced to stop. Then it was up to me to seek out the big plug for the massive gap I sensed. Luckily, watching REBELS, I viewed something that was fun. As I type this up, I am around halfway through the run of rebellious hijinks.
   Will 70+ episodes of REBELS place me in good stead to return to several episodes about Ahsoka? Doesn’t matter. I’m having fun watching a bunch of misfits sneak around Imperial bases. Even the bane of science fiction, the ventilator shaft, doesn’t spoil the show.
   Do you need to go back and watch that thing to understand this thing? Depends. That’s as good an answer as I can give you. To dodge REBELS, you might be left puzzled by many a twist and turn, and character introduction, and basic chunk of plotting. The consequence of doing a bit of homework meant that I unearthed a good show I hadn’t really taken in, when it appeared a few years back.
   So do we live in a golden age of television? Whatever that means. Now that we’re free of television’s shackles, and choose our own way of watching, consuming stories, perhaps we are. You still have to hack through a lot of fool’s gold to reach the good stuff. Remember this.
   On that point, I’ll return to REBELS. Spoiler alert: stormtroopers are easy to impersonate. That’s also a spoiler alert for STAR WARS. I won’t say which episode, in case you haven’t seen any of it. You can safely skip the Ewok spin-off movies. I think everyone did.

VERY SHORT STORIES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Songs, poems, and messages scribbled on birthday cards: these are all very short stories. What stories do we tell that qualify as short? Here’s one I’ve just invented.

 The Betrayal.

 “Hi!”

   “Die!”

   “Urgh!”

I might edit that later. The title risks being longer than the tale itself, and that’s always a warning. Also, I may have used too many exclamations. The first exclamation! Well, that indicates an enthusiastic welcome from the character on meeting a sound ally.
   The second exclamation! This emphasises the sense of betrayal. That third exclamation! I could have left it out. The violence of the betrayal comes in telling the ally to die. We could just tail off into the repercussions, without the exclamation, as the body slumps against a wall, smearing blood down and sideways in a short yet tragic arc.
   And now I’ve committed the crime of spending more time explaining the tale than I did in the writing of it. Should I cut the last line completely? Then the title would match the tale in length. That would be 13% too pretentious.
   Carly Simon encapsulates a whole faux poseur art gallery of rogues in a song about being pretentious. Title: YOU’RE SO VAIN. The body of the text delivers on the title’s promise. You probably think this song is about you.
   Simon takes over four minutes to tell the whole story. It’s done as a real singalong song; the level of repetition is called a chorus, and we find this acceptable in so short a span of time.
   I say short. At four minutes and a little bit over, the story falls within the acceptable time-frame of three to five minutes given to songs playing on the radio. Simon released that one in late 1972.
   The start of 1972 saw Don McLean’s hit American Pie clock in at over eight minutes. If you wanted a big hit, you had to go for a small song: stick to around three minutes – or your five-minute epic would fade out sixty seconds early as the news came on.
   Checking music charts for the period, I see MacLean’s song listed as part one and part two. It was released on Needle-Reader Technology using both sides of the disc. Being a singalong song, the level of repetition is called a chorus and we find this acceptable in so short-ish a span of time.
   My story, The Betrayal, uses exclamation as repetition. And that’s about it. I say it is my story, but the brevity of the so-called plot is severe enough that it comes across as a joke that’s been flitting around the world, bat-like, looking for yet another perch.
   Do bats eat fish?
   Apparently, though I can’t confirm that they eat perch.
   Wordplay. Joking. The joke is a short story. Or it should be, almost all the time. I claim no originality for The Betrayal. Something tells me it’s been done before. The only thing more annoying than having seen it all before is not having seen it all before.
   We’ll chalk that up to Oscar Wilde, on the basis that Dorothy Parker attributed every witty aside to Oscar – whether he uttered witticisms or not. Repetition. Brevity. Wit. The very short story.
   That very short story could be shorter.

 Betrayal.

 “Die!!!”

 I feel there is scope for shrinking the tale a shade more.
   Let us try modest variation on a well-worn theme. A new short tale I’ve named…

 Mystery.

 “?”

 

I’m not sure the story needs quotation marks. Title is a bit lengthy. Hmmm…

 Query.

 

?

 

There you go.

 

Quiz.

 

?

 

Better still…

 

Whu

 

?

 

I suppose, in the end, there is this…

 

?

 

!

 

Kill a minimalist approach by means of flogging a dead horse that’s a dead pony in the rewriting of a tale. Once minimalism is down at the particle level, only angels dancing on the head of an argument about angels dancing on the head of a pin can see what’s left. And that is swiftly disappearing up Stephen Hawking’s arse with a sideways commentary that black holes ain’t so black.
   Instead of reducing the size of the story to theoretical levels, open your short story into strange new avenues. Take a long view of the short story and add highly technical things. Characters. Dialogue. Incidents. Plotting. Anecdotes.
   Poetry is short, and commentary on it often unbearably long. But we return to brevity and Oscar Wilde opining on the business of being a poet…
   A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
   Wilde serves us a short story about poets and poetry and the matter of printing. He hints at criticism and worry over career failure brought about by bad reviews. His sentence breezes through the room, and leaves lingering scents which are our own thoughts on his thoughts.
   A story is a story. It is also our impression of the story. A short tale is written with the framework of the world in mind, but knocks out all the scaffolding. That leaves us to view the slender structure with our own knowledge of the world painting a whole landscape behind the piece at a later date.
   One of the best short stories I’ve read? Akutagawa’s story was published one hundred years ago. Even in translation from Japanese to English, the tale still carries a great deal of power, of storytelling energy, in so confined a space.
   Translation is a tricky thing. His story is called In a Bamboo Grove or simply In a Grove. This grove, in the text, is a grove of bamboo and cedars, so I’m inclined to think of the work as In a Grove. The story runs to almost 3,500 words. On average, that’s about two of my blog posts and a little bit over.
   In a Grove is a murder mystery. I first encountered it in the Kurosawa movie, Rashomon. Characters tell different accounts of a man’s death. As I watched the film, I had the distinct impression that we would hear a statement from the murdered man. I’d seen so many Kurosawa movies by the time I watched Rashomon that I’d grown familiar with the director’s style. His flourishes. Having the dead man turn up seemed normal.
   And so it went. Spoiler for you – spoilers about a movie that’s 70+ and adapted from a story that’s a century old…aren’t really spoilers. When it comes to famous stories featuring dramatic moments, you are going to shit yourselves when you read

 

REDACTED.

 

What of this dead witness? The ghost operates through a medium to tell his version of events. This murder mystery uncovers another crime during the investigation – that of a rape. Different characters have their own versions of what happened and why.
   Ghostly testimony wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, or on a court of tennis for that matter.
   There isn’t much room for the writer to move around when the short story is packed with characters. Akutagawa uses minor details as mighty weapons to get around a few problems. You’ll find witness accounts differ in tiny ways. One witness mentions a point. No one else mentions that point at all.
   Several witnesses mention the same point, but discrepancies arise in the smallest details. Inconsequential? Perhaps. There’s the matter of people who confess to the killing. We’re not talking about suspects denying committing crimes. No. It’s the reverse. Characters queue up to admit what they’ve done.
   Akutagawa plotted discrepancies with incredible skill. As readers, we are even prepared to accept the introduction of a new character – the dead man himself – and play the game of considering how accurate his ghostly evidence is.
   To be precise, we consider how accurate the medium conveying the information is. If we want to. So, technically, that’s the introduction of two characters.
   This story could’ve been murdered in translation.
 

Wait a minute; this guy’s contradicted that guy. Okay, it all goes down in this grove just off the Yamashina stage road. But how many arrows were really there? Violent struggle? Where are the signs? Whoever wrote this didn’t keep a lid on the small details. Here, I’d better fix this, and fast.

 

Fast and loose.
   Luckily the story wasn’t “fixed” in translation. Every witness has something different to say. Four of the witnesses explain events to a High Police Commissioner…
   At this stage, I’m not even convinced they were all talking to the same investigating official. There is some question as to where a character was from, and that could bring in police officials from different jurisdictions…if you want to press the point.
   Can we add a headline to this crime? Samurai from Kyoto…wait. We aren’t even sure of that. Someone is pretty sure he wasn’t from Kyoto.
   Since its publication, In a Grove has generated many stories about the one true version of what went on. As a story, it has been studied to death and studied beyond death in the ghostly section of the tale. A story is short…but don’t write it off as slender or lacking in character.
   Stories are sometimes stories about stories. A movie review is a short story about a longer story, for example. And a movie review about a movie not even seen by the reviewer can, on occasion, be priceless instead of worthless.
   Sir Michael Caine, on his movie JAWS: THE REVENGE.

I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

Caine was paid a lot of money to go on holiday to the Bahamas and out-act a rubber shark. He accomplished this difficult task. Nice work if you can get it. Purely in the interests of research, I watched a mercifully brief video compilation of Sir Michael’s dramatic input.
   He left his mark on the franchise.
   If, in your heads, you are thinking to yourselves that this was a skid-mark, I, for one, would not contradict you.
   Telling short stories is conversational. Except for the typing. I’d use voice software to recognise the words and burble them out for me, but voice and recognition software are terms that don’t go together if you are un-American.
   A cruel rejection of a vital vowel-sound, and I was sent back to the typographical salt-mines.
   How to write a short story? Invent something and babble until you run out of steam. If you accidentally create a novel…oops.
   Invent something. Anything. Invent a television show about a dinosaur brought back to life by mad scientists, only for the dinosaur to crash and almost die while flying an experimental fighter jet. Don’t worry. We have the technology. And the TV budget. We can rebuild him. He is…
   Cyborgosaur.
   Underneath his skin he has a solid Tyrannosaurium™ chassis, as well as extendable metal forearms with opposable thumbs, laser-beam eyes, cyborg legs with Turbo-Boost™ and secrets yet to be revealed. He is Michael Knight Dynne O’Saur, a man reptile barely alive.
   Join him and his merry gang of misfits, operating from their secret desert base in the Canyons of the Doomed. Embark on a shadowy car-trip into the thrilling world of a man reptile who does not exist.
   With Raphael – his open-top bus pursuit vehicle...
   Angel DeVille, the loveable rogue mechanic...
   ...and Control, played by veteran of the London stage Sir Suave Bright-Smoothly.
   Every week our lone hero embarks upon a crusade to champion the downtrodden, cheer the helpless, back up the innocent, and slam dinosaur tail into the butts of those who believe they are above the law.

Episodes, in order of broadcast: Pilot Part One, Pilot Part Two, Rogue Cyborgosaur, Reptile Twin of Evil, Control on Trial, Death of a Buddy from the Old Days, Cyborgosaur: P.I., Goodness Cretaceous Great Balls of Fire, Dinosaur Down, Old Fossils Never Die, You’re a Lizard Harry, and the thrilling finale Extinction Event.
   With Ernest Borgnine as Harry Dean Stanton.

I’d tune in to watch that. Who wouldn’t? Maybe it plays better as a short collection of words. Under 250. If you are struggling to write something, write something short. At least the struggle isn’t as long as the one over writing a novel is.