The Facebook Era
The Great Facebook Migration
On the last day of middle school in May 2009, I got home from school and wondered how I could keep in contact with my friends, as I was getting quite popular. My parents suggested Facebook, so I actually decided to make one for the hell of it. I got addicted to it for various reasons, but one of the things I really took a liking to was the Note feature.
Jordan Dooling: LIVE at the Facebook Theater
I started doing notes consisting entirely of improvisational comedy acts, fictional transcripts of myself on a stage titled the "Facebook Theater," telling stand-up comedy to the crowd of my friends. I made a good fifteen of these, and they were all received rather well. I even did a couple of raps in some of them. >_>;
Assorted Faces
I also wrote more than a few unassociated short stories on Facebook during my ninth grade year.
"Enter Sandman," loosely based on the Metallica song of the same name, was my random attempt at horror. A boy's gonna go to bed, but a few things startle him in his sleep.
"To be Left for Dead" was a two-parter with two short paragraphs about Left 4 Dead: "No Mercy for You" and "Take a Death Toll." It really wasn't much.
"Murdersome Supremacists" was actually my attempt to make up lyrics for a fictitious tech-death song. I had fun with it.
"Scooby-Doo, Where You At?" was my attempt to show what a more 'modern' version of Scooby-Doo would be like. Wrote entirely in math class one day.
The Golden Age of Script Experimentation
Fred and Ted's Totally Infected Adventure (Left 2 Die in the Deep South)
This was a project I gave myself: Write a multi-act screenplay my friends would appreciate. It was entirely Left 4 Dead fanfiction, done in the style of a fictional British comedy movie starring Simon Pegg and James May as zombies who are being chased out of their home. I only finished the first act and half of the second one. It was actually pretty good.
Dark Chao Adventures (Third generation, 2009-2011)
At some point, I started the seventh season of DCA, not really expecting to have any serious readers. Actually, it got to the point where not even my DCA-obsessed best friend was caught up anymore. So these episodes were entirely for the sake of entertaining myself-- my only sure reader. I extended this season, making it around four times as long as a normal one-- and that's only in terms of episode number! The average script length was enormous; these were all the longest stories I had ever written at the time. The overall plot got complicated, not to mention quite meta. The seventh season stretched on 'til episode seventy-nine, which I finished in January of 2011. I ended the seventh season with a cliffhanger, and started work on the eighth season. But stopped.
Life's Stresses
On August 7th, 2011, my family moved back to our home country of England due to crazy reasons. Life, itself, got crazier. I could talk for ages about this, but let's stick to my writing. My actual writing from here on out tended to talk more about stressful things, about the concepts of abuse and consequence, and my writing got all-around more serious and down-to-earth.
The Adventures of the Slenderbrothers
I started daydreaming about the fun I had hanging out with Eric Taylor back in ninth grade. We were so close that we were essentially brothers, and we both loved the slender man. We both wore clothes that were unintentionally similar to The Blues Brothers. One day, after watching the aforementioned film, I decided to start a little mythos about Rael Fancyhat and Knochen Bones. I basically told the stories of us hanging out, but with almost Biblical narration and a few fantasy elements.
The Original Adventures were our real hang-out tales with fantasy elements.
The New Adventures were pure fiction.
The Continued Adventures were my life's dream-- to hang out with Eric again and have new material to write about.
Continued Assortments of Faces
I wrote a few more short stories on Facebook.
"Rael's School for n00bs: Prog 101" was a comedy script about me trying to teach people what prog was. Included musical references up the ass.
"The Facebook Theater Show" was a planned three-part murder mystery starring all my friends, but only one part was finished: "Murder, Plain and Simple." It was actually pretty damn well-done.
In retrospect, The Facebook Era was just as important as The Golden Age of Comic in terms of developing my already-established talents, but also as important as Dawn of the PaperMachine in terms of experimentation. Without this and the stresses within it, my writing would be far less down-to-earth, far less serious.
We have only two eras left to my writing, and the next one actually started a few months before The Facebook Era even ended. The last one actually starts around the time "Murder, Plain and Simple" was released. These eras get really blurry in terms of division! But we're nearly done.
No comments:
Post a Comment