Dan Lauper

Getting a Manuscript Ready for Submission and Publishing:

To start off, this project is all about taking my writing talent to the next level after my first idea for my EDGE Project fell through.
My story for EDGE is an epic sci-fi medical drama featuring inspiration from TV shows including House, Stranger Things, Black Mirror, and Gotham. It also has influence from movies in the MCU and even the DCEU.

The title, “D.I.D.S,” is an acronym that is solved right after the climax of the book. It has themes including how social media fame finally reaches the world’s breaking point and it leads to those getting even with the person achieving all of this fame, rivalries of any sort that become intensified (partially inspired by my experience in high school and college), unhealthy attractions to attractive males, the impact on marriage proposals, and general hysteria. It can also be described as the perfect revenge story as the villain (D.N.) gets even with the victim (Castia) who is beating her in every category, they have been placed in. However, the story then progresses to a type of storytelling in reverse as the characters finally figure out what is the best-known cure for Castia.

In the story, I have a few characters that I originally wrote from a script that I wrote in high school and I put them in the story so the arc could flow a little more.

Each of them is a representation of my experiences in college with social media and my life in general leading up to my idea to write “D.I.D.S”. Castia (a name pronounced KHA-sha) Jaden is the overwhelmingly popular cheer captain of Dell High School who falls victim to the horrible disease that nobody would be able to figure out. Brock Kinney is a caricature of me when I was scrolling through my social media feed in jealousy of old friends that have found their way after high school and Lyle Lionel is the captain of the Dell High basketball team who eventually teams up with Brock. Diana Nicole is a race car driver-turned-struggling receptionist who adapts the acronym D.N. while developing massive psionic powers, intelligence and desire to torture Castia along with the rest of the Dell High cheerleading team. Michelle Jaden is Castia’s older sister who acquires powers of her own and battles it out with D.N. throughout the story.
 
My main inspiration for “D.I.D.S,” started when my childhood trauma from episodes of the show House M.D. at a very young age, especially during the cold opens where the patient would catch some wicked disease and get taken to the hospital to start the episode. I even had nightmares from that show. Another big inspiration was during a Winter Break 2013 vacation in Orlando when I caught a virus and was misdiagnosed with chronic anxiety that was getting out of hand, but it made sense considering how diagnoses could be flawed. Then, once I transferred to SUU in the Fall of 2016, I was starting to notice that there was a trend with people getting married or making relationships look so easy at such a young age. In addition to my frustrations with dating, I also realized the power of social media fame was rising as opposed to fading like any other fad.

 

All of those things led to the big question: What if there was a medical drama spin on the damsel in distress cliché with elements of sci-fi superhero action? 

My original project was to do the Disney College Program, which unfortunately didn’t go as planned. I reset my declaration to include a manuscript for my story to be submitted before it can be published to the world. I met with Todd Petersen, it was called “get a piece of work protected so it wouldn’t be stolen”. Todd rejected it, saying that there’s no real formula to do so and I needed to modify the project to what it is now. Other obstacles that I faced were the obvious ones. The rejection from Summer Solstice Publishing stung a bit, but that was a good time to do some editing of my story to feature more showing and less telling so it could be in active voice.
For English 3030, a class I enrolled in last semester, I wrote the story “Achieving the Main Goal-E”. It is a story about how a college hockey team tries to win a game to strike a deal with an organization to defeat the incompetent student body president and make their campus relevant again. My first draft got a lot of tough love from classmates that were confused by the direction of where the story was going, I took a few letters of critique as a wake-up call. I made several edits to the story and wound up getting a B- on it, it may not have been an A, but it was a good start. The last challenge that I had was patience, there were times that I wanted to get my story heard as soon as possible. Still, I learned how to become more patient as my time would eventually come.

Who else did it benefit? The project also benefitted my Aunt Stephanie, who edited the book so it could become a more readable story and it can bring it one step closer to becoming adapted into a live-action movie. She never got a chance to become a professional editor, but she got experience when she looked at the document from Lulu and reviewed a things in the story before she sent it to me so I would be able to complete those edits and finalize the product so it could be ready to be read by the world. This gave her the chance to pursue something that she has always wanted to do, making this a dream come true to her. It benefits everyone else in my family because they would be given an opportunity to critique my work. This would be something no one else would have thought of.

How did it benefit me? Well, for starters, it gave me a new opportunity to become a better writer/screenwriter. I am currently more familiar with the term, “show, don’t tell,” thanks to some of my mentors in the Writing Center on campus. They taught me how to paint a picture in those scenes that I write about as opposed to telling people what happened in passive voice. It also gave me exposure to publishing sites which include Lulu, a self-publishing site that makes finishing a piece of work much easier and not requiring a cover letter. I hope to do more of that in the future as I will keep doing this as a hobby.
 
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit” – Richard Bach
From https://writingcooperative.com/18-motivational-quotes-to-bring-out-the-writer-in-you-ea3e61c93734