Let's pick up my story where I left off last time--directing WISHBONE. It was a fun TV show with a great crew. Our picture dog, Soccer, wasn't one of the smarter animals I've worked with, plus he was scared of his own shadow, so we had to use other dogs (with makeup) for those scenes requiring explosions, etc.

Soccer's trainer, Jackie Captain, was great. She had been the animal trainer on WHITE FANG, for Disney, and a bunch of other shows, and she was brilliant at making Soccer look brilliant.

WISHBONE was shot single camera, film style, which I've done a lot of during my career, but my favorite part of the show was doing the fantasy sequences. We built castles and had battles and did all sorts of exciting things.

While I was working on WISHBONE, the Executive Producer of the BARNEY & FRIENDS TV show asked me to direct for them as well. They were looking for a director who had done single camera film style, and multi-camera TV style directing, and I was one of the few in town who had. I would have never dreamed I would continue directing shows for BARNEY for the next seventeen years. I have to say those were some of my favorite years. The show was fun, great for kids, and we had a terrific crew. It was like shooting a musical a week, and I ended up getting nominated for Emmys twice.

Also during this time I wrote and directed several other TV shows--one for CBS called HORSELAND, one for Mary Lou Retton called THE FLIP FLOP SHOP, and several others. One of my favorites was a syndicated TV show called IN SEARCH OF THE HEROES. It was a thirty minute period drama about various famous people from the past, and I ended up being nominated for Emmys three times and winning twice.

I also directed another feature film, HEARTLAND, which was a Bollywood film that I shot on location in India.

Besides directing movies, I was also writing them. I wrote numerous spec screenplays and had several optioned. One of those was a script called FIREFLIES. It was optioned several times by high profile producers (including Jerry Molen who won the Academy Award for "Schindler's List"), but it never got made for various reasons. Then one day a friend of mine at Disney read it, loved it, and told me I should turn it into a novel.

This struck a chord with me because I had always wanted to write novels, so I used FIREFLIES to teach myself the craft of writing fiction. As you may or may not know, there is a huge difference between writing screenplays and writing novels, and I will talk about this in a future blog, but for now suffice to say I spent several years working on FIREFLIES. By the time I was done, I'd changed the title to THE UGLY TEAPOT, and had made several other changes.

I was then faced with how to market it. I tried a few agents, but in the end decided to give self-publishing a shot. I did this for several reasons. First, I liked having control over my book. Second, I wanted to get it out without waiting two years. Third, I wanted to learn about the publishing business from the ground up. And finally, I have always felt like writers are the most abused artists in the business of creativity. Nothing happens without them, and yet they are grossly underpaid and are given very little respect. Will the self-publishing movement allow writers to gain control over their destinies? That remains to be seen. But I love being part of that movement.

So, that brings us up to today. THE UGLY TEAPOT is out in literary-land and we'll see how it does. So far I've received some absolutely wonderful reviews, and I'm hopeful more and more people will read it. Meanwhile, I'm hard at work on the sequel.

Next time I'll talk about the challenges of going from writing screenplays to writing novels, and what it's like to write spec screenplays in Hollywood. Until then, I'll be...

Moving on!