Making Things Up for Fun and Profit
If anybody apart from my friends, family, and students knows who I am, it's because of my work as
a writer for stage, screen, and radio.
At the moment I can claim (rather to my astonishment) more than 150 produced scripts.
Some of my stage scripts are available to professional and amateur groups for production. Read all about those here.
I have the honor and pleasure these days of being the Resident Playwright for the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Theatre
Department, where I teach Playwriting, Screenwriting, and
Script Analysis -- and also write the scripts for the Department's popular "Bookends" series, which tours Alabama presenting
stage adaptations of classic works such as Tom Sawyer and The Thousand and One Nights.
And thanks to a wonderfully talented group of students and colleagues, in 2003 I was able to instigate a Festival of Ten-Minute Plays featuring new works
by student playwrights -- and to produce a new four-day Festival every fall since then, each one playing to standing-room-only houses.
Somewhere along the way I've picked up a reputation as an entertaining public speaker. I'm not entirely sure how this got started, but I'm not complaining;
I love talking at sci-fi/fantasy conventions, libraries, museums, and other similarly literary venues. I was thrilled to be the "state scholar" for
the Smithsonian Institution's touring exhibit "Yesterday's Tomorrows," which had me going all over Alabama talking about past visions of the future.
Since then I've been asked back to many of the same venues to talk about science fiction, comic strips, Sherlock Holmes, and other geeky things.
When I'm invited to sci-fi/fantasy conventions, it is usually so I can talk about my experiences in writing for TV, a brief period in my career which
included writing stories for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (particularly the one that would ultimately
become "Ship in a Bottle") -- and
scripts for a then-fledgling cable network that would one day call itself The Sci-Fi Channel (and later -- ick -- Syfy.)
Despite (or because of) my adventures in television, by the early 1990s it was clear to me that I should be true to my "first best love" -- the live theatre.
And small wonder, really: most of my formal training has been as an actor and director, and I'd had a fantastic time in New York playing Sherlock Holmes in an off-Broadway production of my own script HOLMES & WATSON. The NYC run closed to standing-room-only houses and gained the praise of two of my heroes: Isaac Asimov and Jeremy Brett.
The success of HOLMES & WATSON encouraged me to keep writing stage plays, and my dear old alma mater kept producing them. (UAB had mounted the first-ever production of H&W in 1989; it was there producer Bernard Block saw it and offered to take it to New York.) Those plays include PAWN TO KING'S BISHOP, mayfliesfast, and...
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...R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). I'd been looking for a way to combine my passion for live theatre and my love of science fiction, so
it seemed only logical that I write a new adaptation of Karel Čapek's 1920 Czech play that gave the world the word "robot."
The humans grapple with the reality of the Robot Rebellion in my adaptation of R.U.R. at Theatre UAB. The set rotated! And stuff!
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The UAB production in 2002 was a beauty to behold, thanks largely to scenic designer Kelly Allison and costume designer Kim Schnormeier.
Since then the script has been performed by a surprising and ever-growing number of school and community theatre groups.
Then all of a sudden my writing for the stage practically stopped -- because I was busy writing for radio.
I have always loved radio drama and wistfully dreamed of having been
born a few decades earlier so I might have had a chance to write for something like The Shadow or Inner Sanctum.
And my wish was granted with the advent of BODYLOVE, for which I was first part of a team of writers creating the series, then Head Writer,
and ultimately Head Writer and Producer. Between 2003 and 2006 we wrote, recorded, and aired 80 fifteen-minute episodes -- basically a single story 20 hours long,
a whopping 1,200 script pages. The show was heard all over the southeast and is now being marketed as a set of CDs
from BODYLOVE.ORG.The BODYLOVE project gave rise to a sequel of sorts, a serial in three-minute episodes called KEEPING UP WITH THE WALKERS. Once again I was the head writer, this time collaborating with the gifted Alex LaFosta. |
Somewhere
in the midst of all this I have made time to draw lots of cartoons, mostly about Sherlock Holmes. My series
called "From the Doctor's Diary,"
had a long run in The Baker Street Journal.
When I was a lad my main goal in life was to write and draw a story-oriented daily newspaper comic strip. As time went by I realized that the aspect of comics that I liked best was not the drawing but the writing -- so in a way I've attained my dream after all.
The Personal Stuff, If You're Interested
If you need more categories to put me in there are these: teacher, husband and father, disciple of the Prince of Peace, and hobby web designer, to name a few.
Over the years I've also earned my keep as a stage effects designer, makeup artist, and even ordained clergy (yes, really).
My highest college degree is a Master of Fine Arts in Drama (Directing Specialty). This was the result of about ten years of college and an endless succession of various minors, ranging from Education to Film Production to Philosophy & Religion. For seven years I was the Youth Minister for Cahaba Valley Church, a group who was very patient with me despite my many failings. Those years encompassed some of the best times of my life (and, not surprisingly, also some of the hardest).
I'm extremely-happily married to a psychologist whose confidential work requires that she be anonymous
where this web site is concerned.
But it's no secret that we're the proud parents of David Ian Shackleford, who you can see is turning out to be a fine-looking young man -- and something of a sci-fi/fantasy geek. I wonder where he gets THAT from?
