Back in late November, S. K. Anthony and I felt pretty confident we could produce our second episode of The Writers After Dark Series, Romance v. Horror with greater ease than the first. We had, after all, faced only minor challenges in the first, felt more comfortable with the software, and had a vision of “what” we wanted to accomplish. The material itself, Dracula and Twilight were both familiar and seemed perfect for our funny observations, disagreements, and talking points. I may have even said, “heck we’ll be through this in an hour.”

Six and half hours of video, two nights, and three takes later, what we had achieved was…a mess.

Plagued with technical issues, seasonal flu, and general exhaustion in trying to get the…and I quote… “damn F’in video complete,” we concluded the episode was cursed.

Both of us are too stubborn , however, to relent. As much as we wanted to collect all the video segments and press ‘delete,’ we remained determined that we would salvage the episode. For a brief…very, very brief…moment, we considered a final attempt, one more recording. We couldn’t do it. In fact, it will be years before I ever again discuss either of those films. It’s like that last thing you ate before you got sick—you need a lot of time and distance before you’ll eat it again.

We decided we would do a story about the “story” and began the arduous task of reducing four hundred and twenty minutes of video down to less than thirty.

Interestingly, it’s probably funnier as presented than it would have been had we succeeded at our planned episode.

So yes, I am asking you to give up twenty-something minutes of your life (that you will never get back) and check out episode two of our Writers After Dark Series. If for no other reason than to see that sometimes the story you start out to tell…isn’t the story you end up with…and that is not always a bad thing.