Posted By David Accampo on July 29, 2010

So, this is a fun little thing that I thought I’d dust off and finally show people.

Some time last year, my friend Paul Montgomery, as part of his writing duties on the website, iFanboy.com, made a creative challenge — to adapt a fable in comics form. Write, draw, whatever. I didn’t think I had the time to do it, but Paul’s challenge planted a seed. I started thinking of a crudely drawn strip that’s something very different from what I usually do. I decided that my personal challenge would be not only write the script, but to draw it too. I set about trying to teach myself how to draw a simple cartoon. (more…)

Category: Comics, Craft and Process, Fiction | No Comments »
Tags: Comics, david accampo, paul montgomery, three little pigs, writing process

Posted By David Accampo on July 28, 2010

This post was originally published on Murmur.com.

Last week I talked about my road from creative writing to an audio drama podcast. A bit of a twisty road, but it’s an interesting one. Obviously, the common link is story. If you know me at all, you know I’m all about the story. If you don’t, please allow me to introduce myself…

My name is David. I’m a writer.

(more…)

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Posted By David Accampo on July 28, 2010

The following story originally appeared at part of the audio anthology, “Wormwood & The Five Fingers of Glory,” which was part of Season Three of the audio drama podcast, Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery. The following text introduced each story:

The Hand of Glory remains one of the strange artifacts at the dark heart of the many mysteries of Wormwood. An occult object of great curiousity, The Hand has crept into the very center of the chaotic maelstrom of murder and magic in Wormwood, California. The Hand’s true origin has never been revealed. Until now.
“The Five Fingers of Glory” is a new anthology kicking off third season of the critically acclaimed and award-winning audio drama podcast, Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery.

The anthology series charts the path of the fabled Hand of Glory through history, from its creation in 700 BC to its arrival in present-day Wormwood. Inspired by the works of writers such as Robert E. Howard, Bram Stoker, Dashiell Hammett and Richard Matheson, three Wormwood writers have taken up the task of revealing the storied history of the Hand of Glory from the dusty streets of ancient Assyria to a haunted  Sicilian Monastery to the shadowy backstreets of Chinatown and beyond.

Category: Fiction | No Comments »
Tags: Dashiell Hammett, detective, Hand of Glory, hard-boiled, mystery, wormwood

Posted By David Accampo on July 28, 2010

Man, there sure are a lot of cobwebs in here…

So, I’m looking to revamp the blog and hopefully dust it off and get some more current content on here. The truth is I’ve been very busy with Wormwood: Revelation and various other creative projects, and this blog is really sort of a portfolio for fiction at this point.

However, I can announce that my newest short story, “Monkeyshines79,” has been published in the latest issue of the online PDF ‘zine, Grok. This is a geek culture magazine that focuses on essays and fiction for the nerdier among us. The theme of issue #6 was “avatar.” I conceived and pitched a short story to the editors, which they accepted. I then went about writing the short story. I do like the short story, but it’s  unusual for me because it’s one of the first ever prose pieces that I pitched first, THEN wrote. It’s a Twilight Zone type of a story, so it’s all about the twist, and it was an interesting writing experiment to come up with the twist and then have to write everything correctly in order to play the twist and make it work.

Grok #6 is online now and it’s free. Please be sure to check it out!

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Posted By David Accampo on December 1, 2009

Just because I feed the need to share it: I wrote a novel entitled “Red Right Hand” during the month of November, as part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

I actually wrote very regularly and was more disciplined and productive in a sustained manner than I usually am.

(more…)

Category: Craft and Process, Fiction | No Comments »
Tags: discipline, NaNoWriMo, writing

Posted By David Accampo on November 21, 2009

My Life in Audio

This article was originally published on Murmur.com

In the summer of 1998, I moved to Los Angeles from the Northern California Bay Area. As a writer and recent college graduate, it would be a fair assumption that I moved to LA to pursue a Hollywood career. This would be inaccurate. In truth, I moved to Los Angeles because my girlfriend at the time was originally from the San Fernando Valley, and she wanted to be closer to her family again. I was a writer in need of an adventure. And, oh, I would write — but not screenplays. No, I was a fan of stories like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. I was a poet, dammit, not a crass commercial hack. Los Angeles would be the setting for my Great American Novel Which Observes LA from an Outsider’s Perspective. It was thus that I descended upon the city of angels with all the fervor of a budding anthropologist. The denizens of Hollywood would be my Gorillas in the Mist. (more…)

Category: Life | No Comments »
Tags: audio drama, filmmaking, Habit Forming Films, podcasting, wormwood, writers, writing

Posted By David Accampo on June 9, 2009

I had a very strange dream last night. In it, my girlfriend and I are walking along a very dark city street. There are no lights from the street. There is no moon in the sky. Everything consists of shapes of blue and black. We are returning from somewhere; I don’t know where. We come to my car. It is at the front of a small parking lot. While I can’t see much, I can see that something has happened to the car; it rests at a steep angle. We walk around the car and see that the tires are gone. The car has been raised to a forty-five degree angle. As we continue to walk around the car, I can see that the rear bumper has been torn halfway off the car. It’s been peeled back as though it was the lid of a tin can. (more…)

Category: Bits and Pieces | No Comments »
Tags: dream journal, dreams

Posted By David Accampo on March 31, 2009

This is not a review of the film Watchmen. I’m a bit late on that account, and I’ve shared my thoughts on discussion threads and on Twitter, so my views are already published in one form or another.

But I want to talk about Watchmen, and how I think that – oddly enough – the film has found its perfect place in film history, exactly where it should be, twenty-odd years after it found its perfect place in comics history.

What the what–?

Let me explain:

The late 1980′s were a brilliant time for comics. I’m going to use 1986 as a benchmark, but exact publication times may be mis-ordered or slightly off in chronology. The point is this: ask anyone reading comics at the time about the year 1986 and they will light up. They will probably start to talk. Babble even. You may have to feign interest or politely ask them to shut up. Because 1986 was a boon, man.

(more…)

Category: Comics, Commentary, Film | No Comments »
Tags: 1986, Alan Moore, comic book movies, Comics, Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen

Posted By David Accampo on January 26, 2009

I recently lost my blog, “Hey That’s Dave’s Blog” to a hack attack. It now resides in the web-equivalent of Davy Jones’ Locker with my previous blogs, including “Pointless” and “The Inevitable Column.” However, I’ve used this malicious attack on my innocent blog to — in the immortal words of Oscar Goldman — “make it better than it was before.”

To start, I’ve added a LOT of fiction, as you will see below. I hope to use this blog for a lot more flash fiction and writing exercises in the future. But, being as eclectic as I am, I’m sure the blog will find itself home to many machinations, reincarnations, and deviations.

For now, I do hope you enjoy the fiction here — it spans the past 10+ years of my writing career.

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Posted By David Accampo on January 24, 2009

This short script was part of an anthology series of short films to be developed by Habit Forming Films. The theme was “Whiskey, Gun, Cigarette” and each script was required to contain those elements.

Sometimes a little violence is a good thing. (more…)

Category: Scripts | No Comments »
Tags: Script, Whiskey Gun Cigarette