What motivated you to become a writer?

Being a reader came first. I was a voracious consumer of stories when I was a kid. As I grew older, writing became the go-to solution for any life problem. In college, I was well on my way to becoming a production engineer in TV when I discovered there weren’t any jobs which would enable me to break into the business. But there was advertising, and there was copywriting, and that’s what I did for 25 years until a development exec offered me a high six figure payout if my script made it to the green light in his company. Right then, I swore off advertising forever. Six published novels, four optioned screenplays and a stage musical book and lyrics later, I’m still looking for someone to shoot a movie with my name in the credits.

Starting on a blank page is not easy- where does your creativity come from?

Never ever start on a blank page. It’s too daunting and really unnecessary. It’s also unprofessional. In advertising, if you didn’t deliver, you didn’t have a job, so you didn’t think about being creative, you did the work. Every screenplay, every book, every short story, every poem is work. Sometimes it’s fun and easy, most times it’s not. Inspiration can come from anywhere. You can see something fascinating in the world around you and extrapolate a story from that or you can come from the back end by figuring out what the prospects are in a genre and how you relate to it and you can build from there. Once you have an idea, you figure out where it comes from and where it’s going and what it needs to get there and you write it down. Then you look at what you’ve got and figure out what’s missing or necessary or overdone and you buckle down to the craft of digging good writing out of raw material, and you keep doing that until the world hands you an Oscar. Then you do it again.

Do you write projects knowing that so many other factors need to happen to get it to screen and does that come into your project creation?

The screenwriter must always keep in mind their job is to define the project for other people to work on. Once a script is selected, many things are going to happen and the first is that the writer is going to lose control of the project. It will become a collaboration. It will become someone else’s property, which makes it important to assure the project has found the right home before accepting that payment check. It will compete against other projects for that elusive green light, which means it has to be as good as it can be before launching it out for consideration. If it’s a work for hire situation, you might not even get credit for it in the end. Different projects take different routes, so the writer must be flexible.

What is your dream for this project and what other ancillary revenue do you think it could generate? Please include script title in reply.

CURSE OF THE SAMPIRES started out as a horror/thriller screenplay with good results in a number of contests. When pitching the project face to face, two out of every three executives I spoke with said the exact same thing: I don’t know if I can do anything with it, but I’d sure pay to see Samurai Vampires on the screen. Eventually, a couple of managers suggested it might be more marketable as a limited TV series, so I rewrote the feature into a pilot and created a bible that outlines 30 episodes. It turned out to be a rich source for story-telling. Basically, it’s Game of Thrones with fangs… so that’s the kind of revenue territory I think the project covers. It log lines as follows: When three Samurai sons become invincible Nightwalkers, their youngest brother must battle his own clan to restore honor and save the Empire from the conquering vampires.

How has your experience been with screenwriting contests for this project so far?

In 2018, CURSE OF THE SAMPIRES was number 39 on the Capital Fund Competition HOT 100 LIST. It also received the following recognition:

13Horror.com Competition-FINALIST.

Los Angeles International Screenwriting Awards Fall Competition-SEMIFINALIST.

Scriptapalooza-QUARTERFINALIST.

ScreenFest Horror Competition-QUARTERFINALIST.

If you could stand in a room full of investor partners looking at many projects what would you like them to know about you and this project?

As a period piece, CURSE OF THE SAMPIRES leans more to set, location and costume for realization and relies very little on special effects, even though there are a few battle scenes involved. The TV Version trades heavily on the name Dracula, because the story takes place during Vald Dracul’s reign of terror and our chief villain becomes his disciple. While the through story is a quest for vengeance, there’s a lot of sex and family intrigue and flashy swordplay involved, so this all can be done affordably and be very exciting at the same time.

Do you have any website links for your writing, credits, background, etc that you would like to share?

Yes, there’s my writer’s page at Amazon/Kindle at: https://www.amazon.com/P-K-Silverson/e/B000APNN40

And there’s my musical theater spec project site at: http://www.fableusmusical.com/

There’s a nifty YouTube trailer for my horror project THE LAIR which I won in another competition and can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDhq_vG8XNw

But the most important site to visit would be the 8-page pitch book for CURSE OF THE SAMPIRES at: http://thefairystale.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/7/7/6777545/curse_of_the_sampires_-_pitch_deck.pdf