THE WINDUP... ANNNNND.....

Earlier this year, the veterans of the CODENAME: KIDS NEXT DOOR crew were invited to submit proposals to Cartoon Network for new show ideas. KND creator Tom Warburton, AKA the Best Boss In The World, has spent the last several months cheerleading us all to take the chance and write something up, and dealing with our stupid questions and half-baked ideas.

Not knowing what else to do I formed a writing partnership with some coworkers which was very fruitful and taught me that what I've been missing my whole life are writing partners. Like all the greatest bands, we developed a lot of riffs and broke up without one song to our credit. With two weeks to go, I showed three concepts I'd been working on to Tom, and watched in horror as they all proved frail and anemic, sputtering and dying right there on the examination table. I was looking across the table at him and all at once I realized he was supposed to be laughing. I had spent dozens of pages writing about an idea I had for a joke, and I should have a hundred jokes.

The next day I was driving a rental car from Houston to Galveston, stuffing my face with BK Veggies and running over the concepts in my head in a blind panic, when I thought of something for one of them that actually made me chuckle to myself. I pulled off the highway and bought a notebook.

The next two weeks went by like some kind of a montage out of a war movie. I dropped all the other ideas, wrote as stream-of-consciousness as I could, pulled in every friend I had with any sort of writing credentials (fortunately no writer can resist critiquing other people's crappy writing), and I rewrote until 5pm the day the pitches were due. I made the wonderful discovery over thanksgiving weekend that my wife and I write really well together, and the five episode descriptions ended up being as much hers as mine. At the 11th hour I sketched a few funny scenes I had in my head and lamely threw tone on them in photoshop.

They got a lot of submissions from our crew. The night of Dec. 1 a bunch of us went out to get drunk and celebrate that the beast was off our backs. I was pleasantly surprised at how imaginitive and offbeat a lot of my colleagues' ideas were. In a perfect world, one or two of us would get a show greenlit and we'd all have jobs for a little while.

My show idea is titled "Backwoods." I'm actually pretty satisfied with it, or at any rate I feel like I didn't punk out. Here's my sketches of the hero kids. We won't hear any feedback for awhile. Fingers crossed!