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.

Me directing Liv von Oelreich in something neither of us now remembers

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.

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.)

Alan Gardner as Watson and me (seated, with Holmesian Hairpiece) as the great detective, in HOLMES & WATSON at the Theatre at Saint Peter's in 1990

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.)

The humans face the end of the world in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

Those plays have included all the adaptations for young audiences mentioned above, a number of ten-minute plays, the notorious mayfliesfast, and -- perhaps most famously -- a new adaptation of R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

That production was, in many ways, a dream come true. 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 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.

And thanks to a wonderfully talented group of students and colleagues at UAB, in 2003 I was able to instigate a Festival of Ten-Minute Plays there featuring new works by student playwrights -- and we've produced a new Festival every fall since then, each one playing to standing-room-only houses.

Chalethia Williams and James A. McCarty Jr recording an episode of BODYLOVE

Meanwhile, 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.

In the midst of all this I 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.

Ian as the Tenth Doctor in the Wheeler's TARDIS replica at Gallifrey One

I am also the proud father of David Ian Shackleford, named for my long-time best friend, the amazing David Duncan.   You can see Ian is turning out to be something of a sci-fi/fantasy geek. (I wonder where he gets THAT from?)  Our special favorite in the genre is DOCTOR WHO -- and sometimes we are even moved to write about that show on our WHO-related blog.