Week 6 of the “2 scripts in 2024” Challenge

If you haven’t been present on the site lately, here’s the deal.  I’m guiding you through the process of writing an entire feature screenplay. Then, in June, we’re going to have a Mega Screenplay Showdown. The best 10 loglines, then the first ten pages of the top 5 of those loglines, will be in play as they compete for the top prize. So far, I’ve helped you choose a concept, sculpt your outline, and build your characters. Last week, we wrote our first ten pages. Here are the links if you’re late to the party…

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages

One of the things I baked into this challenge was making this ACHIEVABLE. I mean, all you need is one hour a day. Who doesn’t have that? So, if everything is going according to plan, you should have ten pages written by now. Two pages (aka one scene) for five days a week, with two extra days in the week to catch up, make adjustments, or rewrite.

Now that we’re headed into our second ten pages of the script, that means we’re hitting one of the most important beats of the entire script. I’m talking about the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is built out of this idea that, before the crazy stuff starts happening in your story, we have to get to know your character. We have to see them in their “normal” habitat. The reason we want to see them in their normal habitat is so we have something to contrast them against when they’re thrown on this big journey.

In that sense, the inciting incident (which typically occurs between pages 12-15) is a divider. It divides the past life (pages 1-14) from the future life (pages 16-110). My favorite way to think of this “divider” is the event that causes the “problem.” The problem is the thing that your hero must now deal with for the rest of the movie. The problem also creates the goal because the act of solving any problem is a goal. If I wrote a story about a guy whose car broke down on the way to a date with the girl of his dreams, the car breaking down is the event, which creates the problem (I no longer have a car to get to the date anymore), which creates the goal: do whatever needs to be done to get to the date.

One of my favorite examples of an inciting incident is War of the Worlds. In that movie, we see Tom Cruise’s everyday life as a construction worker and a family man and then BOOM, the event is sprung on us. And boy is it a good one. Alien tripods come out of the ground and start killing everyone! This creates a problem: Tom’s family (half of it) is in danger.  Which creates the goal: Reunite with family.

Like all classic story beats, inciting incidents work best when you’re using the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is when a character is content (but unknowingly unhappy) living a mundane life. And then: BAM! Something happens to shake them out of that existence, sending them off on a life-changing journey.

But inciting incidents can be tricky when they don’t fall under the classic Hero’s Journey template. That’s when I hear writers complain and say, “These forced plot beats are restrictive and ruin the art of creation! They are evil, Carson! Eviilllll!” Watch, you’ll see some commenters make that argument down below.

Look, no one’s saying you have to use an inciting incident. But it’s such an organic part of every story, it makes your story better 99% of the time. Think about it. If you told a friend about your day, you’ll include an inciting incident without even thinking about it. “I was at work, minding my own business. Then Sara comes up to me and says I’m responsible for our biggest client canceling their order.” Sara coming up and saying you screwed up the order IS THE INCITING INCIDENT of your story.

But yes, it’s true that some scripts don’t allow for organic inciting incidents. Take yesterday’s script for example: Neobiota. In that story, Melanie’s “normal life” occurred before the script even began. The inciting incident, technically, is the plane crash that placed her in this position. That created the problem that our hero had to solve.

But Mikael actually did something clever here. He made the “life in her normal habitat” section of the script her life on the beach after the crash. We spend 10 pages of her getting acclimated to her new surroundings before we introduce a new problem, aka the inciting incident: one of the dead passengers stands up and starts moving.

Another movie that has a non-traditional use of the inciting incident is Star Wars. In that script, we don’t even MEET the main character until 15 pages in. That’s when we start Luke Skywalker’s “normal life.” The inciting incident doesn’t come for another 15 minutes when Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed. This motivates Luke to head off on this journey to save the galaxy.

What’s interesting about Star Wars is that it has an earlier inciting incident as well. But, in order to understand it, you must understand that the first fifteen minutes of the movie has a different protagonist: Darth Vader. Yes, Darth Vader is the “protagonist” of the first segment of the movie. The reason he’s the “protagonist” is because he’s the one with the goal: Recapture the stolen Death Star plans.

That’s why he barges into the ship. He needs those plans! The inciting incident for Darth Vader’s story, then, is R2-D2 escaping in a pod and heading down to nearby planet, Tattooine. This is the “problem” that gives Darth Vader his goal: Retrieve that droid. Some people might even call this the “actual” inciting incident of the movie as it happens near the traditional “inciting incident” point (12-15 pages in). But the real inciting incident is what motivates your *real* protagonist, which is why Luke’s aunt and uncle being murdered is the more accurate representation.

A lot of people get the inciting incident mixed up with the break into the second act (pages 25-30) and it’s understandable why. Once your inciting incident happens, your hero should technically be thrust on their journey, which is where the second act begins.  But what’s supposed to happen in the traditional Hero’s Journey is that your hero feels safe in his world. He likes his world. Then this inciting incident comes around, creating a problem he must solve. But guess what? He doesn’t want to solve it. Solving it requires going off into this new strange scary world that he doesn’t want to go into. So what does he do? HE RESISTS. That’s what the space between the inciting incident and the beginning of the second act is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be the section where the character resists.

The reason this resistance matters is because it conveys something important to the audience: that your hero has a weakness. Their refusal to change conveys that they have growing to do. If the problem occurred and the hero was just like, “Yeah, let’s go! Woohoo!” Then your hero is already internally strong, which isn’t as interesting. The resistance shows that growth is required.  And growth is the whole point of a journey.

Another reason why the resistance after the inciting incident is important is because it’s similar to real life. In real life, nobody wants to change. We’re all resistant to it. So when we see our hero resist, we relate to that. This is a key reason why stories work so well. When our hero finally does take on the journey and ultimately change, it’s a reminder that we can change too! So it invigorates us, gives us hope, sends us back out into life with a pep in our step.

Now, as some of you might’ve caught onto, certain scenarios don’t lend themselves to this. Take War of the Worlds. The attack of the Tripods is so intense and in your face that you don’t have the opportunity to sit around and resist. “Hmmm, I don’t know if I want to go on this journey. It’s too difficult.” No, the journey has come to you! You have to go on it!

But you can still create resistance in how your hero reacts. A hero only truly goes on a journey when they take action. So you can create that resistance by having Tom Cruise run away a lot, hide, resist. Then, when he realizes he has to save his freaking family, he takes action and you’re thrust into your second act.

Star Wars had its own issue with the resistance period. It had used its first fifteen minutes on a bunch of characters other than its hero. So when Luke experiences his inciting incident of his aunt and uncle dying, we’re already 30 minutes into the movie. We don’t have time to dilly-dally so Luke takes a beat then says, “I’m ready. I want to go on this journey.” And off they go.

Now, Lucas and his writing crew did a sly job here because they incorporated an earlier scene after Luke and Obi-Wan escape the sand people where Obi-Wan tells him, “You need to help me out.” And Luke resists then. He says, “Nope.” So that resistance was retroactively built into him in a way where he could say “I’m ready” the second his aunt and uncle are murdered. That’s important to note. Each inciting incident has its own potential issues. It’s up to you to figure out how to solve them.

Some of you may want to say that the real inciting incident in Star Wars is Leia’s message to Obi-Wan Kenobi but it isn’t. That message is not meant for our hero. It’s meant for Obi-Wan. Let me make this clear. The official inciting incident is the thing that sends YOUR HERO (not any of the supporting characters) out on their journey.

By the way, this is why important plot beats such as the inciting incident get complicated in big ensemble pieces (Star Wars movies, Avengers, Fast and Furious). In those movies, each character has their own journey, which forces you to motivate all of them. In some cases, this requires you to create a bunch of mini-inciting incidents, like Star Wars does. A lot of writers will solve this problem by treating the group as one character (Avengers). Give us a Thanos trying to destroy the world and everyone’s problem and subsequent goal is the same.

Also, with Avengers, or serial killer movies with detectives, or Indiana Jones, you often don’t have that resistance period because the problem is their job. Indiana Jones doesn’t resist because his freaking job is to find ancient antiquities. The Avengers don’t resist because they’re superheroes and saving the world is their job. Same with detectives and cops. When they get a new case, they don’t usually resist (although in some situations they will and I actually find those stories to be better because of that) because it’s their job.

The main thing to remember here for these next ten pages is that you want to introduce a big problem in your hero’s life and then, if it fits your story, show them resisting it afterward. A character journey is almost always more powerful if they, at first, don’t want to go on it. This shows the audience that they’re not yet ready and that change is needed. That way, later on, in your third act, when they finally are ready to change, it will be more powerful. This is why they say that if you have a problem in your third act, it’s usually because there’s a problem in your first act. Not properly showing that resistance could very well be that problem.

Friday = write 1 scene
Saturday = write 1 scene
Sunday = write 1 scene (you should be near your inciting incident here)
Monday = write 1 scene (should be an inciting incident day)
Tuesday = write 1 scene (the beginning of your hero’s resistance)
Wednesday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes
Thursday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes

Genre: Horror
Premise: After her plane crashes on a remote island, a young biologist fights for survival against a rapidly zombifying army of dead passengers.
About: Exposition Time. Last year, for one of my monthly Showdowns, I had a First Page Showdown. Contestants entered their first page. No information whatsoever about title, genre, or logline. Just the first page. The readers on the site then voted for the best one. This is the page that won. However, Mikael Grahn played a trick on us. He hadn’t actually written the script. Well, the script has now been written so I thought I would review it today!
Writer: Mikael Grahn
Details: 107 pages

With all this talk about the upcoming First Line Contest, I remembered that I never reviewed the FIRST PAGE SHOWDOWN contest winner. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances. But since I finally have the script, I figure we should review it. Yeah?

Before we do that. I want everyone to see the winning first page. This is the page that appeared on the site and won the contest.

Now, it’s time to see if the other 106 pages are as good.

Melanie Cardot wakes up in the ocean on a plane seat with dead people all around her. One of those dead people was her husband, who was in the seat next to her. Now he’s just a skull fragment and some hair.

Melanie crawls onto the beach and quickly saves a ferret from the plane who becomes her little pal. She’s going to need friends because moments later, one of the dead passengers in the ocean begins to crawl forward. Which shouldn’t be happening considering his skull is gone.

The good news is, it doesn’t seem to want to kill her. Yet. But her fortune dissipates quickly when she sees another headless man walking on the beach. This one in an orange jumpsuit. After getting the heck away from those guys, she finds a rescue helicopter where it appears the man in the orange jump suit came from. But where are the other rescuers?

Soon, more of the dead plane passengers are waking up. Melanie, who’s a biologist, starts to formulate a theory. Something is placing eggs in these bodies and these eggs birth some sort of insect that then takes control of the bodies’ nervous system, basically turning those bodies into vehicles.

Melanie heads up a nearby cliff where she runs into another survivor, an overly nice incel named Rudiger. The two, almost immediately, have to fend off some insect-zombie-dudes with whatever weapons they can find. For Melanie, it’s a jaws-of-life tool from the rescue helicopter. Now that they know what they’re up against, they have to find a way off this island. But how they’re going to do that is anyone’s guess. Cause they’re in the middle of nowhere.

Okay, so, it’s time to get real.

You ready to get real with me?

I read scripts like this alllllll the time. Scripts where people are in some contained location and zombies and/or monsters come after them. Just to give you an idea of how often I read them, I happened to read one JUST YESTERDAY for a script consultation. And I read one last week!

What I’ve learned by reading this particular setup over and over again is that there are two ways to make it work. One is if you give us a scenario or execution we’ve never seen before. Every aspect of the story feels fresh. Now that’s really hard to do because you’re competing against a hundred years of movies. But it can be done if you come up with a really original idea.

The far easier way to make these work, though, is through the characters. If you can create a character we love who is trying to overcome something inside of them and/or a small group of characters who have some unresolved conflict between them and you can explore it and resolve it in an emotionally compelling way, we’ll like your script.

I’m going to grade Niobiota on that scale.

Is this something we’ve never seen before? For the first half of the script, I’ve seen this setup a billion times. These are the same monsters you see in every first person shooter video game. However, later in the script, when they turn into full-on insects, they became more original. The problem was, by that point, the die was cast. We were already bored by the ‘been there done that’ monsters.

Grade: 6 out of 10

What about the character element? We have a dead husband, who was on the plane, so there’s a teensy bit of an emotional tug there. Melanie herself is a biologist, which, while not exactly common in these movies, isn’t that original either. Rudiger has the incel thing going, which was sort of different. But I never connected with anyone emotionally.

Grade: 5 out of 10

So if neither of those two things is near an 8 out of 10, it’s going to be real hard to keep a reader’s interest.

Which is why I say: GET THE HUMAN/PERSONAL/EMOTIONAL component right. Spend more time on that than all the bells and whistles of your concept. Because it’s the easier one to pull off. Why did The Last of Us video game become such a big hit? Because, up until then, zombie games were mindless shooters. The Last of Us developers put a premium on making you fall in love with the characters, connecting with them, giving them internal conflicts and flaws and backstories, and now you actually care what happens even if you go a long time without having to kill any zombies.

Getting back to the plot of today’s script, there were things that I didn’t quite understand. There’s a recurring theme about them disturbing this island. This island wasn’t meant for them. They’re “invaders.” Which is why they can’t be here.

For that reason, I thought these insects that laid the eggs were part of the island. I thought that was the physical manifestation of the theme we were exploring. This is why you can’t come to our island. Because we will infect you and destroy you.

But the insect egg thing didn’t originate on the island. It originated on the plane. So what does “we’re not supposed to be here” mean? Being on this island has nothing to do with anything that’s happened to them. Some crazy insect-infested dude on your plane is the problem.

I don’t know. Maybe I missed the point. But that’s the thing writers have to realize. If we’re not invested in your story, we don’t care enough to figure out the nuances of it. If it’s confusing, we won’t back up and try to figure it out. We’re not engaged enough to care.

This happened recently with Ari Aster and Beau is Afraid. In an interview he agitatedly complained that there were things in Beau is Afraid that people still weren’t talking about online. And it’s like, “Well yeah. Cause we couldn’t connect with your story.” If we don’t love the story, we’re not going to look deeper.

I do think that some of the aspects of Neobiota could be improved through subsequent drafts. I mean, the third act is a disaster and shows how quickly the script was written (It’s an entirely different story that has nothing to do with the island). The question is, is it worth it to perfect this script?

I’ll say this. There may be something here with these insects that control human and animal bodies. If they could emerge by the end of the first act so that you’ve established the uniqueness of your concept early? There could be a path to a fun movie there. But you need to dig way deeper with Melanie. She needs to be more likable and a more complex character and have a more interesting path. You’d need to replace Rudinger. He’s not working. And you’d need to rethink your third act. You can’t just start your movie over.

If you did that… I don’t know. You may have a movie. What do you guys think?

You can download the script here: Neobiota

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: It was hard for me to look at this without thinking about how Mikael was rushed writing it. And while the majority of you will never be in the exact same scenario Mikael was in, you will be in scenarios where your time writing the script will come up in conversation. In those scenarios, always be vague. Never say you worked three years on a script. Never say you worked one month on a script. Those details WILL work their way into a reader’s head when they’re reading.

If they were told that the writer wrote the script in a month, the second a cliched creative choice pops up, they’ll think, “This is what happens when you write a script too fast.” Or if a script is really dense and heavily described, they’ll think, “This is what happens when you spend too long on a script. You overwrite it.” Just don’t ever mention that stuff if you don’t have to.

Today, I discuss literary agents and how to know if they really like you. Also, is death by shin guard possible?

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A woman who’s moved into a new home and is buying a lot of things from a giant delivery company learns that she is being used for a new delivery scam.
About: Today we have a director who directed a short film and used that film to create buzz for the feature script, which allowed him to get 25 votes on last year’s Black List, which was good enough for a Top 10 finish. I did not watch the short film because I didn’t want to spoil the script. I wanted the writing to do all the work.
Writer: Russell Goldman
Details: 94 pages

Gillian Jacobs for Julia?

Time to take a small detour to talk about something we don’t typically talk about on the site. This has come up because I’ve talked to several repped writers recently who are frustrated with their reps.

I want writers who think the end all be all is securing an agent to know that it’s more complex than you think. Here’s how it typically works. When you sign up with a rep, they will be your best friend. They will parade your script – the one that got them to sign you – out to the entire industry.

How that script is received will determine how your rep treats you from that point forward. If the script gets a lukewarm response around town (no sale, no options, no assignments), the rep will cool on you *a little bit*. But, you still have one more script to prove your worth to them. So the next script you write is super important. It needs to get sold or secure a big option or lead to an assignment or get genuine A-B level talent attached if they’re going to keep promoting you going forward.

But if that script also fails to make a dent in the industry, your rep isn’t going to do much for you going forward. You will have to do all the work yourself. There is one exception to this, which I’ll share with you in a minute. But first, we’ve got a script to review!

38 year-old Julia Day seems to have just lost her father and has bought a new house. I say “seems” because a lot of details in this script are vague. Julia is a recovering alcoholic and spends the majority of her time trying to fix up her house.

As a result, she’s constantly buying ‘building stuff’ online from an Amazon stand-in called “Smirk.” One of her early packages contains a ski mask by accident. But she’s a self-admitted weirdo and likes it. So she adds it to the many decorations she’s making for her home.

Julia tries to get a job (what that job is is unclear) while occasionally hanging out with her brother or sister, Tat (the gender is unclear), and developing a little crush on her Smirk delivery man, Charlie.

Things get weird when Julia starts receiving things that she didn’t buy – a blender, protein powder, a corkscrew – and she complains to the Smirk people. She’s eventually told that this is a developing scam where people send stuff to customers in order to game the Smirk review system. She should just send the stuff and not worry about it.

But Julia isn’t letting it go that easy. She thinks this is the beginning of an identity theft scam. She starts telling everyone she knows that she’s being targeted but there isn’t enough evidence for her claims to be convincing. One of her windows is broken, for example. She claims someone was trying to get in. But it looks like a harmless accident. As she dives deeper into online delivery scams, Julia becomes obsessed with proving she’s right. But at what point does she accept that this may all be in her head?

Okay, back to the secret to getting a rep who will ALWAYS fight for you.

The one exception to the “2 Script Rep Rule” is if the rep genuinely loves you as a writer. If they really really love your writing, they’ll keep pushing every script you write because they believe in you. Most reps only sign people because they think they can move that script. But if that script doesn’t move, they sour on them quickly.

So always gauge a potential rep to see how much they like your writing. Ask them questions about what they liked in your script(s) and gauge how genuine and thoughtful their responses are. If there’s real enthusiasm and attention to detail in the way they respond, that’s a good indication that they believe in you as a writer. Those are the reps you want. Cause those are the reps who are going to stick with you even if you’re not a shooting star right out of the gate.

I’ll talk about this more in the next newsletter if you guys want me to. Just give me a heads up in the comments.

Back to today’s script.

I’m not going to lie. This one was tough to get through.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the writer is a director. Cause I sense they’re a director first and they only write because they have to.

Go ahead and take a look at this script. It’s that kind of writing where if you even drift off for a second, you have no idea where you are or what’s going on, forcing you to go back to the top of the page and start reading all over again. The problem is, that the writing isn’t clear enough to prevent you from drifting off again. Which means you keep having to go back to read the pages all over again. As anyone who’s read anything knows, after doing this five or six times, you just give up on trying to re-understand the page and charge forward, accepting you’re going to be ignorant about some things.

I mean, I wasn’t even sure why Julia was home throughout the first half of the script. I wasn’t sure if she had a job or not. When you’re not a screenwriter first, you make the mistake of assuming too much. You assume the reader is in your head with you so you don’t have to make things clear. You may know the protagonist is a teacher so you just *assume* that the reader will figure it out as well.

There *were* some interesting ideas in here. For example, the script covers something called “brushing,” which is a scam where Amazon users will send you an item you didn’t order so that it ships as a “verified” purchase and then they use your account to write up reviews for those products they shipped, since verified purchases push you up higher on Amazon’s “featured” list.

But it isn’t explored in an interesting way. It’s mentioned. Characters seem upset. Julia complains. But it was more annoying than curiosity-inducing. In other words, it didn’t make me want to keep reading to find out what happened next. All it did was make me think, “Oh, I’d never heard of that scam before.”

This is how a lot of things played out in the script. Julia gets a mask in the mail from Smirk. So we think that’s going to be important. But nothing happens with it for half the script until another one shows up. And that one’s just as impotent as the first. We keep waiting for something to HAPPEN in this story and nothing ever does.

Ironically, the best scene in the script is the opening scene. It’s a cold open where this woman receives shin guards in the mail and proceeds to shove one down her throat and use the other one to try and choke herself to death. I’d never read a scene like that before. So it definitely pulled me in.

But then we just get 50 pages of Julia being annoyed. You promised us something and then completely backed away from it.

I see this mistake a lot where writers write their best scene as the first scene. They do this because they don’t need to connect it to anything and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Which is why it’s so good. But you need to keep the spirit of that first scene in the writing of the rest of your script. Sure, it’s tougher to write engaging material like that if you’re setting up characters and a plot and having to make everything connect. But you have to try!

There may be something to the idea of random stuff being delivered to you. Each item is increasingly weirder. You don’t know how they connect but there’s clearly some message to them. That could be a movie. But the script I just read doesn’t have that clarity of purpose. It’s murky. It stumbles. It has moments but those moments are followed by ten pages that put you to sleep. It needs a writer-writer to come in and add that definition.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If you give a reader a wall of text, they will revolt. Readers don’t have the patience. So, please, going forward, pages like this should be condensed to 1/4 of the space. Paragraphs, also, should be a lot slimmer.

As a means of comparison, here’s a page from Mercy, which got Chris Pratt to sign on and sold to Amazon. By the way, Mercy is a script that has 10 times the amount of mythology it needs to explain to the reader. So, if anything, Mercy should be the script that’s overwritten. Instead, the writer understands how important it is to keep the reader’s eyes moving down the page.

A new twist on the Logline Showdown that is sure to result in pandemonium!

Sorry there’s no official post today. I’m too exhausted. But I did think it was odd how the trades went all ballistic on Argylle “bombing” this weekend. Isn’t $17 million perfect for a movie like this? Was anyone expecting Marvel numbers for a movie about a cat? Unique footnote on this one. Did you know that, while the reported budget for Argylle was 200 million that, actually, Apple just *gave* Matthew Vaughn 200 million. The movie itself was made for much less and Vaughn pocketed the difference. Ahh, to be a director in today’s streaming market – they’re LITERALLY throwing money at you. Either way, why see this movie in theaters when it’s coming to Apple Plus soon? It looks fun to me. And since Taylor Swift secretly wrote it, you know it’s going to be awesome.

Okay, on to business!

January Logline Showdown may be behind us. But that doesn’t mean we have to pack our bags and head home on the next flight. NO! For those of you brave enough, for those of you with a spirit of adventure, it’s time to put those Hawaiian swim trunks back on and DIVE BACK INTO THE SHOWDOWN POOL. Cause the showdown continues people. The showdown continues to continue.

The theme of February Showdown? Anything goes! Just like January Showdown.

But just like any great film, there is a twist.

I will be including the FIRST LINE of your script with every chosen logline on Voting Day. So make sure that the very first line of your script grabs the reader and makes them want to keep reading.

And hence was born… FIRST LINE SHOWDOWN.

What: First Line Showdown
When: Friday, Feb 23
Deadline: Thursday, Feb 22, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me: Title, Genre, Logline + the first page of your script
Rules: Your script must be written to enter
Prize: Script review the next Friday
Where: E-mail all entries to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Holy smokes is this a big one! I give you the secret trick to generating great movie concepts. I tell you just how much longer you have to take advantage of the short story sale trend. I bring back Comment of the Month. One of you won it and you don’t even know it yet! I talk the shock movie team-up of the month, the surprise movie team-up of the month, the kick-butt movie team-up of the month, and give you a way-too-long assessment of the Mandalorian movie announcement, which I provide the blueprint for to make great. I end things with a big splash spec script sale review that was announced just this past week. In short, this may be the greatest Scriptshadow newsletter ever! So why aren’t you on my newsletter? E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get on.

And please, anyone who’s on my newsletter list and not receiving the newsletter, e-mail me so I can yell at my mass mailer program.

P.S. As usual, I am fried from putting this thing together. So there will likely be no post on Monday. Feel free to use this comment section to get through the extended weekend. :)