Anthony Silverwood

Firstly, let me just warn you that I am a human plane crash. a dumpster fire with legs... and a laptop... and big dreams. As of now, I am NOT part of this complete breakfast with nine essential vitamins and minerals, I am NOT the surprise at he bottom of the box.
Not yet anyway..
after about two years of college, majoring in Communication Arts, my severe ADHD and dyslexia had shown themselves to be fatally incompatible with learning in a campus environment. Writing fiction and film making were my burning desires. So I decided I would take off and see as much of the world as I could while I tried my hand at various forms of writing. And once I was safely beyond the "starving artist" phase of that journey, and had built a solid foundation as a writer, THEN we would circle back to acadamia, and learn film making as a whole.
Well I'm great at making plans, not so strong on the follow-through.
in the succeeding years I wrote short stories, produced a counter-cultural magazine/website called Horribly Awry (which would eventually appear at number two in the High Times "Hemp One Hundred."
At our most popular moments wed have a readership in the thousands thousands.
My co-founder and editor had an uncle who worked for the FBI, and once informed him that Horribly Awry, with its frequent reviews and recipes for legal mood altering highs, and shameless advocacy of breaking the law in the name of anarchy, had garnered this magazine an honest to God FBI file..
We were never accused of any wrongdoing, but Big Brother was doing what Big Brother does: watching.
The "zine" and its readers faded away over the next several years never, inspiring the punk rock revolution that was it's purpose.
. And it was then that I shifted my focus to larger projects, reinventing myself as a novellist. I wrote three of them. The first a complete disaster, a second one that had an agent interested for a time, though she was never able to find a market for it..
I continued to write whenever the Muses decided to pay me a visit,. And I continued to party, and celebrate life in increasingly dangerous and addictive ways.
I was still not interested in growing up, taking responsibility, or setting realistic goals.
But the endless partying made my thirties an increasingly blurry and irrelevant decade. The recreational pot and hallucinogenics were gradually supplanted by a most unrecreational devotion to ethyl alcohol..
Great. The "Alcoholic writer" I had become a cliche - a sworn enemy in this line of work.
and So with no money for school now, I taught myself screenwriting, and began my DIY journey into, a medium I found was alarmingly structured, overflowing with do's and don'ts, and would take years before even starting to click.
But I LOVED it. writing for a visual medium was so in line with how my dyslexic brain comprehended things. When you're dyslexic you think in pictures. Everything you've ever learned, from your multiplication tables to the yearly calender is rendered in icons, symbols., and here was a form of writing that used visual and auditory perspectives exclusively. AND it had in spades, the structure, format and discipline of which my writing was always so bereft.
But the years between then and now were an often dark and tragic dimension. there was the death and suicide of loved ones, whirling bouts of increasingly dangerous substances abuse, homelessness, hospitals, rehabs, even jail and prison for. stealing booze and cough syrup.
The third offense for which was an automatic felony. in the state of Missouri. And it was during my incarcerations that I decided to make the most of my confinement, and start to take screenwriting seriously. I wrote the first frafts of most of my scripts in the Missouri Department of Corrections. By hand, with a pencil and all the paper I could get my hands. A few of these scripts are written on the back of my parole and court documents.
I counted every word on every page so i could calculate the typewritten length. When I had to sharpen my pencil, I would rub it against the concrete floor of my cell.
I wrote script after script. 14 of them in all, sometimes out on the prison yard where all manner violence and drug overdoses would commence right in front of me as I wrote.
When out of incarceration however, I found that alcohol and cough syrup, my over the counter drugs of choice, were all around me, too easy to acquire.
This led to many hospitalizations as well. I was once even in an alcohol induced coma for about a week. I am sad to report that I did not wake up with the power of psychic premonitions. Otherwise I would have promptly killed Donald Trump back in 2008 when no one foresaw the threat he represented..
In January 2010 I passed out drunk outside one night, when the temp was down to about negative 4 degrees. Woke up in the hospital with frostbite in my hands and feet, so severe that the doctors told me that amputation was a possibility.
A writer without hands is like a porn star without a dick. I was horrified, my fears dampened only slightly by the morphine in those first few weeks.. I healed however. an indescribably painful process, because as frozen nerve endings grow back, they're constantly transmitting pain signals - a uniquely sharp and tingling pain unlike any {I had ever known, I remember trying to write in those five month of convalescance.. every key stroke was agony. Imagine typing on a keyboard, and each key is like needles piercing your finger tips.
As a writer I cannot think of a more literal interpretation of "suffer for your art" than that.
But I just could not stop. Writing had become an addiction unto itself. In my stories, and in my characters, was the only place there wasn't pain of some kind. Screenwriting spoke to a hope of redemption, my name in proverbial lights, threesomes with supermodels., the works. AsI slowly wrapped my dyslexic, vodka-pickled mind around this vicious animal, the screenplay. I slowly started to tame it., and my various demons for that matter .
I'm still taming. STILL a human dumpster fire. In an age when selling a spec screenplay is about as likely as being attacked by sharks in the desert , I write, I stitch my life back together, and I write some more.

Perhaps I should have stayed in school and gotten that communications degree. Perhaps I should have been an actor.. People over the years have said I had that certain marketable look.
But speculations about callings I might have missed are irrelavent, distractions to a highly distractable dude. And at the age of 46, I am a creature of habit, sufficiently set in my ways, and for that matter, motivated by pride and ego., that I have to see this through, Because I strongly believe that a career, a calling, that which you honestly believe you were put on this Earth to do, is not just a belief, it's an entire belief system. A religion unto itself. And if there is only one Goddamned thing I take seriously in this world, it should be that
So I will keep writing. I will keep learning. I will probably get my narrow ass back in school and fill in the blanks in my knowledge of film making as a whole. In the mean-time I will continue to use cyberspace and social media as my all purpose therapists' couch, film school lecture hall, and of course, adult video store.
Meanwhile, I'm a seriously lonely cat.. I have literally no friends, I haven't been in a relationship for an embarrassing number of years, and my family had disowned even further back than that (and didn't even bother to tell me when my brother died) I work at whatever nameless temp job will pay the bills just now. I work out like a madman at the gym, motivated less by health concerns than by my profound insecurity regarding my skinniness. And I go to AA meetings where I do little talking or, sharing,, and mostly sit there constructing movie scenes in my head, And every free moment thereafter, I'm brains-deep in my stories. My universe. And it consumes me. Because If you're a writer of fiction, in any form, you're a god. And if as a god, you want to go around saying crazy shit like "let there be light" or "fade in, or "Chapter One.. Well that's a big bang right there mister Supreme Being. Now you've got yourself a universe. That comes with responsibilities. You'll have flooding, smiting, and judging to do. But you'll also have miracles, and the sky's the proverbial limit what those miracles look like.
With all that on my plate, I don't wind up spending much time in the real world.
And that makes me unrealistic, and frankly, a bit socially retarded, The closest thing I have to a social life is this electronic one right here. If you're talking to me on social media, even it's to crap on one of my pitches, loglines or other posts, thank you. You are playing an active role in keeping my clinical depression out of the suicide zone
So I have , you, the folks who have made it in all the walks of life I aspire to, but have yet to reach.. You clearly know something I don't. And it would be awesome to enjoy that walk of life with you. Anything you can teach me, even by way of the most callous, condescending critiques of my work, is something from which I can learn
Because I believe every day's a school day, in age of the web, more than ever before. I believe that, win or lose, my stubborn obsession with seeing my stories embodied in that awesome two dimensional space we call the big screen is a natural and wholly organic thing. It's what I was built for.
So i continue to learn the craft of screenwriting in my own scatter-brained way.I also throw knives. And I have a 5th degree black-belt in cunnilingus.
In an age when selling a spec screenplay is about as likely as being attacked by sharks in the desert , I write, I stitch my life back together, and I worry. Will it ever happen? The name in lights, etcetera?
It doesn't matter. Well it does, but regardless, writing stories, and characters, being a god after a very real fashion, it's a rush like no other, and believe me, I have tried them all..