Another schoolday. Mr. Arnzen is still in the hospital.Today I was inspired to work on my D.M. story. I was inspired so much, in fact, that I took the pages to school with me even though I ended up NOT having any time to do anything with them!
NOTES: Remember how I said I had always wanted to be a writer? Well, I may have still been getting the hang of non-fiction with this journal but I had been writing detective stories for a year or two already! D. M. was a detective character I created. The thing that made him unique was that he was a man who awoke one morning in a strange town where no one knew him and he had no memory of who he was. His pockets had been stripped of all info except for a small, folded piece of paper on which was written the initials, "D" and "M."
In case those of you reading this are too young to remember it, this was in essence the backstory of a short-lived 1967 TV series entitled CORONET BLUE. I recall watching that series but I don't remember if I consciously or unconsciously lifted the idea for my own stories. I wrote--or at least plotted and/or started quite a few of them, though. I found the following list this evening:
DM--SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
1--The Beginning--Jewel Robbery
2--The Mark of Capricorn
3--Arrows of Death
4--The Spawn of Hitler
5--Mystery of the Supermen
6--The Horrible Dr. Dare
7--A Turn For the Worse
8--On the Trail of Dr. Dare
9--The Egyptian Connection
10--Angie Dawn
11--The Doll House
12--A Death in the Family
13--The Millionaire
14--Rock and Roll Revenge
15--The Death Corporation
16--The Executioner
17--Killer On the Loose
18--Stranger in My Mind
19--The Suicide Conspiracy
20--The Genocide Formula
21--Z For Zoo
22--Sabotage
23--Return to Lifetime
24--Professional Death
25--Last Dance Together
26--A Trace of Identity
Looks like a full season of TV episodes, doesn't it? Reading my notes, though, 9 were left completely unwritten, 5 unfinished and 6 in need of revision. I wrote about DM from about 1971 or '72 until 1975. During that time, i also spun off a couple of his supporting characters into their own stories--Angie Dawn and Rick Trace--as well as teamed DM up with my pulpish, two-gunned masked avenger, Nightmare.
I still have most if not all of the DM episodes that I actually finished...and they aren't one bit as interesting as all of the above might make them seem! I had a LOT to learn about writing.
3 comments:
Steve -
There is at least one episode of Coronet Blue on Youtube. It was also the inspiration behind the show Nowhere Man (which I recently watched by way of Youtube.)
Cool! Thanks. Based on the little thingie in the corner, I'd say it ran on TV LAND at some point (back when it was worth watching) and I missed it! Darn it!
A great batch of titles - without which you cannot write stories at all, anyway. Same with music...you first must come up with a great BAND NAME, then you worry about writing the tunes!
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