My third published story took an interesting route.

I’d always wanted to write a Blues inspired story for an artist I used work with, Jason Shawn Alexander. He loved the Blues, and it rubbed off on me. The rawness and harsh realities of many Blues songs can take one’s mind to dark places…

I had a title stuck in my head for a long time: “Old Hat to Raise the Devil”; a turn of phrase describing the means to do just what it implies. I got the title just flipping through a book for inspiration, the excellent and highly recommended Encyclopedia of Occultism by Lewis Spence. Combining that title with the Blues theme, I wrote a prose style, one page pitch about about a young man inspired by Robert Johnson sell his soul to the Devil. Jason loved it. We pitched it to Vertigo for one of their occasional anthologies, but only got mild interest. Jason showed it to Mike Richardson at Dark Horse, and he was very interested in getting it into Dark Horse Presents. But we couldn’t get any real commitment or movement from our follow ups, so we let it sit for awhile.

Inspired by a Pinhead sketch that Jason had done, I suggested we pitch the idea of doing something Hellraiser to Boom! Studios since they had been publishing the licensed title.

I don’t remember how much time passed, but enough that Jason and I had moved on and were working on Empty Zone. Then Jason got an email from Boom! letting us know they had a Hellraiser anthology in the works and would we like to pitch a story? (In a future entry I will write about Clive Barker’s significant influence on my decision to pursue writing.)

We were excited by the idea, but had no idea what to pitch. We just knew we wanted to do something different. It occurred to me that we might be able to do something with “Old Hat.”

Then it hit me: What if it wasn’t the Devil that  the young man met at the crossroads, but Cenobites?

I wanted to do something other than the Lament Configuration box. It just made sense to me to make it a steel guitar. I threw in the idea of a thirteenth string just give it a little more sinister inference. (Jason texted me a few times about how much he hated that guitar because of the difficulty in designing it with moving parts in mind, but there’s no denying that the end result was a gorgeous centerpiece to the story.)

The other thing I wanted to do was make the story read like one you could imagine a Bluesman writing a song about.

I rewrote my original Old Hat pitch and sent it off. More time passed, but they finally got back to us and let us know they loved the pitch and wanted us to do the story.

I’m happy with the results, and the story got great reviews. I really wanted to do more with Hellraiser, as well as Barker’s other properties. He has always been such a huge influence and inspiration to me. I went so far as to write a 20 page spec sample script for adapting “The Last Illusion.”  In fact, maybe I’ll include that spec script in a future entry.

In the meantime, here’s the original short and long pitch, as well as the rewritten pitch for Hellraiser and subsequent script.

Original pitch: OLD HAT copy

Rewritten for Hellraiser: UNTITLED HELLRAISER PITCH REV copy

The script: HELLRAISER OLD HAT LETTERING 051214 copy