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Last night, at my in laws’ place, I showed a group of people the first episode of The War.

We made decorations and a ton of food. We also put up the beautiful portraits Aaron Acevedo did for the episode with a little bit of foreshadowing text under each one. Even though we got a ton of RSVPs through Facebook, we expected ten or twelve people to show up. As it turned out, we got more. A lot more. So many, we ran out of chairs. Folks were sitting on the floor, standing in the back, sitting on laps. We turned out the lights and turned on the DVD player. 

The episode started off with a polite silence as the audience listened to the narrator’s voice and watched the images float by. I sat in the darkness, my hands shaking. I had worked on the first episode for six months. From outlining to pre-writing to first draft to second, third and fourth and final draft, to recording, to working with Aaron and Jessica on the art to re-recording to re-re-recording to running out of art to getting more art to iMovie crashing and thinking I had lost the entire episode and had to start from scratch to finding out that iMovie autosaves everything to sitting in front of the cpu for six hours while it processed and then another three hours as it burned to DVD and testing it on our XBox and the inlaws’ DVD player… it was six months. My hands were shaking.

The episode played on. A still silence in the room. I could barely control my body as it shivered, watching the images flash on the screen.

And then, something happened. The audience began to respond.

They laughed. And they laughed when they were supposed to. I could feel emotions swell up in the room at moments when I hoped they would. They responded to the voice actors reading text I had written nearly a half a year ago. After one particularly emotional monologue, someone in the audience actually spoke back at the screen. Spoke back at the character. And when the audience laughed, you knew they were all thinking the same thing.

One of my favorite moments was when one character said the words, "recurve bow." Nearly every person in the room gasped. I heard someone say, "Oh shit." It was a genuine reaction. An emotional response.

It was working. My shaking got more intense.

And then, when the episode was over, and when the credits for the voice actors ran, the people in the room cheered. They cheered.

At that moment, I was so proud of the people who helped me. Aaron for giving faces to my characters. The actors for giving them voices. Jessica for filling in all the little pieces that were empty. And, of course, my patient wife who keeps reminding me that she loves me in ways that continue to surprise me.

Afterward, folks stuck around and talked about the episode. Eventually, we turned off the DVD player and the TV shifted back to the channel it was on before we started. We turned the volume down and kept chatting. It took us about fifteen minutes to realize what the TV was trying to tell us.

"Osama bin Laden has been killed by US Forces."

I’m still stunned.

We sat and listened to the news for fifteen minutes or more. Someone said it could not have been a more fitting coda to the evening, considering what they had just seen. I still don’t know what to say.

I’ll be putting the first episode up live… shortly.

Special Preview on May 1st.
Contact me for details.

In production since last year, my newest (and most ambitious) project.