My Amazing, Astonishing, Corrugated Time Machine by Timothy F. Betts (souterfell) - Short, Comedy - When teenager Trevor is forced to hang out with his eight year old cousin, he finds that the kid's imagination is more than just overactive: it's dangerous. 9 pages - pdf, format

Thanks for throwing it up here. I wanted to do something quick, like a little exercise since I have more time on my hands. Went into "looking for something" and asked for a theme. The first one i got was time travel. Liked to give credit for the suggestion but I forgot who and the thread was quickly deleted, not sure why though.

Anywho, it's silly and it's pretty family friendly, small cast and would be a rather small production. Come to think of it, it's probably the most accessible thing I've written. Well here it is and hope to have more up soon, and get a couple of reads in too.

Souter,

It was Rob. He's always on about time travel. He's probably a medieval knight, or maybe a viking or summat.

Ni idea why that thread would be deleted. You would think the mod who dumped it would let you know, as it's a fair question.

Strange title. Kinda put me off, to be perfectly honest. Sounds like something Les Dennis or Michael McIntyre might write. I'm not a fan of either by the way. Although Michael "Pierce Brosnan with a mouth fulla sweets" McIntyre can be annoyingly amusing.

So Rachel's 42. Could we not have a lickle bit more intro please?

Page 2. You're far too fond of the wond 'and'. And you're using it to replace 'then'. Stop it!

I'm no expert SF, (far from it) but these kids don't really sound like kids to me.

Top of p5. "He puts another foot in which terrorizes Curtis."

Good, but telling not showing. There's a bit of that later too.

I'd say the last line would work better as a question.

Overall - a strange  story. Not bad, but weird. Felt like it should be more and you were skipping things. I dunno. Could do wih a little more. Particularly around pages 6-7.

Not bad though.

This is "probably the most accessible thing I've written". Really? You need to chill out dude!

Ren

I gave this a read and I had a few comments.

First off, and this has more to do with your comment than the script, scripts with children are not very accessible.

I liked what you were trying to do with this script.  The story was cute and it was obvious that you put lots of effort into trying to make the dialogue kid like.  You did fairly well with this, I had a kid vibe while I was reading.

Now, while the story was cute, it really wasn't much more than that.  It would have been good to have a bit more meat there, for it to be more compelling.  Perhaps make us understand more about what is at stake.

Somehow relate the kick at the end to connect somehow with Curtis and Trevor's relationship.   Perhaps the old homeless guy is somehow the future Curtis.  I don't know exactly what you need to add to the script but you definitely need more here.

One little nit that I noticed fairly early on was that you were describing a character's costume.   While this is needed if the clothes are needed for the story, it really isn't an appropriate way to introduce a character.  I would definitely correct that.

I think you have a clever idea here and with a little work to make it more compelling you can have a great little script.        

Hey man, only real comment I wanted to make was that it would be good to see more action involving the time machine. I don't think you've really exploited your premise to get the full potential out of it, and we could see more of Trevor travelling through time.

Not a bad story, but I think you could do more with it.

Cheers,
Tim.

Hey Tim,

I thought this was a cute little story.  Could it be expanded?  Sure, but judging from your post it seems like you were just looking to pop out a quick story to get the juices flowing.  I enjoyed it.


I think you did a really nice job capturing the voice of the two kids.  I got a couple of nice chuckles.  Good luck.

Craig

Hey guys, thanks for the reads.

R, thanks for reminding me it was Rob. The thread was deleted cause I had already gotten my suggested theme. Sorry you didn't like the title, figured it would be a fun little title. Thanks for pointing out the "and" and "then" issues. I'm still struggling with my addictions to "ings" but I'll add this to the list. I see how it could be expanded. I toyed around with having the eager to be a grown-up Trevor go into a future bar and only to find that a heavily taxed soda is the only libation he could buy but I figure that would take away from the overall feel. By accesible, I mean filmable on a next to nothing budget. Hell, the biggest prop is a cardboard box.

McC, i had a feeling I described the "mom" costume too much. Just figured if I was gonna reference it. Glad you thought the kids pretty much talked like kids. I wasn't sure how much "at stake" to make. This would actually be aimed towards a younger group, 13-18, where if you didn't get the whole time travel thing you'd at least like the kick in the balls and if you were too mature you might appreciate the moms' concoctions. was the effect of the time travel clear? that's the important part.

Trojan, good idea, i'll have to way out the sudden surprise as i have it written against maybe a small than big trip

C6, yeah it was mainly like a finished sketch before actually woking on something substantial. I may tweak it around though.

Souterfell,

I enjoyed this overall, and I'm surprised you didn't get more reads on this.

Let me preface my comments by saying that I'm fascinated by the subject of time travel, so I try to read whatever I can about quantum reality, the many-worlds theory, etc. I'm also a pendantic ass at times, so take this all with a grain of salt... (o:

First, about the writing - I really enjoy your writing style.  I think your narratives are good and you seem to get the quality of pithy dialogue.  I would suggest though, as it was remarked about earlier, that you give us more character description.  The women are sisters, but do they look alike? What about Curtis?  Since he's obviously brilliant, do we picture him as Jonathan Lipnicki from "Jerry Maguire"?

As for Trevor, I didn't buy him as fifteen from his opening dialogue. He seemed a bit petulant and immature for that age.  I would go with thirteen for him - it makes more sense that he would be carted around by his mom then. Plus there's a huge difference between thirteen and fifteen when it comes to boys, as the latter are usually led around by we-all-know-what...

As for the story itself, I really, really liked the fact that anyone who uses the machine ages.  For all the time-travel stuff that's out there, no one has ever captured that image.  Of course we know from Einstein's equations that time dilates as you approach the speed of light - so actually your mode of time travel makes sense in a "let's not defy the laws of physics all THAT much" kind of a way...

Okay, now for the pendantic ass part - and this is a personal preference and not a criticism. I have a problem with fantasy that just "happens".  I know that Curtis really couldn't build a time machine because no one can, but I have a really hard time believing that this actually happened (i.e., it's not a dream, or hallucination, etc.) with a cardboard box and drawings on it.

I know Curtis has a chemistry set, so maybe show some tubes sticking out of this thing? And maybe attach a real laptop?  Give me something here. (o:

Oh yes, and as was remarked upon earlier, you should expand this and give Trevor more to do while he travels.

Random thought alert - I love the dialogue "Oh no, future homeless" and "Man, I thought I was getting less crazy"...

Really good job on this and I think you could expand on it -

AJR