I'm finishing up my M.A. in Screenwriting and one of the things that I think the programme didn't do well was it didn't teach us how to write shorts.

At all.

Everything was all about writing feature films. There was a module on television, but the television module was such a small part of our grade, and we were only required to write the first 15 pages of a pilot, not the full pilot. (I wrote the full pilot anyway.)

But shorts can be valuable for getting some credits in the industry.

So, what resources would be good for writing shorts specifically if you already know how to do features?

And more importantly, how do you come up with the idea for shorts if you're used to thinking in feature-length or novel-length concepts?

Hello. I'm finishing up an M.A. in Screenwriting at IADT, which required me to write a feature film. I'm finishing up about a month early with my final draft.

But I also thought to myself that the idea I came up with for a screenplay might actually be a good idea for a stage play as well. So I did an adaptation of it. I had to change a lot of cinematic conventions to theatrical ones -- can't use smash cuts or jump scares! -- but that actually freed me to do some really interesting stuff that I couldn't do on the screen.

That said, while I'm proud of it, this is my first stage play and I'd love any notes that you might have on the very basics, including how things should be formatted, if I've got the 5-act structure right, etc.

TITLE: POLITE COMPANY

Logline: After coming out in her forties, a London-based trans comedian returns home for Thanksgiving, where her family's insistence on "keeping the peace" turns a painfully awkward holiday reunion into a crisis she cannot laugh away.

LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Whv8ooI0sF4AOYHqp6uV0lkW2nWoJwT4/view?usp=sharing

Howdy. I'm a student at the Irish National Film School, and I'm finishing up my M.A. in Screenwriting this year. Actually, I'm pretty much done.

I was required to write a feature film for my thesis; I think it could also work as a stageplay, though obviously it needs significant adaptation.

I'm wondering if there are resources for screenwriters who want to adapt what they've written for the stage.

On a related note, where can I get feedback on my stage play when I'm done writing it? For screenplays I use StoryPeer.com - but stage plays are a completely new environment for me. (I'm sorry if I missed an FAQ somewhere.)

Hey, so, I'm an M.A. in Screenwriting student at the Irish National Film School-IADT, and I just finished up the fifth and, for the programme, final draft of my first feature, "Polite Company."

Not much to say other than that. :D

Please forgive me if there is a weekly thread for treatments.

TITLE: Zephyr
Format: Feature (Stage: Treatment)
Page Length: Aiming for 95-105.
Genre: Sci-Fi / Political Drama

LOGLINE: After becoming the face of a galactic victory, a celebrated war hero discovers that the leaders she fought for knowingly accepted the destruction of civilian worlds—including her own—as the price of defeating the enemy's superweapon. As the dangerous truth begins to leak, she must choose between protecting the fragile peace she helped win and exposing the sacrifice on which it was built.

Feedback Concerns:

Here's what I'd like to know - does this seem like a viable story to you? Are the elements there? Anything coming out as obviously missing (or obviously extraneous?) Before I start writing up the beat sheet, I want to know if what I've got here is an idea worth exploring.

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SYNOPSIS/TREATMENT:

The war ends in fire.

The ASCENDENCY’S ultimate weapon, the asteroid fortress known as the KALLUS ENGINE, hangs above a contested system, its planetary-kill capability poised to decide the fate of the galaxy.

Soldiers prepare for war. Among them is MILLI ZEPHYR, leading the commando charge to take down the shield, assisted by her second-in-command, BLAKE, from their shared homeworld of ELARIA. They exchange messages to give to each other’s families, in case one of them doesn’t make it.

Her commander, the general GEORGE ISLE, gives a final brief to her and her team. They know it’s a suicide mission. But Isle reminds them that the sooner the shields are down, the more soldiers get to return home to their families.

A coalition assault begins. Capital ships engage in orbit while Zephyr’s elite commando team breaches the asteroid’s interior to disable its shields from within.

The mission is brutal, surgical, and familiar in its shape: corridors, choke points, timed charges. One by one, the team falls, including Blake. Zephyr presses forward alone, completing the objective and transmitting the signal that drops the Engine’s defenses. Moments later, the coalition flagship fires. The asteroid fractures, then collapses into a burning halo of debris.

The Ascendancy surrenders. The war is over. Zephyr returns to the capital as the face of victory.

She is paraded through a galaxy desperate to believe in clean endings. Broadcasts hail her as the soldier who “saved countless worlds.” Political leaders invoke her name as proof of moral clarity. A medal is placed around her neck beneath a cascade of light and applause.

Behind the spectacle, something is off.

During the battle, the Kallus Engine fired multiple shots. At the time, they were dismissed as defensive measures, stray discharges in the chaos of defeat. Now, fragmented reports begin to surface. Entire civilian worlds have gone silent.

One of them is Elaria—Zephyr’s home.

Her family. Her history. Gone.

The official explanation is swift and carefully worded: the Ascendancy, facing annihilation, lashed out in a final act of spite. A tragedy. Unpredictable. Unavoidable.

Privately, Zephyr learns something else, delivered mournfully by Isle.

The possibility of retaliatory strikes had been modeled before the assault. Not likely, not strategic—but possible. The coalition’s leadership proceeded anyway, calculating that the risk was outweighed by the necessity of ending the war. No evacuation was attempted. No warning was issued.

Zephyr wasn’t told about this until after the mission. She becomes a symbol of victory while carrying a truth that doesn’t fit inside the story being told about her. 

And she is ordered to secrecy.

If the galaxy learns that the war was won by knowingly accepting the possibility of civilian annihilation, the fragile peace could fracture. The Ascendancy’s surrender holds, but only just. Systems are watching. Waiting for a reason to doubt the legitimacy of the new order.

She obeys, as she believes that peace she fought for is more important than anything. Even grief. Even the truth.

Besides.

There is no version of the truth that restores what she lost.

And yet...
 
There is no lie that makes it acceptable.

Isle is made regent of the provisional military government that inherited the galaxy after the Ascendancy falls. He asks Zephyr to join the cabinet, both because of her qualifications and because as the hero of the war, she’s universally respected by all factions, and thus can help give the fledgling, fragile government legitimacy. She agrees, entering a political life, now part of the machinery.

So, publicly, she smiles, gives speeches, stands beside leaders who speak of unity and peace. Privately, she withdraws. Isle assigns a robot, Friday, to serve as Milli’s personal assistant, when Isle worries about Milli’s health — not just as the acting chancellor, but also as a friend.
 
Grief isolates her, but something sharper begins to take shape beneath it: a need to understand the decision that erased her world.

The secret of the acceptable risk is starting to leak. Grieving survivors are asking questions about what the Coalition leadership knew, and when.

A new separatist movement arises, led by former dissident and political prisoner LUCIAN VALE. The movement is using the conspiracy as a wedge issue to create a myth that the Coalition provisional government can’t be trusted.

Vale is a well-intentioned anti-authoritarian extremist, and spent twenty three years imprisoned by the Ascendancy. During that time, her parents died, and her wife, also a prisoner of the Ascendancy, died in prison.  She fought the Ascendancy, suffered under it. She, like Milli, is unquestionably brave.

Milli remembers Vale as a childhood hero, having grown up reading her banned essays. Vale also sees Milli as the woman who sacrificed so much to liberate herself and others, even going so far as to say “You’re the only honest person left in government.”

They don’t want to be on opposite sides. But Vale believes that the Coalition is becoming exactly what it defeated — lies, secrets, and centralized authority. She’s pushing for immediate publication of all classified records, and radical decentralization of the government, leaving power almost entirely in the hands of local planetary systems; unable to even give the Coalition a standing military. Vale is so determined to prevent another dictatorship that she would make stable government impossible.

They meet at the war crimes trial of Ascendancy Lt. Colonel HEERSE, who freely admits to planning the retaliatory strike on Elaria and the other worlds. Heerse was not a battlefield commander. He was a bureaucrat, responsible for population control, logistics... and targeting data. He is the epitome of the “banality of evil,” stating that “we targeted the homeworlds as a deterrent to invasion. That was our miscalculation. We underestimated the Coalition’s capacity for acceptable loss.”  He protests that “he never killed anyone. I only processed reports. And if I hadn’t done so, someone else would have.”

He even says to Milli and Vale: “You think killing me will make you safe from becoming me.”

After the trial, Vale tries to recruit Milli to her cause. Milli is not convinced, but is clearly tempted.

Zephyr knows the conspiracy theory is true, but wants to contain the revelation so that it does as little damage as possible. She, too, also wants to know who made the call. If she can find someone specific to blame, then perhaps they could be offered to the public as a sacrificial lamb. If it was one bad actor, they can get a trial and the truth can come to light. And she needs to put a face to the person who made the decision to doom everyone she has ever known and loved.

She fears the answer might be Isle himself, who is cagey about it: “If I didn’t know they might retaliate, I would have been a failure of a general. If I did know they might, I might be a failure of a person.” When Milli presses him and asks point blank if he was the one who made the call, he refuses to answer. “Because I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. And on this one, I’d rather be damned if I don’t.”

As a member of the Cabinet, she uses her position to rummage through corners of the postwar galaxy: refugee settlements from other destroyed worlds, intelligence archives already being redacted, and working side-by-side with the officers who planned the assault. Friday comes with her, a sounding board and confidant.

The answers she finds is consistent and unsettling, and it is Friday who finally gets her to realize the horrible truth: No one person made the call. No one strategist. No one general.

Strategists ran probabilities. Commanders approved the plan. Politicians accepted the cost. Each step was rational. Each decision is defensible. The chain of responsibility dissolves into a system that functions precisely because no single individual owns the outcome.

There is an analyst who objected. He was ordered to secrecy and quietly reassigned without punishment. “I wouldn’t do it. So they found someone else who would.” (This mirrors Heerse’s line about: “if I hadn’t... someone else...”)

Because they were all culpable... nobody was.

And the worst part: They were right. Delay could have meant the deaths of hundreds of worlds. Surrender would have resulted in a galaxy living in fear. The invasion—and the cost of it—was the best bad option.

Eliara was simply inside the margin of error.

Heerse is executed, with Milli and Vale as witnesses. Vale sums it up: “He deserved it. I wish that mattered.”

The first true free and fair elections are imminent. Isle is running for Chancellor, as is Vale. In an “October Surprise,” Vale’s separatist movement obtains key documents about the risk, releasing them to the public. The false narrative of a clean victory begins to erode. Even moderates start openly questioning the provisional government’s story, throwing the new government’s entire legitimacy into doubt. Isolated riots break out — and threaten to become larger ones.

The truth is out. The question becomes: Who gets to frame it? The separatists? The government? Or... Zephyr?

She still believes that peace is more important than truth.

But she comes to learn that peace built on lies cannot last.

She reveals what she knows. Her credibility as the hero of the war gives her confession weight and gravitas.

And when she’s asked point blank: “If they had told you Eliara might be destroyed, would you still have gone on the mission?” She admits it: “I’ve had years to think about that. The young commando who got on that drop ship would have said no. Today? Knowing now what I know? How necessary it was? Yes.”

Whether the peace holds after that is no longer something she can control.

Election night, Milli chooses not to watch the results. She has Friday charter a flight to the star system where Elaria used to be.
 
She spacewalks, leaving Blake’s last note to his family floating among the ruins.

Title: "Polite Company"
Format: Feature
Page Length: 117 Pages
Genres: Family Tragicomedy
Logline: A middle-aged trans woman flies home for her first Thanksgiving as herself, hoping to prove to her Catholic Irish-American family that she hasn’t changed, but finds that what's really at stake isn't whether her family will accept her, but who in the family gets to define reality, even when denying her truth becomes life threatening.

Feedback Concerns: This is the first pass on the fourth draft out of five required for the M.A. Screenwriting course. At this point I am looking for the flaws I can't see and the concerns I don't know about. I'm willing to take any general or specific notes, but, here are some specific, practical, actionable questions.

1. Do you think this draft is good enough to spend the money and send it to the Blacklist for a professional evaluation?

2. Do the tonal shifts work?

3. There is a moment near the end of the 2nd act where the framing device starts breaking -- this is deliberate. Does this work?

LINK: (Comments are enabled) - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MPYBQ65vePGiqe9dqJvIvoH7_QfTiSUZ/view?usp=sharing

---

EDIT:

Improved logline based on feedback:

After finally transitioning at forty-three, a middle-aged stand-up comic returns home for Thanksgiving as herself, hoping to reconnect with her Catholic Irish-American family, only to discover that their refusal to accept her identity may cost her far more than family harmony.

I've just completed an MA in Screenwriting in Dublin and am leaving with a feature screenplay and two one-hour drama pilots. I also have a second feature in development and am currently working on the treatment.

My immediate priority is finding a day job and getting financially stable, so I may not be able to act on advice right away. But I'd like to understand what the actual roadmap looks like from here.

Assuming you have a small portfolio of polished scripts but no significant industry connections, what would you focus on next?

Competitions and fellowships? Querying managers or agents? Networking events? Script hosting sites like BL? Local Irish industry organizations?

I'm based in Dublin, Ireland, if that changes the advice.

I'm not asking for a shortcut into the industry. I'm trying to understand what the next few years should realistically look like for someone moving from "student with completed scripts" to "working writer."

I'm estranged from my parents and I'm struggling with whether I'm seeing things clearly.

The break happened after the 2024 election, but the more I think about it, the election wasn't really the cause. It was the thing that made me re-evaluate decades of interactions.

One of the recurring patterns in my relationship with my mother was that my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions were constantly questioned or overridden. If I was upset, I was overreacting. If I remembered something differently, my memory was wrong. If I made a decision, someone else knew better.

Sometimes it was major things. When I came out as trans, my mother told extended family members without my knowledge or consent, then later asked me to effectively go back into the closet for Thanksgiving. I lost the ability to decide for myself who was safe to tell.

Sometimes it was much smaller things. When I bought my first home, she took over decorating decisions and even major purchases without consulting me. The issue wasn't the money or generosity. The issue was that my preferences and choices didn't seem to matter.

Individually, many of these incidents could be explained away. Together, they formed a pattern that left me feeling like I wasn't regarded as a competent adult capable of making my own decisions.

For years I kept giving the benefit of the doubt because I believed the problem was execution rather than intent.

The election changed that. As a trans woman with a trans sibling, watching my parents support a political movement that openly targeted people like us forced me to ask whether I had been misunderstanding the relationship all along.

There are other incidents that damaged trust. One that I still struggle with involves my father leaving me alone with a loaded firearm despite knowing I had a lifelong history of suicidal depression. Whether that was negligence or something worse, it permanently changed how safe I felt around him.

What makes this so difficult is that I don't feel nothing.

I love my parents.

I miss my parents.

I also don't trust them.

I don't tell them where I live. I don't share details about my relationship. I don't share my creative work. I don't feel emotionally or physically safe being vulnerable with them.

The part I'm having trouble reconciling is that they still provide some financial support. From their perspective, that's evidence that they care. From my perspective, it exists alongside decades of experiences that left me feeling unheard, dismissed, controlled, and unsafe.

Has anyone else experienced estrangement where the issue wasn't one dramatic event, but a lifetime pattern of not being believed, not being listened to, and not being allowed full autonomy?

How did you learn to trust your own judgment after years of doubting it?

I'm estranged from my mother and father. It's the right choice, I think, but I also realize that the reasons for my estrangement are not as severe as others on here (but severe enough.)

Long story short, my Mom genuinely cares for me. She's actively supporting me (even providing me with rent money during a rough patch in my life, with the expectation, but not the obligation, to pay it back.)

I went no-contact for a full year. We've started talking more often but I don't share details about my life with her. Only the logistics of how I'm surviving (barely).

My mom, I think, honestly doesn't want to hurt me. But she also doesn't want to examine that she is hurting me; that she thinks she's doing the right thing and that it's my reactions to what she does that are wrong, not the actions themselves.

There's also a huge amount of epistemic gaslighting. It's almost as if "If Kerry thought of it, it's wrong." Even the estrangement, I think, she thinks is just a temper tantrum -- and that I'll come to my senses eventually.

What that means is that I don't think that me trying to explain why I'm estranged from her (and I don't think she even really knows... or tried self-reflection to figure it out) will bear fruit if it comes from me.

BUT! I also know Mom is not unreasonable. So I thought: I'll get a psychologist to do a zoom meeting. Like a couples councilor. That way, when mom says: "It didn't happen like that," or "You're exaggerating," there's an independent third party in the room to say: "No, these are rational concerns, not overeactions," and "Whether or not you believe these feelings are rational is irrelevant to the idea that they were deeply felt." and "Kerry did come to you and say this, but felt that you didn't listen to what she was saying at the time, and didn't try to understand her perspective."

Because I think my mom and I can have a relationship.

So the question is now logistics. How can I find a psychologist or therapist willing to do a zoom call between me and Mom, that is LGBTQ+ friendly, and is willing to work between the US (where she's based) and Ireland (where I'm based?)

Hello. The auto-spell check works great for me, but I'm wondering if there's a way to do a "manual" spell check, one that goes through each misspelled word in the document.

Don't get me wrong, most people won't need this, but I'm specifically someone born and raised in the U.S. writing for an Irish-English & UK-English audience, and some American-spelled words look perfectly normal to me, so my eyes glaze over the little red squiggle, only to later realize/realise I've made an error.

For various reasons, I'm trying not to use AI features. Just a personal choice.

Yeah, uh, just in case anyone's wondering, this post isn't AI slop spam. I wrote this. Like, all of this. Even the — marks, I use em-dashes and en-dashes and hyphens and stuff, so I set that up with AutoHotKey so that ctrl+alt + hyphen = em-dash, and control + hyphen = en-dash.

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Hi all,

My name is Kerry Ann, I'm a screenwriter who is A.B.D. on an M.A. Screenwriting programme at the Irish National Film School.

I’m looking for beta readers for my completed neon-noir novel (88k words), which I've also adapted to a TV pilot. In the pitch deck, I've given it the comp line of: "Fargo meets True Detective in Las Vegas... with vampires."

If that seems like something that might be up your alley, I'd love to get feedback. DM me and I'll send you the PDF for the full manuscript.

I'm looking for:

• Pacing and structure (does the mystery hold up?)
• Character voice and development (especially the protagonist and key relationships)
• Clarity of the supernatural rules/worldbuilding
• Anything that confused you, dragged, or didn’t land

If you decide to start reading it and stop, please let me know where you stopped, and why -- that'll help me figure out where it's dragging.

Here's the one-page pitch, modified for the novel version:

>This Is Bat Country is a neon-noir drama about modern vampires surviving inside the margins of off-strip, working class Las Vegas while a series of killings threatens their exposure.

>The tone is noir first, black comedy second. Humor comes from desperation and gallows survival instincts, never punchlines. And just because something is ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. The comedy sharpens the horror rather than undercutting it.

>CALEB TRYST, a Gen-X vampire, PI-wannabe, film buff, and general disaster, survives on the fringe of Vegas with nothing but guile, petty theft, and a tortured conscience.

>Caleb can read people quickly and talk his way out of situations he has no business surviving, but is also impulsive and self-sabotaging, pushing away even the people trying to help him. Caleb avoids intimacy by turning everything into a case — including his own trauma. He wants two things that don’t coexist: to stay hidden and survive, and to learn who turned him into a vampire — and why.

>The setup: A serial killer, is murdering young working-class Vegas women in a precise, escalating pattern. Caleb tries to capture him, but when he escapes, Caleb makes a catastrophic choice: he turns the killer’s dying victim, PATRICIA “PANTS” ANTSEL into a vampire, not to save her life, but to preserve her witness testimony.

>Pants wakes furious, undead, and refusing to be reduced to a body in an evidence file. The only way she gets justice is by working with the vampire who made her this way.

>To stop further deaths and protect the vampire underground from exposure, they seek help from other vampires, including ANGELINA, Caleb’s ex and a disciplined poker pro, and STELIAN, a “glittering” daylight-capable vampire who can read psychic residue left by the dead. In parallel, homicide detectives RITTER & WILCOX hunt the same killer through conventional police work, steadily closing in on Caleb and the vampire community without knowing vampires exist.

>As the investigation deepens, Caleb realizes Joshua is not acting alone. Each lead pulls him closer to the truth that his own turning was not an accident, but part of a much older conflict — one that predates him, his turning, and Vegas itself.

>Each chapter escalates the cost: the police investigation tightens, the vampire community fractures, and stopping the violence risks exposure while doing nothing guarantees more deaths.

>Even as mysteries are solved, and the truth gets closer, the damage remains. Dignity is optional. Survival isn’t.

>The true monster is the system that feeds on the vulnerable, and the most dangerous bloodsucker is the city itself.

>Instead of focusing on redemption or damnation, it explores harm reduction, endurance, and community as forms of resistance against injustice. It does not demand moral purity of its characters. It accepts moral compromise without romanticizing it.

>Typically in this genre, vampires are metaphors for power or sex. Here, vampirism is being trapped in a body you don’t understand, living under a sun that’s a loaded gun. It’s being bound by rules written without you, in a world that still expects you to obey.

>Bat Country is a queer survival metaphor wearing fangs, blood, and satire, set against the neon machinery of late-capitalist survival.

EXCERPT:

Chapter One

Three Simple Steps

The shopping mall was dead. Caleb felt a kinship.

It stood there like a tombstone to prosperity — back when people had money to waste on mall-brand luxuries and the blind optimism to believe Dippin’ Dots were the ice cream of the future.

The parking lot wasn’t any livelier. Cracked asphalt. Flickering sodium lights. Empty spaces stretching into the dark. The kind of place where a scream could echo for a mile and not earn so much as a glance.

Dying mall parking lots are surprisingly conducive to grisly knife murder. 

That’s the thing with crime scenes — location, location, location. 

He’d been on the case for a month now — ever since the first murder, when he recognised the M.O. So he watched. Waited. Narrowed down where the killer was likely to strike next.

It all led him here.

After all, Caleb knew how a killer thinks.

He rolled his shoulders and adjusted the sleeves of his denim jacket — old, faded, frayed. He checked his syringe of ketamine in his jacket pocket. Sterile and ready.

The plan was simple: find the guy, sneak up on him, jab the neck, end it quick. No fuss.

It went to hell immediately.

Caleb had wedged himself under what he thought was a dead parking-lot streetlamp — until the halogen snapped awake like God hitting a light switch to personally screw him over. Sickly yellow flooded over him. His cover was blown.

For one long, stupid heartbeat, they just stared — the killer in blood-splattered dad drag, khakis and a red polo; Caleb in thrift-store couture — both realising things were about to get ugly.

The killer was faster and stronger than he looked. The suburban camouflage hid something sharp, practised, and wrong.

Still, Caleb had one advantage.

He was dead. 

When Discount Dexter threw a punch, Caleb caught it mid-air, bared his fangs, hissed, then slammed him into his faded red minivan.

“Yeah.” Caleb let his frustration show. “Vampire. Didn’t want to bury the lede. Stay still and this’ll be over quickly.”

It wasn’t over quickly.

Because the murderer did exactly what Caleb should have expected when confronted with proof positive of the supernatural in the form of a nightmare bloodsucking creature.

He screamed. 

Straight into Caleb’s face.

And the scream stopped Caleb dead. Not out of fear. Not out of pity. Disgust. 

Garlic breath. 

Caleb doubled over, coughing.

“Seriously?” he wheezed.

His own personal kryptonite. His vampire strength left his body, his brain started skipping grooves, and the smell! Dear god! Like a dead fish left in Satan’s humidifier.

The killer popped him across the jaw. Normally Caleb would shrug it off, but with lungs full of garlic, he reeled. The syringe he had prepared flew out of his pocket, skittered across the asphalt.

The blood-soaked man ran for the van’s driver’s seat.

Caleb was going to lose him… because the bastard had weaponised Olive Garden.

As the murderer fumbled with the ignition, flooding the engine, Caleb realised he didn’t have long. He looked around for his syringe among the broken glass and rainbow-slick oil on the ground.

And then he heard it.

A faint moan of pain came from inside the van.

Caleb froze.

The killer’s victim was still alive.

Caleb pushed through the garlic pain and rounded to the rear. The doors weren’t locked, and he flung them open.

A young woman lay crumpled inside, barely conscious. Matted raven-black hair. A face carved in angles, like she’d been sketched in quick strokes by an artist who liked straight lines more than curves. Even half-dead and drenched in her own blood, there was something sharp in her profile. A kind of instinctive alertness, even in unconsciousness.

She wore jeans, a faded Alice Cooper T-shirt, mismatched socks, and most of her own blood.

The smell was sharp and metallic—familiar, of course—beneath the faint, homey haze of fabric softener and cheap shampoo. 

She needed a miracle. 

She got a monster. 

Caleb scooped her up—fast, but careful. He was used to blood. Just not like this.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me!”

He listened to the rattle in her lungs, saw the breaths getting shorter, weaker. Then, with a sigh that sounded too tired for his age:

“Oh, you are absolutely not staying with me, are you? I gave you one simple instruction…”

With her last dying strength, the woman in Caleb’s arms reached up, extended her arm, and showed him her middle finger. She collapsed, unconscious, eyes open.

So there he was: standing in a dead department store parking lot, a dying girl in his arms, a killer escaping in a van.

Not the best start to a Sunday.

The van sputtered, then roared to life. Caleb had no time left to think. He had to decide what he was going to do. Now.

There was a version of this where he walked away.

And there was the other, desperate play. A line he swore he would never cross. And once he did… he could no longer tell himself that he wasn’t truly a monster.

But he needed answers.

He needed answers more than he needed a clear conscience.

“Oh, Angelina’s gonna kill me,” he muttered. “And if she doesn’t? She probably should.”

He tried to hold onto that thought. If he held onto that thought, maybe he wouldn’t go through with it.

He didn’t know if he could live with what he was about to do.

But he knew he couldn’t live without knowing why.

He lowered his mouth to the girl’s neck, fangs sliding in. What remained of her blood trickled into him, heartbeat hammering—then slowing.

He pulled back, bit into his own wrist. Dark blood welled up.

He pressed it to her lips. Reflex took over. She swallowed.

Making a vampire isn’t rocket science. Just three simple steps.

>Step 1: Drain the victim dry.

>Step 2: Give a little back.

>Step 3: Learn to live with yourself afterwards. 

Caleb had never really gotten the hang of step three.

The girl’s head lolled, upside down. The last thing she saw before death was the van’s license plate and its red tail lights vanishing into the night.

That was the moment that Caleb stopped pretending that this would end well.

As for the killer?

After he saw Caleb doing something with the woman he had just stabbed in the rear view mirror, he burned rubber, screeching onto the highway access road wide eyed and panicked. He muttered to himself: “Vampires… Vampires?”

“They’re real?”

***

Detective Peter Wilcox adjusted his tie. His badge was clipped, his shirt lined up with his belt buckle and trousers, his tie was a perfect Prince Albert knot, pants pressed, and he even had a haircut recently.

That was because he had a Grindr date that night. But the date stood him up. Catfished, possibly. By the restaurant. A fake profile, ChatGPT to flirt back to you, and when the twunk you were promised doesn’t show, well… you arrived hungry, didn’t you?

He would have made a bigger deal of it, but dispatch called him and alerted him to a homicide.

By the time he got there, the crime scene had already been roped off. Beat cops and CSI were everywhere and it was flooded with portable lights. One of the techs handed him gloves, a mask, shoe coverings and a hair net — and showed a blood-stained Nevada driver’s license inside an evidence bag. It read “Patricia Antsel.”

He sighed. Poor girl.

Oh well. This was his night now.

Wilcox crouched over the body, looking it over with his high-powered tactical flashlight. Antsel lay there, dead.

A moment of silence for the deceased. Then he had a job to do. He took out his digital voice recorder.

“Victim is Patricia Antsel. Female. Twenty-four. Multiple stab wounds.” He looked at the corpse’s arms. “Defensive injuries on the arms and right hand. She fought. Good.”

Wilcox could tell already… if her killer got away, it was going to sting.

So. No shortcuts. By the book. Don’t give a defense attorney a single handhold.

He looked at the wound patterns, shifting position. Studying them.

“Clustered,” he said into his recorder. “Same placement. Same depth… but… with hesitation?” He looked at the marks — then traced the air above the wounds, re-enacting, without touching the body. “Yeah. That’s hesitation. It stops. Starts again. Same spot. Didn’t drift.”

He stood up. The body wasn’t going anywhere but the morgue. The coroner could give him more information later. He focused his attention on the scene itself.

It was hard to make out, but he spotted it. Shoe scuff marks. Shoe prints going toward and away from the tire tracks. Not a clean grab-and-go.

That was new.

He gestured for the tech with the camera. “Photo. With flash.” The tech laid down a couple of numbered tents and took the photos from multiple angles. But Wilcox had already moved on.

He nearly missed it. But there was a glint in a crack in the asphalt when his flashlight passed. He moved closer.

In the crack, a syringe. Needle cap still on. Filled with some sort of liquid.

He stopped. Didn’t touch it. Just studied it. “Photo and bag that,” he finally said, pointing at the syringe.

That was out of place. If this was the same killer as the other two, there was no evidence he drugged his victims before.

It puzzled him. “A second actor?” he muttered to himself. “An accomplice?”

He looked back to the scuff marks. “An interruption?”

He placed a hand on the tech’s shoulder, stopping him. “It’s standard, but at the morgue, first thing you do is get a blood draw on the victim. Find out if there’s anything in her system. And run it to the lab immediately.”

Wilcox continued looking around, making sure he didn’t miss anything. Then, he called over the cadaver team, who zipped up Patricia Antsel, age twenty-four, into a body bag, then carted her away to the morgue.

Hi all,

My name is Kerry Ann, I'm a screenwriter who is A.B.D. on an M.A. Screenwriting programme at the Irish National Film School.

I’m looking for beta readers for my completed neon-noir novel (88k words), which I've also adapted to a TV pilot. In the pitch deck, I've given it the comp line of: "Fargo meets True Detective in Las Vegas... with vampires."

If that seems like something that might be up your alley, I'd love to get feedback.

I'm looking for:

• Pacing and structure (does the mystery hold up?)
• Character voice and development (especially the protagonist and key relationships)
• Clarity of the supernatural rules/worldbuilding
• Anything that confused you, dragged, or didn’t land

If you decide to start reading it and stop, please let me know where you stopped, and why -- that'll help me figure out where it's dragging.

Here's the one-page pitch, modified for the novel version:

>This Is Bat Country is a neon-noir drama about modern vampires surviving inside the margins of off-strip, working class Las Vegas while a series of killings threatens their exposure.

>The tone is noir first, black comedy second. Humor comes from desperation and gallows survival instincts, never punchlines. And just because something is ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. The comedy sharpens the horror rather than undercutting it.

>CALEB TRYST, a Gen-X vampire, PI-wannabe, film buff, and general disaster, survives on the fringe of Vegas with nothing but guile, petty theft, and a tortured conscience.

>Caleb can read people quickly and talk his way out of situations he has no business surviving, but is also impulsive and self-sabotaging, pushing away even the people trying to help him. Caleb avoids intimacy by turning everything into a case — including his own trauma. He wants two things that don’t coexist: to stay hidden and survive, and to learn who turned him into a vampire — and why.

>The setup: A serial killer, is murdering young working-class Vegas women in a precise, escalating pattern. Caleb tries to capture him, but when he escapes, Caleb makes a catastrophic choice: he turns the killer’s dying victim, PATRICIA “PANTS” ANTSEL into a vampire, not to save her life, but to preserve her witness testimony.

>Pants wakes furious, undead, and refusing to be reduced to a body in an evidence file. The only way she gets justice is by working with the vampire who made her this way.

>To stop further deaths and protect the vampire underground from exposure, they seek help from other vampires, including ANGELINA, Caleb’s ex and a disciplined poker pro, and STELIAN, a “glittering” daylight-capable vampire who can read psychic residue left by the dead. In parallel, homicide detectives RITTER & WILCOX hunt the same killer through conventional police work, steadily closing in on Caleb and the vampire community without knowing vampires exist.

>As the investigation deepens, Caleb realizes Joshua is not acting alone. Each lead pulls him closer to the truth that his own turning was not an accident, but part of a much older conflict — one that predates him, his turning, and Vegas itself.

>Each chapter escalates the cost: the police investigation tightens, the vampire community fractures, and stopping the violence risks exposure while doing nothing guarantees more deaths.

>Even as mysteries are solved, and the truth gets closer, the damage remains. Dignity is optional. Survival isn’t.

>The true monster is the system that feeds on the vulnerable, and the most dangerous bloodsucker is the city itself.

>Instead of focusing on redemption or damnation, it explores harm reduction, endurance, and community as forms of resistance against injustice. It does not demand moral purity of its characters. It accepts moral compromise without romanticizing it.

>Typically in this genre, vampires are metaphors for power or sex. Here, vampirism is being trapped in a body you don’t understand, living under a sun that’s a loaded gun. It’s being bound by rules written without you, in a world that still expects you to obey.

>Bat Country is a queer survival metaphor wearing fangs, blood, and satire, set against the neon machinery of late-capitalist survival.

EXCERPT:

Chapter One

Three Simple Steps

The shopping mall was dead. Caleb felt a kinship.

It stood there like a tombstone to prosperity — back when people had money to waste on mall-brand luxuries and the blind optimism to believe Dippin’ Dots were the ice cream of the future.

The parking lot wasn’t any livelier. Cracked asphalt. Flickering sodium lights. Empty spaces stretching into the dark. The kind of place where a scream could echo for a mile and not earn so much as a glance.

Dying mall parking lots are surprisingly conducive to grisly knife murder. 

That’s the thing with crime scenes — location, location, location. 

He’d been on the case for a month now — ever since the first murder, when he recognised the M.O. So he watched. Waited. Narrowed down where the killer was likely to strike next.

It all led him here.

After all, Caleb knew how a killer thinks.

He rolled his shoulders and adjusted the sleeves of his denim jacket — old, faded, frayed. He checked his syringe of ketamine in his jacket pocket. Sterile and ready.

The plan was simple: find the guy, sneak up on him, jab the neck, end it quick. No fuss.

It went to hell immediately.

Caleb had wedged himself under what he thought was a dead parking-lot streetlamp — until the halogen snapped awake like God hitting a light switch to personally screw him over. Sickly yellow flooded over him. His cover was blown.

For one long, stupid heartbeat, they just stared — the killer in blood-splattered dad drag, khakis and a red polo; Caleb in thrift-store couture — both realising things were about to get ugly.

The killer was faster and stronger than he looked. The suburban camouflage hid something sharp, practised, and wrong.

Still, Caleb had one advantage.

He was dead. 

When Discount Dexter threw a punch, Caleb caught it mid-air, bared his fangs, hissed, then slammed him into his faded red minivan.

“Yeah.” Caleb let his frustration show. “Vampire. Didn’t want to bury the lede. Stay still and this’ll be over quickly.”

It wasn’t over quickly.

Because the murderer did exactly what Caleb should have expected when confronted with proof positive of the supernatural in the form of a nightmare bloodsucking creature.

He screamed. 

Straight into Caleb’s face.

And the scream stopped Caleb dead. Not out of fear. Not out of pity. Disgust. 

Garlic breath. 

Caleb doubled over, coughing.

“Seriously?” he wheezed.

His own personal kryptonite. His vampire strength left his body, his brain started skipping grooves, and the smell! Dear god! Like a dead fish left in Satan’s humidifier.

The killer popped him across the jaw. Normally Caleb would shrug it off, but with lungs full of garlic, he reeled. The syringe he had prepared flew out of his pocket, skittered across the asphalt.

The blood-soaked man ran for the van’s driver’s seat.

Caleb was going to lose him… because the bastard had weaponised Olive Garden.

As the murderer fumbled with the ignition, flooding the engine, Caleb realised he didn’t have long. He looked around for his syringe among the broken glass and rainbow-slick oil on the ground.

And then he heard it.

A faint moan of pain came from inside the van.

Caleb froze.

The killer’s victim was still alive.

Caleb pushed through the garlic pain and rounded to the rear. The doors weren’t locked, and he flung them open.

A young woman lay crumpled inside, barely conscious. Matted raven-black hair. A face carved in angles, like she’d been sketched in quick strokes by an artist who liked straight lines more than curves. Even half-dead and drenched in her own blood, there was something sharp in her profile. A kind of instinctive alertness, even in unconsciousness.

She wore jeans, a faded Alice Cooper T-shirt, mismatched socks, and most of her own blood.

The smell was sharp and metallic—familiar, of course—beneath the faint, homey haze of fabric softener and cheap shampoo. 

She needed a miracle. 

She got a monster. 

Caleb scooped her up—fast, but careful. He was used to blood. Just not like this.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me!”

He listened to the rattle in her lungs, saw the breaths getting shorter, weaker. Then, with a sigh that sounded too tired for his age:

“Oh, you are absolutely not staying with me, are you? I gave you one simple instruction…”

With her last dying strength, the woman in Caleb’s arms reached up, extended her arm, and showed him her middle finger. She collapsed, unconscious, eyes open.

So there he was: standing in a dead department store parking lot, a dying girl in his arms, a killer escaping in a van.

Not the best start to a Sunday.

The van sputtered, then roared to life. Caleb had no time left to think. He had to decide what he was going to do. Now.

There was a version of this where he walked away.

And there was the other, desperate play. A line he swore he would never cross. And once he did… he could no longer tell himself that he wasn’t truly a monster.

But he needed answers.

He needed answers more than he needed a clear conscience.

“Oh, Angelina’s gonna kill me,” he muttered. “And if she doesn’t? She probably should.”

He tried to hold onto that thought. If he held onto that thought, maybe he wouldn’t go through with it.

He didn’t know if he could live with what he was about to do.

But he knew he couldn’t live without knowing why.

He lowered his mouth to the girl’s neck, fangs sliding in. What remained of her blood trickled into him, heartbeat hammering—then slowing.

He pulled back, bit into his own wrist. Dark blood welled up.

He pressed it to her lips. Reflex took over. She swallowed.

Making a vampire isn’t rocket science. Just three simple steps.

>Step 1: Drain the victim dry.

>Step 2: Give a little back.

>Step 3: Learn to live with yourself afterwards. 

Caleb had never really gotten the hang of step three.

The girl’s head lolled, upside down. The last thing she saw before death was the van’s license plate and its red tail lights vanishing into the night.

That was the moment that Caleb stopped pretending that this would end well.

As for the killer?

After he saw Caleb doing something with the woman he had just stabbed in the rear view mirror, he burned rubber, screeching onto the highway access road wide eyed and panicked. He muttered to himself: “Vampires… Vampires?”

“They’re real?”

***

Detective Peter Wilcox adjusted his tie. His badge was clipped, his shirt lined up with his belt buckle and trousers, his tie was a perfect Prince Albert knot, pants pressed, and he even had a haircut recently.

That was because he had a Grindr date that night. But the date stood him up. Catfished, possibly. By the restaurant. A fake profile, ChatGPT to flirt back to you, and when the twunk you were promised doesn’t show, well… you arrived hungry, didn’t you?

He would have made a bigger deal of it, but dispatch called him and alerted him to a homicide.

By the time he got there, the crime scene had already been roped off. Beat cops and CSI were everywhere and it was flooded with portable lights. One of the techs handed him gloves, a mask, shoe coverings and a hair net — and showed a blood-stained Nevada driver’s license inside an evidence bag. It read “Patricia Antsel.”

He sighed. Poor girl.

Oh well. This was his night now.

Wilcox crouched over the body, looking it over with his high-powered tactical flashlight. Antsel lay there, dead.

A moment of silence for the deceased. Then he had a job to do. He took out his digital voice recorder.

“Victim is Patricia Antsel. Female. Twenty-four. Multiple stab wounds.” He looked at the corpse’s arms. “Defensive injuries on the arms and right hand. She fought. Good.”

Wilcox could tell already… if her killer got away, it was going to sting.

So. No shortcuts. By the book. Don’t give a defense attorney a single handhold.

He looked at the wound patterns, shifting position. Studying them.

“Clustered,” he said into his recorder. “Same placement. Same depth… but… with hesitation?” He looked at the marks — then traced the air above the wounds, re-enacting, without touching the body. “Yeah. That’s hesitation. It stops. Starts again. Same spot. Didn’t drift.”

He stood up. The body wasn’t going anywhere but the morgue. The coroner could give him more information later. He focused his attention on the scene itself.

It was hard to make out, but he spotted it. Shoe scuff marks. Shoe prints going toward and away from the van. Not a clean grab-and-go.

That was new.

He gestured for the tech with the camera. “Photo. With flash.” The tech laid down a couple of numbered tents and took the photos from multiple angles. But Wilcox had already moved on.

He nearly missed it. But there was a glint in a crack in the asphalt when his flashlight passed. He moved closer.

In the crack, a syringe. Needle cap still on. Filled with some sort of liquid.

He stopped. Didn’t touch it. Just studied it. “Photo and bag that,” he finally said, pointing at the syringe.

That was out of place. If this was the same killer as the other two, there was no evidence he drugged his victims before.

It puzzled him. “A second actor?” he muttered to himself. “An accomplice?”

He looked back to the scuff marks. “An interruption?”

He placed a hand on the tech’s shoulder, stopping him. “It’s standard, but at the morgue, first thing you do is get a blood draw on the victim. Find out if there’s anything in her system. And run it to the lab immediately.”

Wilcox continued looking around, making sure he didn’t miss anything. Then, he called over the cadaver team, who zipped up Patricia Antsel, age twenty-four, into a body bag, then carted her away to the morgue.