Hi - just posted my first script to The Black List and I'm looking at the reading options they offer but I have a concern. I have written a gay battle epic set in ancient Greece about The Sacred Band of Thebes and their end at Chaeronea - is anyone aware of how readers are matched to scripts?
Apparently you're supposed to face the showerhead.
I face away from it. Back to the water. Always have. Never once questioned it. Just assumed everyone did it that way until approximately twenty minutes ago when I discovered this is apparently a Thing.
Late diagnosed. Suddenly a lifetime of "wait, you don't do it that way?" is making a lot more sense.
Anyone else?
(I also apparently tie my shoes wrong - lol - but so did Einstein!)
His Dogfather isn't very good at taking care of himself so Tux keeps him on track - happy to spend hours asleep on the couch while Daddy writes late into the night - so they can roam fifteen forested acres in the middle of nowhere together.
This week Daddy wrote a screenplay. Tucker held the ground.
Good boy doesn't begin to cover it.
(This was his first full puppy coat - and I just didn't have the heart to get it cut until we absolutely had to!! LOL)
Just submitted my first screenplay to The Black List - a historically accurate gay epic battle film about The Sacred Band of Thebes. 300 warrior-lovers, 38 years undefeated, five love stories threaded through the greatest military brotherhood the ancient world ever produced.
Ends at Chaeronea. Where Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, and Hephaestion stand waiting.
Would genuinely welcome reads from anyone familiar with epic historical material or LGBTQ+ cinema. Happy to reciprocate.
The Sacred Band of Thebes is one of the most extraordinary military units in ancient history - 300 warriors, 150 pairs of male lovers, undefeated for 38 years against the greatest armies the ancient world could field.
Sparta. Athens. Phocis. None of them broke the Sacred Band.
The conventional military explanation focuses on Epaminondas and the oblique formation at Leuctra - hitting the strongest point of the enemy line with concentrated force rather than matching strength for strength. It was revolutionary. It changed warfare permanently.
But that's not why they were unbreakable.
Gorgidas built the Sacred Band on a single idea - that a man will fight harder beside the person he loves than beside a stranger. That Eros and Ares, marching together, produce something neither god can produce alone.
38 years of battlefield evidence suggests he wasn't wrong.
One of the most quietly devastating ironies in ancient military history is that Philip II of Macedon spent his formative years as a hostage in Thebes, training alongside the Sacred Band, learning from Epaminondas directly - and then thirty years later stood on the battlefield at Chaeronea watching every man he'd learned from die in formation rather than break.
He wept. Plutarch records it. A king who had just achieved the defining military victory of his career, weeping over the men his victory had destroyed.
There's a reason the Lion of Chaeronea still stands over their grave.
Curious what this community thinks - is Philip the most conflicted figure in the Sacred Band story? He loved what they were. He built his army on what they taught him. And then he sent an eighteen-year-old general - his son - Alexander to finish them.
