Screenlancer is run by me, Michael Dance, as both a personal blog and a home base linking to all the other places I can be found online. I’m a freelance writer, entertainment journalist, movie critic, web designer and webmaster. I graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in 2007 with a degree in screenwriting, and I still write screenplays and short fiction when I’m not writing for work.
This site has existed since 2003 in some form. First it was just a collection of movie reviews I wrote in my spare time located on an NYU Homepages domain. (The original reviews are miraculously still up there, but I just read through a few, and now I’m suddenly unwilling to tell you the URLs.) It was called “Home of the Movie Freak” and went through not one, but two iterations designed on Microsoft Word.
After I came to my senses and realized I shouldn’t be designing websites using Microsoft Word, I taught myself enough HTML to code a site myself and renamed it “Stranded in Manhattan” in 2004.
After I came to my senses again, and realized how cumbersome it was to edit static HTML files every time you want to update your site, I switched to Blogger (and got my own domain) in 2006. It was around that time I started writing movie reviews for TheCinemaSource, so I re-purposed the site as a blog that linked to my reviews and had lots of meandering posts about the show Lost.
In 2008, I moved from New York City to Washington D.C., rendering “Stranded in Manhattan” incorrect. That coincided with a realization that WordPress was better than Blogger, so I switched to WordPress, renamed the site “Screenlancer” (because I write about movies, get it?) and created a new WordPress theme to use as the design. Alas, it was my first try at a WordPress theme (I’ve since gotten better) and wasn’t very good. The version you see now uses a theme I found on ForTheLose.org that I tweaked until it fit what I wanted.
And that’s the history of my site. Hey, you asked.
Thanks to all my readers, particularly Ricky, who’s been reading since the beginning and is responsible for 97% of the comments.
