Herzlich willkommen auf meinem Blog!

That’s German and it means `welcome to my blog.` 

My name is Roland Heep and I’m a German guy living in Germany, so why then am I writing all of this in English?

Well, for the past 25 years, I’ve been enjoying a fairly successful career over here as a TV writer and as much as I love writing crime and action shows as well as the occasional family drama, I’ve always been itching to tell way more fantastic, weird and wonderful stories than the local studios and networks were comfortable making. As, over the years, my efforts to sell a Sci-Fi, horror, fantasy or high adventure script were as futile as resistance to the Borg, I got increasingly frustrated. 

Why was no one interested in the adventures of a teenage Red Riding Hood living in present day Berlin? Why can’t we get an epic movie series about a future Mars off the ground? Or a reboot of the one and only Sci-Fi show Germany ever had? What about a Detective show set in 1895 Hamburg? Or an action film about a group of mercenary’s mission to enter the afterlife to save Berlin from nuclear annihilation? What about a splatter movie set in a demon haunted version of the reality show “Survivor”? Or a teen drama about a girl who wakes up every morning in a slightly different version of reality? 

Well, maybe the answer is as simple as my writing sucks and in more capable hands any of those ideas would’ve turned into a Game of Thrones-style media juggernaut.     

But more capable hands have tried and so far there is still not a single German space opera, fantasy epic (in a country with hundreds of castles and medieval style villages to boot) or superhero show. And the very few Horror movies that come out of Germany are low-to-no budget productions. So maybe something else is going on.

I promise I will go into some of the many reasons why the country that brought you Sci-Fi and Horror classics like “Metropolis” and “The Cabinet of Caligari” at some point developed a strong aversion against anything remotely fantastic in a future blog post (spoiler alert: it was the Führer’s fault). But for now let’s just say, if you live in Germany and want to write a movie featuring exploding spaceships, dragon riding wizards, or demon possessed serial killers, you need to take your ideas somewhere else.

And that’s where this website comes into play. And why I’m writing in English. 

You see, whenever I get frustrated I also get motivated. So at some point I decided to say “Frack you!” to the local gate keepers, focused my local work on the established shows I’ve been writing on for years and funnel my more “out there” projects elsewhere. 

Having grown up on a steady diet of American blockbuster movies and television shows, I have developed a reasonable handle on the English language and with a global market now at arms reach thanks to the internet, it was a logical step to start writing scripts in English.

Of course the international market is also tough to crack but I did sell a big budget Sci-Fi movie script that I had developed with some local Special FX geniuses to an American producer.

In the meantime I’ve worked on many more English language projects that you can find on this website. I’ve also put a lot of energy into my passion for comic books and with the publication of my first project looming, this is the place to get all the latest news and information about “Back to Fairtaylia”. Oh yes, and of course I’m also working on my first novel. 

So without further ado let me thank you for your time. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions, comments or a big check you want to hand me for one of my scripts. And be sure to check back regularly for new blog posts and news about my projects.

But before you go there’s one last but important thing: 

This is my personal website, so of course I’m talking about myself. A lot. ☺ However since the start of my career I’ve been mostly writing with writing partners. I love teamwork! Hangin’ out in a writers’ room (even a virtual one) is first of all way less boring than sitting in my office all by myself and secondly, two or more brains do have way better ideas than one and as everyone who’s ever have been in a creative partnership knows, there’s also an additional invisible party involved that is as mysterious as it is palpable. Of course I’ll talk about that at some point too. But in my next blog post, I’ll introduce you to my frequent collaborators.

Be seeing you,

Roland