Okay. That's it. I give up.

Over the last few days, I've been trying to sort through the tons of
boxes that have for the most part been sitting in storage for the last
several years to try and find space for all this stuff, and there just
isn't any. The floors are wall-to-wall with boxes, crates, palletes,
you name it, the detritus of decades of making shows and writing comics
and being a pack-rack. It has literally grown to overflow two rental
storage facilities.

I have reached the point best expressed by Oscar Wilde's last words:
"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

There's just no room, and I'm going insane.

So I'm going to have a yard sale.

Now, understand, the majority of this stuff will never leaving my
hands, and for those I have set aside places here at the house...the
statue of the B5 station that sat for five years on the desk of every
commanding officer on B5...the actual prop Book of G'Kar...a number of
props and bits of memorabilia that have honored places here.

But a lot of the rest is going to go out the door, because either that
wallpaper goes, or...well, you get the idea.

It's going to be kind of a JMS retrospective in some ways, because as I
said, this stuff covers decades...from memorabilia and storyboards for
the Ghostbusters, He-Man and Captain Power series, original scripts
from Twilight Zone and Murder, She Wrote...but the bulk of it is B5
stuff.

There are the actual script books I used during production, into which
I shoved the script I was working on, the breakdowns, shooting
schedules, any storyboards that were needed...the whole thing, in one
book per episode, some of which still have my original notations.

There are episodic dailies tapes, with takes and bits not previously
seen anywhere, posters, publicity material, a ton of stuff.

Props from the show, from my personal collection, where I have doubles
or just no place for them anymore.

(One of the things I'm letting go traces back to the pilot. Not sure
if the show would ever actually go, I paid the wardrobe department to
make me a B5 captain's uniform. I know, I know, I'm the ultimate geek,
but there you are. Suffice to say given the passage of time and
calories, there's no way on god's green earth that that uniform is ever
going to fit. Not that I ever wore it past the initial fitting, but
for sure it ain't gonna happen now. So that's on its way out.)

Another prime item is going to be one of two huge original art pieces
that the late Peter Ledger did for me to help sell B5 itself, big,
elaborate paintings, signed by Peter. The one I won't sell is the
first painting of the B5 station itself from the outside; the one I
just don't have room for is the very first visualization/painting of
the Garden area, with the core shuttle, folks floating around, and in
the bar, a fight breaking out between humans and aliens, with an early
version of Garibaldi in the thick of it.

There's caps, and a disco-style prototype of a B5 crew jacket, a few of
the original blue key B5 symbol t-shirts made up before we did the
pilot and given out at a couple of conventions, an assortment of
souvenirs and some truly, truly weird shit, some of which nobody's ever
heard of before, let alone seen.

I'm still holding on to about 75% of the stuff, but the other 25% has
got to go.

So starting sometime probably next week, the week of the 11th, and from
time to time over the next month or so, keep an eye on Ebay. (I'm
playing with the idea of doing this chronologically, from the earliest
stuff to the latter stuff, but I don't know if I'm disciplined enough
for that.) I likely won't put this stuff up every day, only when and
as I think of it. So you may have days pass with nothing, then a day
when four or five items go up. The Ebay user ID is babylon5auctions.
Once I've cleared out enough room to actually see the floor again, the
auctions will stop and that user ID will go away.

Let the games begin.

jms

(Message content copyright (c) 2005
by Synthetic Worlds, Ltd.
Permission to reprint specifically
denied to SFX Magazine)