A script isn't just something that appears on page (or screen) in it's finished form instantaneously. There is a lot of work that goes into it from the very beginning point when the original idea starts to when you, the humble reader, is reading the finished item. I have written a short history of this script and it will get updated as the history is written.

	5th February 1998 This is the reason why the re-write took so long. I've spent more time writing this bloody web-page than I have writing the thing. I redesigned the site over Christmas and like the new look which features a groovy version of the Alien poster.
	2nd February 1998 I finally finish the re-write! I never thought it would happen, but it did and I am well chuffed. The re-write is miles better than the first draft, it feels more like one film than two films joined together. I introduce a number of new characters, including; The slightly retarded Homicide Detective Vincent, the new boyfriend for Annalee - St James (a little wink and nudge to Joss Whedon there), two scientists who work for IE and are called Bannon and Shusett (another wink and nudge to the respective writers of Alien). The screenplay feels much better, not perfect, but better. I however, know that this screenplay will be conceived as worse by some members of the Alien fan community. "You removed the marines!" I will hear them cry, frankly my dear I don't give a damn.
	Very Late 1997 The site is starting to really get some circulation and is looking good. Before I left for Christmas the counter was at 400-something which quite impressed me. I had a number of comments in my guestbook and made a pledge to myself that I would respond to each of them. Unfortunately the University tightened up on Internet access and so restricted the time I could spend on-line. That is why this site isn't updated as regularly as I'd like. I was starting to show my dedication to this site when I got up early in the Christmas holidays and travelled into Uni to update the site.
	29 November 1997 I start on the re-write of Alien Home. There are some good bits in the first draft, but I felt that the second half of the script was frankly poor. I only meant the marines to have a small part, but they took over and I ended up with an Aliens re-make. For the re-write I simply deleted everything from about half-way through onwards and started again. I did change one or two bits of the first half, I removed the stupid company men who think the alien is messiah and I removed the alien leader. The biggest change is that Ripley has now become a good guy. I like to think that there was an intellectual ideology behind the re-write, but it's just luck. Basically what I have done with the re-write is change one scene in the film and then show how this changed matters. The scene I chose was the one between Ellen and Annalee were Ellen tries to force herself on Anna. In the first draft, Anna runs from Ellen and Ellen goes over to the side of the aliens. Anna runs back to her boy-friend Adams who unfortunately doesn't last very long. In the re-write Anna helps Ellen and Ellen is saved from herself and going over to the aliens. This has catastrophic effects on the rest of the script, but Adams still gets it.
	28 November 1997 Alien:Resurrection opens in the UK and like the sucker that I am, I run along to see it after Uni. If you don't already know my opinion of the film then please read my rant in the author section about it. I received more E-Mail on the subject of this one statement than I have about the script. Suffice to say that I didn't like it, I can't say if it's because it was a bad film or because I had too high expectations. The exact same thing had happened in March with Star Wars which I had looked forward to for months and when I finally saw it I was disappointed (Return of the Jedi was far better). All over the globe the same situation was occurring, the fourth film tore the fans apart straight down the middle, some liked it, some didn't. In the critic's views it was the same, Brit SF mag SFX gave it a good mark (but later changed their mind), but Empire hated it. The film still made a lot of money and that is why the films are still being made. The poor quality of the film spurs me on harder into getting my script seen as I know that I could easily have done better (and you're so modest with it!). I hear from various sources that the fifth alien film will be written and filmed as soon as possible and that the fourth film was altered to make a fifth easier. This spurs me on again and gives me a deadline. I later read that Joss Whedon has submitted another script for Alien 5 and that Fox are reading it. The git! You've already got loads of films under your belt, let somebody else have a piece of the pie. The film couldn't be finished before late 1999 anyway so I didn't really worry that much.
	17 November 1997 I received my first piece of fan mail! Well, not really fan mail, just somebody E-Mailling me to tell me they liked the script. This was probably the first E-Mail I had received that wasn't from an automated source and so I was plenty chuffed. That person was Charles Cole, the creator of the Pray for the Prey site telling me that he was linking to my site and liked it so much he was giving me 3 skulls out of 5. 3 whole skulls! I guess it's better than 2 or 1 or even none. Stop complaining John! That was very kind, especially as the way my site is spelt it means that I always come near the top of his links list.
	20 October 1997 This is, as close as I can guess, the opening day of the Alien Home Script page, using Geocities free 2Mb of space offer. I had just finished the script and so actually had something to put on the page. It was a very bare page at the time and just had the finished script and some other rubbish made to look like it was a really big site. I didn't have the Geocities Guestbook set-up (it was originally an L-Page guestbook) and there was very little content. This was very good because only three people visited in the space of two weeks. That's an understatement of course, but very few people visited. It took me a while to figure out that people had to know about my site before they would visit. I got myself on the Aliens Ring and any other Ring that would have me and sat and waited for the counter to ring through those hundreds. I eventually gave up on getting a mention in Yahoo, after the second week and no reply from them I told them were they could stuff there search engine.
	8 October 1997 This is the date I read the Alien:Resurrection script that was circulating the net. I like the script, I don't love it, but it's quite good. I'd never heard of Joss Whedon at this point but I recently saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have to say that it was quite good (I'm a sucker for a good vampire movie). One character I did like was a certain Annalee Call, I knew she was being played by Winona Ryder and just thought it would be cool to have Winona Ryder in an Alien film. The fact that she's the most gorgeous thing on the planet Earth had nothing to do with it. Publicity shots from the new film were available and I liked the look, the former Director of Photography from Seven (or Se7en, I never know) was working on the film, so things had to bode well.
	22 September 1997 This isn't really anything to do with the script. This is the date that I started University, so why have I included it? Well because this was were I got my first tastes for the internet. All my internet access is provided free by the university (for academic usage, HA! HA!). I was just a surfer like every other shmo at this point, but noticed that various companies gave away free web space and thought it would be cool to have my own web page.
	14 September 1997 I should have realised by now that changing a nearly year old script was not going to help. The only thing I could do was start the script all over again. A complete re-write. This re-write became the first draft for Alien Home. I still didn't have the name yet, that was proving the difficult part. I tried to come up with an original name and something that was thought-provoking, not just blatantly obvious (Aliens - There are lots of Aliens, Alien:Resurrection - Somebody comes back from the grave, these aren't exactly brilliant titles). The writing continued without any characters from the Aliens mythology so no Ellen Ripley. Also, as I wrote this script I found that Ellison and Straczynski wrote themselves and started coming to the fore. I also came up with the idea for having the giant, exoskeleton robots in the film. I had just seen Patlabor the movie and loved the robots in that film, although they are more like giants. I thought that these robots would look cool on the big screen and was amazed in this day and age of Computer Graphics on-screen that nobody had done it before.
	Mid 1997 Alien:Resurrection was drawing near and I was getting into the spirit of things by reading through my old Alien 4 script. My writing had come on in leaps and bounds since I wrote this and I was really quite surprised. There was however still untapped potential in this script and I thought that maybe I could change a couple of bits and it could become Alien 5. I still didn't know what was going to happen in Alien:Resurrection so I thought that the best bet was to write a stand-alone piece which had no links to any piece of Alien chronology. What this meant was removing Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Morse. Unfortunately the script was pretty bare without them, it was also getting harder to change this script. I gave up on this and after reading a competition in Empire (class English film mag) for readers to send in their ideas for sequels to classic films I thought I'd just write a synopsis. I still couldn't decide on what would happen at the end (still a problem I have today) and the synopsis sort of fell flat. I never sent in my entry to Empire either.
	Late 1996 - Early 1997 The announcement by Twentieth Century Fox that they are making a new Alien film called Alien:Resurrection puts a cramp on my Alien 4. I forget about the story altogether and wait in anticipation for the next in the Alien saga.
	Mid 1996 I began to write the beast. I was only 17 years old and was only 16 when the idea came to me so my writing was frankly abysmal. I couldn't even settle on a name, it was Alien 4 but I didn't like that. It was Alien Apocalypse, Alien Earth, Alien War, More Aliens, Alien Fishmonger, every thing you could think of. The story itself was very different. It featured Ellen Ripley, but after reading another rumour she became half-human, half-alien. Not the nice Hollywood kind but actually looking like an Alien. I also had Newt who had also been cloned and was psychic (don't ask me!) and had a clone of the living bishop mixed with alien DNA as the bad-guy. Morse, the survivor of Alien3 was also in the story as a vagrant. The police characters didn't change that much, Sam and Lane were in the story and were in fact the main characters. Ellison and Straczynski were just little tiny roles and both died very quickly. Although the writing of this script was poor, there were scenes that I rather liked. One scene set in a giant cyber-mall and featured an alien queen was rather good. I also had a rather good Aliens-chase-car bit. The finale of the film was just as depressing as the end of the first draft of Alien Home. It had the evil Bishop launching a new kind of alien spore over the whole planet and infecting every human, turning them into aliens. Everybody died, pretty nice really.
	Early 1996 This was the conception point of a very long birth (still pushing, it won't come out). This was when the original idea for a sequel to Alien3 occurred to me. I had heard that rumours were going round Hollywood for how a sequel to the film could be written, it was all rumour at this point. There were the various stories of Alien3 being a dream planted in Ripley's mind and other such stupid suggestions, of course the one that was finally chosen was the cloning idea, but at the time they were all viable ideas. I clamped onto this idea of cloning and decided to write my own story. The only other idea I had was that it should be on Earth and it should involve the Police.