Clovis, the efforts in CTU don't go unnoticed. In fact, kind of just in general, individual audience members rarely if ever feel the need to tell a performer they did a good job, but if they don't like some tiny thing they throw it in your face. They will only applaud if the
crowd is applauding.
My band has recorded a lot of music and played a lot of shows. Even if we mess up a song at a show, everybody in the room might clap. But post a video or a song we spent a ton of time recording, and we're lucky to get one comment. It's the nature of people. They want a show put on for them, then they want credit for the show.
Anyway, back to CTU. Whether there are original characters or not doesn't affect the quality of your product, you can easily do just as well expanding on existing characters. It just takes understanding. If your audience asks why a character reacted a certain way, and as a writer you did not intend for them to ask, you're doing something wrong. I think your work is great, for what it's worth. I didn't mean to imply anything else.
And skylark, I read some of your Sea of Dreams parody, and it seems to be written in an almost sitcom or "Scary Movie"/"Airplane" sort of style, where almost every line is a joke. As you said, I found it to be hit or miss, but the problem isn't so much the writing, more the format. You do have potential, and I 'd like to challenge you to write something more serious, where the jokes are more of an afterthought. If you do (and you really should, if for no reason other than the fact that it's outside your comfort level) I'm sure you could come up with some really cool stuff. Try it, push yourself and outline a story, then write write write till you hate your keyboard (or pen, which is what I prefer) and write some more. The more you go into uncharted territory, the more ALL of your writing will improve.
One singing lesson helped my guitar playing, as did one drum lesson. You can defeat your boundaries once you see they are only built by you!
