Payload And Jack Austin Go Antipodean

Growing up, I used to think that poetry was, well, for individuals of questionable sexuality. Things have changed over the last decade and a half. Now that I'm a little older, and hopefully a little wiser, I've come to realise the power of a great poem - and the challenge of crafting a great poem.

My first published poem, 'Payload', a sci-fi themed work revolving around a female Coalition Recon Marine on guard duty of an alien artefact, should be hitting AntipodeanSF #125 mid-October.

Additionally, 'Jack Austin: Xeno-Hunter' will also be appearing in an upcoming edition of AntipodeanSF - tentatively scheduled for Issue #130 in mid-March 2009.

More details when the publish dates get a little closer.

Damn You J.J. Abrams!

A few posts back I mentioned an old screenplay (teleplay) called 'The Mind's Eye' that I had written for an Australian show called Two Twisted... well, I have a funny story about it. Well, it's not that funny, it's damn annoying actually.

I've been working on and off during the last year to adapt 'The Mind's Eye' into a novella - it's taken close to one hundred hours and is somewhere in excess of 15000 words. It's pretty damn close to finished, and it's taken a lot of time and effort. Now as the title of this post alludes to, the bit where J.J. Abrams comes in is the fact that I was flicking through channels the other night and spotted something that looked very familiar. The show was called Fringe, and the scene that looked familiar involved a scientist extracting a death image from the retina of a cadaver using a scientific process that was almost exactly like what I described in my story The Mind's Eye... right down to the multiple flashes into the eye to build an image matrix.

Now I'll admit that the whole idea of extracting the last image a person witnessed before death is not a new idea, but the way it appeared on television looked so much like the technique I had imagined, and put onto the page. It's safe to say that I got pretty annoyed. Thinking you have a fresh idea in this day and age is pretty naive, but to see it realised in front of your eyes is another story.

The questions that now spring to mind are: Will I ever get my work published after this went to air? As soon as someone reads it, are they going to think I lifted it straight from Fringe? Was all that work for nothing?

If you know of anyone that was working for Bryan Brown’s production company, and they are now working on Fringe as a writer, let me know!

Back From The Dead

I've returned... ready and raring to go.

I know that it's been close to four months since my last post, but that doesn't mean that I've been avoiding writing. Truth be told, I haven't written a lot of fiction in that time, but I have been doing something semi-productive. Anyone that knows me well enough would know that I love film - I've always wanted to start a film news/review website, and after a chance encounter with an old mate from university who now runs a few of his own websites, he got me interested in taking the plunge.

I present you with www.youseenthat.com!

Okay, it's pretty basic at this stage, but I plan on working on it some more when I can get some time off. Writing a full SQL/PHP driven website from scratch isn't a five minute job. Just don't expect to find your typical, well-structured reviews on YouSeenThat.com - my reviews are very much stream-of-consciousness. Whatever comes into my head as I tap away on the keyboard. I try to adhere to basic review structure where possible, but they tend to go off the rails at times. I guess that's the fun of writing for your own website... I can write whatever the hell I like.

Anyway, enough of the website plug - I've actually put the website on the backburner for the last few weeks. Instead of writing reviews, I've really tried getting back into reading and writing fiction. At the moment I'm slowly getting through Clive Barker's 'Books of Blood', and I must admit that old Clive has really got me excited about writing short fiction again. When I say 'slowly', I like to read a story in one hit, so it's a matter of finding an uninterrupted hour to polish off one of Clive's amazing stories.

I'd kill for even half the talent of a guy like Barker. Well, kill again.

At the moment I've been getting back into the rhythm of 'the craft' with some flash fiction - under 1000 words in length, for the uninitiated. I've mainly been going through my work folder, pouring over the innumerable half-realised plot ideas salvaged from incomplete stories.

One story that eventuated, Jack Austin: Xeno-Hunter, was spawned from two simple lines of dialogue that popped into my head about a year ago. I ended-up jotting the lines down and saving them in a Word document on the off chance I'd ever use them.

The two lines of dialogue:

“What happened to your last cameraman?”
“Screw that. What the hell happened to your last host?”

Going under the original title of 'ZMB-TV' (Zombie TV), the story was initially going to be about a fast-talking anti-hero who finds himself followed around by a reality TV crew during a zombie apocalypse. Instead, the story ended-up going in more of a Sci-Fi direction. While the opening lines of dialogue are similar, only more fleshed out, the central character is now an Australian alien hunter who is forced to tolerate a reality TV crew in order to pay off a series of lawsuits after a his chain of intergalactic petting zoos went belly-up after an incident with a kid and a carnivorous midget pony... the only problem is that old Jack has a hard time keeping his TV crews alive long enough to get an episode in the can.

I limited myself to 500 words for 'Jack Austin: Xeno-Hunter', mainly to ease myself back in - plus I suspect that the story would have lost a little of its punch if it were any longer than, say, 1000 words.

And how goes the novel? I finished the second draft before I went away to Europe, and I haven't really looked at it since. If I were to be completely honest, I'm going to keep it locked away in the cupboard for another few months, and then look at doing a third draft - I'd like to concentrate on improving my writing before taking another stab at what is a very lengthy and time intensive process. There's nothing wrong with the story structure, the original screenplay was very tight and a great guide for writing a fast-paced novel, I’m just still working on developing my own writing style. I suspect that more reading and writing is the key.

Anyway, I hope that the later half of 2008 will be a little more productive than the half that preceded it. My aim is to double that Publication List of mine by this time next year.