Confession time: I was an anime fan in the early 90s. Back then it was tough to find anime, and watching the stuff was difficult, with 4th generation fansubbed VHS tapes regarded as a major find. Anime was a predominantly male (and Asian) hobby at the time, something that has massively shifted over the last two decades.
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I’ve been plowing through more books of late, scattered across various genres. I’ve made a point of not only bathing in scifi but dipping into different genres that up until now I haven’t tried. My method is simple: when an author of note is mentioned offhand in a podcast as someone worth checking out, I make a point of seeking out a sample of their work. This month, the author in question is Raymond Chandler, and the book is “The Big Sleep.”
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About a year ago, I and my compatriots at Radio Free Skaro were guests at Westercon 66, a science fiction convention held in Sacramento. Westercon and a variety of other “pure” scifi cons tend to skew a little older and more towards things literary rather than out-and-out fandom. That’s obviously not a hard and fast rule, given that I was down there as part of a fan podcast focused on Doctor Who, but it is a noticeable difference from events like Gallifrey or San Diego Comic Con.
The upside of the literary bent of Westercon was that the dealer’s room was filled with books, many of them astonishingly cheap. I bought something like thirty paperbacks for around thirty dollars, and I was able to grab many of the sci-fi and fantasy books (classic and otherwise) that I’d missed as a youth.
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And here it is.
Batman and 3!
I wrote a short story a couple of months ago as an attempt to get into an anthology of Canadian post-apocalyptic fiction. They ended up passing on it, so I’m posting it here for you to read and criticize/comment on. I’m also using the Wattpad embed widget thingy, so if there’s a way to rate it on there or otherwise interact, please do so.
Recently I’ve posted about getting out of making videos and moving more towards writing. Since then I’ve been doing a bunch of writing (you may have seen a couple of whimsical fanfics) but in the warm-up to the Radio Free Skaro live show at Gallifrey One, I put together this little number:
It got such a good response, with people cheering and laughing in the audience and Doctor Who fans saying such nice things about it online, that it’s encouraged me to rethink my previous trepidation towards filmmaking.
But it’s important to note that filmmaking will not be the dominant thing I do. I think the best approach is to tackle creative work in as many mediums as possible; comics, prose, film and audio. Not only will I learn more but it’ll expose my work, for better or for worse, to a wider array of people.
I would like to thank everyone who emailed or commented on how much they liked the video. It really means a lot.
P.S. I can’t take all the credit. The opening “Thames” ident was the work of Mel Siermaczeski.
Thanks to encouragement and support from both fellow fans and other writerly types such as J.M. Frey and Deb Stanish, I’ve kept at it with the fan fiction scribblin’. My newest is Head Cases – Episode 1, a bit of cranial nonsense involving Handles, Davros, the brain of Morbius and a few surprises.
I’m also working on a couple of short screenplays and an original horror-themed short story…and a comic book script and some other ephemera. In other words, I’m keeping busy.
Since I have a day job and occasionally freelance video work on my plate, I have to carve out time for writing, as every writer does. My routine for the foreseeable future is heading home from work, hitting the gym in my building and writing for an hour or two before bed. Glamorous? No. But it does mean I’ll be Getting Things Done.
And speaking of getting things done, in a few days I’ll be heading off to Hawaii for a week to cover a conference for work. I’ll likely be way too tired after a day of blogging, tweeting and shooting video to get any writing done…which is why I intend to spend most of the flight to Maui glued to my new Macbook Air.
After Hawaii, I’m heading to Gallifrey One, the biggest and best Doctor Who convention in North America. I’ll (despite a chronic lack of sleep thanks to a red-eye flight) be one of the three hosts, along withe the mighty Steven Schapansky and Chris Burgess opening the convention with the Radio Free Skaro: Gallifrey Stands live show (technical direction by Chip, the Two Minute Time Lord), followed by a weekend of friends, nerdery and probably a little booze. Then it’s back home to Vancouver and another marathon session of coverage for a big conference in town.
Phew! February is going to be mighty busy. Wish me luck.
I’ve made fun of fan fiction writers for a long time. Mostly this was due to the more extreme behaviours and subject matter tackled at the edge of the hobby, but I realize now it might have been a defense mechanism on my part as well.
Even though I get paid to write non-fiction for a living, I’ve spent a good long time avoiding writing anything fictional, at least in prose form. If I think about why that is, it probably boils down to fear. I’ve written a few screenplays for short films, but prose is an entirely different beast, and think subconsciously I always regarded fiction writing as the pinnacle, the place i probably wasn’t good enough to even attempt.
The only way to break that cycle is to actually write some fiction, and the easiest entry into that milieu is through fan fiction. Knowing full well I’d probably get called a hypocrite, I pressed on regardless, and put together a little tale involving the Fourth Doctor, Y2K, and homicidal computers.
I published the story, Metal’s Eve, on Archive of Our Own, the leading fan fiction repository. Much to my surprise, nobody has looked askance or raised an eyebrow at me. Instead, just under 200 people (so far) have read the story and I’ve received two “kudos,” which is basically the equivalent of a Facebook like or a favourite button.
In fact writing this fanfic has been enormously encouraging, and I’ve been writing original stories and submitting them to various anthologies, as well as trying my hand at comic book scripting. I’m still interested in filmmaking, but the older I get, the less appealing it is to tackle every single aspect of the production process. Comics, by contrast, only need a writer, a penciller, an inker, a letterer and maybe a colourist. Prose only requires the writer, and that’s probably the direction I’m going in as time goes on.
As stories get rejected or accepted, I’ll post links to them here. Watch this space!
