Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Sinkholes in Time

A sinkhole is the only term I can come up with when I think of why I haven't written anything in over a year. Just this gaping wide chasm, a parabola of the horizon's fading light skirting around the far edge, deep and dark as it gets. Can't see the bottom. Only my shadow way off against the far wall...

...Sorry. I got lost in that image for a sec. I should clarify: I've BEEN writing - throughout what remained of 2016 - but I just wasn't writing HERE, on this blog. This blog, as I mentioned, is like a sinkhole at the moment, and I gotta start filling it up with some content. I plan to do so at least once a month for the rest of 2017. In the meantime, let me at least catch us all up to speed with the writing that kept me busy for the rest of 2016.

I WROTE A NOVEL! Like, a WHOLE novel.
The first draft comes in at just around 210,000 words. It's hard for me to believe that I really strung that many together into a cohesive story, that I really had it in me to do that. But I did, and I do. When times get dark, at least I'll always have this accomplishment to look back at to brighten up my day.

The book is called "The Animal in Man", and you can check it out for yourself over at Inkshares.com. In addition to writing the actual novel, I always scribbled out a dozen reader updates along the way, some of which featured some amazing character concept art. It's all on the book's project page. Go look and see!

But wait, don't leave just yet. Let me ask you "Have you ever heard of Hotline Miami?" Yeah, I hadn't heard of it either until just after putting Bloodborne down in mid-2015 (which was very, very hard for me to do, and still very much is). The first time I decided to pick up Hotline Miami, I entered a kind of warp that instantly shot me forward through time, maybe two whole months, right up until the next time in my life I could actually blink my eyes. ...I'm trying to creatively express how that video game held my every waking thought hostage. And it wasn't just the frenetic gameplay or the pulsing soundtrack - though those certainly helped the hypnosis. No, it was the STORY. Or rather, the LACK of story. There were so many fascinating pieces of the narrative puzzle, but no way to see how they all came together.

Well... I decided to fill them in. I put down the gamepad and picked up a pen and between the months of May to about August, 2015, I wrote a 100-something page screenplay based on Hotline Miami. Personally, I think I did a fantastic job of capturing the game's themes and atmosphere. I had a blast depicting the gratuitous violence - and yet I worked within the constraints of the screenplay format, which ruthlessly calls for a concise writing style. I'd urge you to check it out on my portfolio site if you haven't done so already.

I've been busy, it seems, everywhere else except for this blog. I plan to stay busy, and to extend some of my work back here. So please follow my blog here, look me up on facebook, inkshares, goodreadslinkedin, or send me an email.