Just When You Thought We'd Forgotten...

Yeah, it has been a long time since there has been news of which to speak of, and this week there are suddenly two things to bring to people's attention.

The first is more immediate, the second is directly relevant to Beast.

The first item...

You may recall it being mentioned here about On Infertile Ground.  It is a documentary about the fertility industry and the effects of infertility on couples who suffer from it.  It is being produced and directed by C.S. John, who was one of the producers on Beast and a number of people involved in Beast has worked on it, or are slated to do work on it before it is done.  It is Infertility Awareness Week and thus this is a hot topic again.  Additionally, two months ago the John family added a pair of twins to their lives.  It was a long and hard fought journey to get to that point and it makes me very happy to welcome those two little girls into the world of two old friends who I've known since high-school.  They all appeared together on Global TV a few days ago to talk about their experience and the documentary.  (As of this writing there is a small issue with the video - there is a false start that lasts about a minute before the video starts for real... perhaps that will be fixed soon and this parenthetical will be rendered pointless.)

The second item...

...Is mostly a tease.  We couldn't move forward on streaming options for Beast until after our contract with SuperChannel expired.  Once that happened it took some time for us to assess the options that were available.  That is now done and we have plans for the fall.  Hopefully before the end of September... but that is not solid as of yet.  I can't really reveal more specific details at this time - in part because they barely exist, and also because there may be other significant events over the summer that should rightfully be revealed first.  So look out for those details yet to come.

'Cause I Just Don't Have Enough to Do....

As mentioned in the last post, I have been considering - obviously for quite some time - writing a book about the experience of creating Beast of Bottomless Lake.

Well the damned idea isn't going away.  I thought that having no actual interest from a publisher would knock the notion out of me.  But why would it?  Not having a budget or a distributor or any of the myriad things that you really ought to have when making a movie didn't stop me from making one.  And in the age of digital self publishing, its possibly viable.  And tonight I kind of buckled.  I took all of the posts from this blog and cut and pasted them (as reference material) into the outline in the pitch document I sent publishers.  I'm already at 120 poorly edited pages.  Obviously, I'm going to rewrite practically everything, but the guide is there.

Like the movie, this probably won't be a fast project.  I have a lot going on.

- I've been serializing a truly massive novel online for quite some time - the going is slow there too, despite having much of the plot mapped out... those holes are hard to get past though.  If I ever finish, this one is going to be a door-stopper.

- I'm working on a screenplay about a truly fascinating aspect of deterrence theory (The political gamesmanship that has against all seeming odds kept us from nuking the hell out of each other for over half a century.) that has taken me way down the rabbit hole.

- An older project I created with Roger Haskett (Neville in Beast) may have once again found some legs - and if it has it could be pretty consuming.

- A TV project I conceived with another friend had some recent interest... but I suspect we've seen the last of this round of sizzle, so that's probably not a factor.

- I've finally acquired the means to go back into production on my video series "Best Picture" - which fortunately has no deadlines on it, but still... if I'm going to do it, I should bloody well do it.

- And I'm in the middle of researching a series of short fiction about the (very real) Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Not to mention carrying on contract work, a very part-time "day job" and not least of all being a Father.

But I just can't help thinking, that this project isn't going away.  I'll pick away at it in the gaps - Eg. some times I simply can't bring myself to get immersed in the psychology of gambling that everyone is going to play nice and not blow one another into radioactive dust, and in those times I need something else to write - something where I already know the beginning, middle and end.