Category: writing

The Fellows Hip: the Rise of the Gamers

A while back, an old friend of mine from grad school called me up and asked me to co-write a script for an indie film. He was out in Virginia, I was here in California. We wrote the script, batted it back and forth for a while, polished it up, and then I went on my merry way. He and some associates then did the hard part of the job. They went and shot the thing. Writing film scripts is not that hard. There’s a reasonably rigid formula to it. Shooting them? That’s a different kettle of slippery little fish.

The film is called The Fellows Hips: The Rise of the Gamers (here’s the IMDB page if you want to check out cast/crew). It’s a buddy-comedy movie about some high school gaming geeks who find meaning in life by getting into a Lord of the Rings video game contest. The story follows them as they road-trip it down to the convention and geekdom. We wrote the script to deliberately mirror events from the Lord of the Rings. And, yes, we did get the Saul Zaentz Company to sign off on the project. They’ve been known to sue people who take liberties with LOTR, as they hold the entertainment rights to the trilogy. As part of the film, we also won the collaboration of the guys at Turbine who do the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. I haven’t seen the final cut, but they were gracious enough to allow video game footage to be used in the film.

In addition to co-writing the script, I also wrote a song for the soundtrack. You can hear a rough cut of it here. Anyway, The Fellows Hip should be released sometime later this year. Keep an eye out for it!

Humor and Hortiventury

I started writing a new book last week. It’s a humorous take on the science and pursuit of hortiventury. Hortiventury is a little-known part of the scientific community that involved hunting down fascinating flora in dangerous or remote settings. Most people don’t know, but Julius Caesar was a dedicated hortiventurist, viewing that more as his life-calling. Ruling the Roman Empire was a bit of a headache for him, but he recognized his responsibilities there, even though he would’ve gladly chucked it all for a lifetime of hortiventury. Atilla the Hun was another famous hortiventurist. Oddly enough, one of his personal chefs was the inventor of what we moderns call fudge.

Review from the Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell

I just got a new and very positive review of The Hawk And His Boy from a Finnish review site. You can read it here. Contrary to some experiences I’ve had with foreign reviewers, the two ladies who review on that site have excellent English. I recently had another review from a different country in Europe and the reviewer basically hated the book (as I am the dictator of this site, I decided not to link to it). I’m not sure how much this played into it, but their grasp of English was a bit on the shaky side.

Great review from Fantasy Book Critic

Wonderful review from Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic blog. He was very gracious. I’m constantly amazed at reviewers, that they are willing to give so much time to authors. At the least, it takes a couple hours to read a book, and I’m afraid that, sometimes, those are a couple hours one wants back. Happily, Liviu liked the book. I’m pleased with my stories, but it still makes me very nervous to have them read by a reviewer. There’s quite a lot of subjectivity in how a book is received, once you’re past the initial components of grammar and coherence and the like.

Spalding’s Racket

Nick at Spalding’s Racket just put up a post about The Hawk. Thanks, Nick! Sites like his are God-sends for the indie writing community, creating oases for writers like myself in the vast wasteland of the internet. Okay, I’ll stop with the poetic waxing. Give Nick a visit and find some other indie writers that you might be reading right now instead of my blog.