This has been quite an eventful week for my writing career. I’ve just made my second short story sale of the year! (The first sale is currently in limbo: I’ll post about it once it finalizes.)
My short story “Murder of the Orient Express” (of, not on) will appear in the June issue of Pulp Asylum. Also, that officially makes me a pulp fiction writer. Heh.
There’s a funny story behind the title… “Murder of the Orient Express” was a blooper on the great “Ex Urbe Ad Astra” podcast hosted by Malka Older & Jo Walton. They misspoke, then laughed it off and moved on, but it got me thinking… How do you kill an actual train? And why? What kind of person would even do such a thing? You’ll have to wait till June to find out!
I’m very very glad to get my third paid publishing credit (2025 has been quite kind to me so far), and I hope this will inspire all y’all to do what I did: seek inspiration in the weirdest places. You can find a kernel for a fun story just about anywhere – as long as your eyes are open and your mind is imaginative.
Longer version: I stayed up all night, adding last touches to my final edit of “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes,” a dark-academia Young Adult sci-fi novel. It’s quite different from my first novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide” (which is still in the query trenches) in that it actually follows the three-act arch, and has recurring characters and the big showdown and all. Heh.
Stylistically, it’s Chernobyl + Ender’s Game + X-Men. It explores a very simple process: if the environmental pollution in the 1990s Russia reached the point where children started getting either cancer or superpowers, how would the government react?
It was partly based on a true story… I was born and raised right next to Seversk, aka Tomsk-7, aka one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. It wasn’t as bad as Chernobyl, but it was bad… Widespread birth defects. High rates of cancer. A lot of weird stuff happening… When I try to tell my childhood stories to my friends, whether in the US or Canada, they usually think I’m making them up, or at the very least embellishing them. So, I figured, why not go all the way? Why not actually embellish them and turn them into a very strange, very dark sci-fi novel?
Throughout the novel, there are short interludes: real-life news reports, excerpts from military dispatches, think-tank analyses on Russia’s plunging health rates, etc. I like to think it’ll give the readers something to chew on: educational as well as entertaining.
I set the action in the 1990s because that was the last decade without advanced technology: cellphones already existed (there’s a Nokia phone that features prominently), but they were very very rare. And that’s also the decade I know best. My family left Russia in 2003. I never went back. Probably never will. Whatever the hell it’s become now, I’m not familiar with it – so I wrote about what I knew. About corruption. About ineptitude. About horrifying accidents. About cruel teachers who would watch you get pummeled right outside the school and then do nothing.
There’s some levity and romance there, as well, but… Let’s just say Disney won’t base a children’s movie based on my novel. And that’s all I’ll say. Spoilers, eh.
The last thing I did before passing out at 7am was put together a nice-looking query and a synopsis (it took some work to condense it from 2,500 words to 850!), after which I sent the whole thing to one very special agent, who will have the first dibs on the manuscript. Toes and fingers crossed!
But perhaps most importantly, this giant psychic weight is off my shoulders now. I’ll fly off to New Mexico less than a month from now, and I’ll be able to start my big Continental Divide Trail thru-hike with a clear conscience. If I hadn’t finished this novel, it’d always be on my mind, if only a little. (And before you ask, writing and editing on your phone is possible, but it’s the least convenient of all possible options.)
And so… Done. Done at last. Might goof around and write a short story or two, but I’m definitely not starting the third novel’s draft in the coming weeks. Time to have some well-earned rest, eh.
The best way to get absolutely fucked-up for less than $5 is by drinking a can of NOS. Twenty or so years ago, it was the most powerful energy drink on the market. It’s been surpassed since then, but it still has one helluva kick, with 175mg of caffeine and more than 1,000% of your daily dose of B12 and a few other things.
I’ve only ever tried NOS three times in my entire life.
The first time was in college: I spent the next 36 hours walking around campus, pointing at things, and giggling.
The second time was after college: I pulled an all-nighter and wrote a best-selling e-book on Taoism.
The third time… The third time was last week. I hadn’t touched the stuff in over a decade and wasn’t sure if it’d have an effect on me, but yup, it sure did. I stayed up most of the night, added the much-needed final touches to two short films, and created another, brand new short film from the components I’d assembled. (Public domain video clips, my amazing voice actress’s recording, public domain music, etc…)
And as a result, I’m very very proud to present my newest – and most ambitious! – short film: “So Long, and Thanks for All the Bandwidth.” When a routine experiment on a space station goes terribly wrong, the lone astronaut is faced with an amoral AI hellbent on uploading itself to Earth. With the fate of humanity on the line, the astronaut must destroy the AI – or suffocate trying.
And here’s the extra-fancy poster I’ve made for my film. (Thanks for the neon font, Canva!)
The best part? My budget was $24 USD – all of which went to my amazing voice actress. (You rock, Sarah!!)
Writing this script wasn’t easy for me, because I personally think the traditional three-act story structure is too restricting and too predictable. But nonetheless, that was an interesting opportunity to get out of my comfort zone. My beta viewers sure seemed to like it, and it deals with some of the biggest contemporary fears: untested technology, evil artificial intelligence, and personal autonomy… In the film, both the astronaut and the AI are women, which I think adds another, interesting dimension to the power struggle.
The entire film is seven minutes long, which is about three times as long as my debut attempt, “Please Don’t Send Help.” Heh. Together with my other two new films (“Species Spotlight: Humans” and “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace”), this makes four films total, or almost 30 minutes of sci-fi goodness.
If you had told me this just a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I didn’t even start tinkering with video editing until May 2024. Incidentally, major kudos to my filmmaker friend from Dam Short Film Festival who recommended using the free version of DaVinci Resolve (the paid version is $400; the free version still has many neat features) – it has been an absolute game-changer for me. So, soooo much easier and more user-friendly, eh.
I really ought to be making the final edits on my second novel… But deep-diving into the r/Filmmakers and r/FilmFestivals subreddits is such a fine and fun distraction, eh. The movie industry isn’t a meritocracy by any measure: we’ve all heard about the nepo babies, or about key decisions being made based solely on friendship or sexual favours… But the parts that remain after you filter out all that stuff? Those parts are pretty damn meritocratic. As with any hobby, the more you learn, the more rewarding your experience will be – and I’ve been learning a lot…
Two things I aim to explore after I return from my gigantic CDT thru-hike (which is just six weeks away now!): how to apply for artist grants on provincial and federal level (because as a filmmaker attending festivals in the US, I represent Canada’s and Quebec’s art scene), and how film distributor companies work. Not the ones that charge you several grand to submit your film across all the festivals in the world, but the ones that will sign a contract, submit your film on your behalf (using their own existing partnership) for free, and will give you 70% of the net profit from screening fees, art exhibitions, etc, etc. This might be nothing. This might be everything.
I’ve been experimenting with FilmFreeway’s $10 promotions: you give them the moneys (it’s $20 if you don’t have their monthly $15 membership) and they include your film’s thumbnail image and synopsis in their daily festival briefing. Ideally, that means a really cool festival would learn about your film and offer you a full waiver: a 100% discount to submit your creation to their festival. (Though acceptance is not guaranteed.) In reality… Well, in reality you get roughly 200 offers ranging from 10% off to 90% off (usually around 50%) from festivals that aren’t on your wishlist, as well as a handful of full waivers from festivals that may or may not be scams.
Unfortunately, many festivals that send you partial/full waivers are scammy, or at the very least sketchy. They might not have any images in their gallery. Or they might be an online-only festival. Or their rules would contain creepy language implying they’ll show your film whenever and wherever they feel like it, “for commercial and promotional purposes.” (To clarify: the festivals that promise to use just a few seconds of footage are fine.) There are festivals that have 50+ award categories, and that are so impatient to scam you that they’ll straight-up say that a) you’ll get accepted and win by default, and b) you’ll have to pay $179 USD to ship a plastic award thingy all the way from wherever the hell they are to your home address. Hard pass, amigos. Hard pass.
So… Yeah. It’s pretty much Wild West out there. As of this writing, FilmFreeway has 14,568 film festivals. I wonder how many of them are scams (or sketchy) as opposed to genuine.
That said, I did find a few gems among the hundreds of kinda-sorta-not-really waiver notifications. A few small festivals (carefully vetted) offered full waivers. A few others offered waivers high enough (and with their fees low enough) that the grand total came to $5 or less. There’s a top-100 film festival in Scotland that now has two of my films. A small and cozy festival in Iceland. I won’t be able to attend them, but I’m a strong believer in the power of coincidences: if my films screen somewhere, and if someone loves them and contacts me, that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, eh.
I’ve carefully made a list of 11 film festivals that I’ll send my short films to. All carefully researched, all with great reputations. They’ll be from late September through late March, aka in between my epic hikes. (When – not if – I complete the Continental Divide Trail – the next one will be the Appalachian Trail in 2026. Triple Crown, woooo!)
Two of the 11 festivals are in Canada: Hamilton and Montreal. Most of the 11 are quite big – either in the top-1% worldwide ranking, or close to it. I don’t expect to get accepted into all of them, but one can dream, right? I’m going to submit either all four of my films to each fest, or the three latest ones, without my debut “Please Don’t Send Help.” I love it, I really do, but it’s 2.5 minutes long, and I get the feeling that a lot of festivals wouldn’t even consider a film shorter than three minutes. (Though one of the festivals on my list (Fargo Film Festival) has a special category for 2-minute films: I made sure to squish my film to 1:59 just for them; let’s see what happens!)
The goal is to get in. Once I’m in, there would be – hopefully – alumni discounts for the following years. Combined with travel grants (toes and fingers crossed!), that would make the next festival circuit seasons a helluva lot more interesting. There’s a famous sci-fi film festival called FilmQuest in Provo, Utah, but it lasts 10 days, doesn’t help the filmmakers with any accommodations (some other festivals have fun little homestay programs), and actually charges filmmakers to attend the networking events, parties, etc. I’m sure there’s fun to be had there, but… after my first-ever experience (the festival which shall remain forever nameless) last October, I’m not willing to pay to attend events after I’ve already paid the high submission fee. So it goes.
I’ve made a spreadsheet (as I often do) to track all of my wishlist festivals, particularly their early-bird deadlines… I’ll send my films to them soon. Even with all my tricks, the submission fees alone will cost me roughly $1,000 USD. However: a) I’ve finally sold my goddamn condo, so I won’t have to worry about surprise special assessments ever again; and b) when I snapped and went on my “revenge vacation” in June-July 2021 (seven cities in 37 days, if memory serves), that had cost me roughly $10,000 (hey, you don’t get to judge me), so really, this is all quite relative, eh.
…ultimately, my big deep-dive into filmmaking – research and all – is an incredibly elaborate attempt to ignore the news. Sure seems like Trump and Putin are trying to monopolize access to the North Pole by annexing Canada and connecting the land masses. Trump’s flunkies keep spewing lies about the big bad fentanyl problem on the Canadian border (no such thing), and it sounds an awful lot like the PR campaign before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (If afterlife exists, I hope Colin Powell got his due. He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave that presentation to the UN.) Hopefully, nothing will happen. But if it does… Goddamn it, I’m so tired of moving. Maybe my fourth country will grant me a measure of peace.
Aaaand now I’m just typing for the sake of typing, and to postpone the inevitable return to the novel-editing process. Heh. I’ve already run out of all the possible distractions – I’ve even gone so far as to make posters, closed captions, and 30-second trailers for all four of my films. Bah, humbug. Back to the wordsmithing mines.
(If you’re reading this in the future, having googled certain film-related terms, I hope this was useful to you, friend.)
Grigory Lukin.com 