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New short film! And more

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March 12, 2025

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.)

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Putting the “pro” in “procrastinator”

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February 27, 2025

I am very very well aware that I’m just straight-up procrastinating now, but come on, this is marginally useful!

I have just under eight weeks left till I fly out to New Mexico, so, obviously (obviously!) I spent today researching all the interesting film festivals (in North America and beyond) that have either no submission fee at all, or just $5 or less.

Once you filter out all the blatant scams, possible scams, the locals-only festivals, and the youth-only festivals (ye gods, that made me feel old), what you’re left with is a rather eclectic mix. I ended up sending off 13 free submissions and 20 dirt-cheap submissions, which cost me $93.36 USD. That’s an excellent deal, considering the really big film festivals I plan to apply for in April will charge $40 a pop. (I’m setting aside a special budget to deal with the one-time expense of applying to high-level festivals. Afterwards, the alumni waivers should take care of the costs in future years.)

The film festivals I’ve ended up submitting to are wild and fun and diverse. There’s one that’s just a county fair in California, presumably with a side room where they’ll project the films for the 120,000 or so attendees. There’s an adorable community-based festival in rural Japan. There are several brand new festivals that are doing this for the first time. There was a rather exciting call for sci-fi short films from this year’s Worldcon. (You know, the biggest annual sci-fi convention?) Looks like they wanted to add some pizzazz to their programming (which is mostly about books), which is why they’re soliciting any and all sci-fi short films for the low, low entry fee of $6. There won’t be any prizes, but maybe, just maaaaybe, if my film gets accepted, and screened, and noticed by someone in the industry… Considering I’d gotten into this hobby as a side-quest while waiting to hear back from literary agents (still waiting!), if this actually gets their attention, then that’ll be the single most roundabout way of doing this.

(I won’t be able to attend in any case, since I’ll be hiking somewhere in Wyoming when the Worldcon takes place in Seattle. Ho hum.)

One of the brand new $5 festivals actually included an automated message saying they’ll gladly provide free lodging at a volunteer’s home if the selected filmmakers choose to attend. That’s just over-the-top wholesomeness, and also makes me feel a little bit like a villain, since my very carefully curated schedule of big-name festivals will have something during that exact three-day slot. Sorry, guys.

This is all a giant fun side quest – a lot of these little festivals will take place during my CDT thru-hike, and I probably won’t be able to attend any of them, even if I do get picked, which is never a guarantee. Still, that’s 33 new mini-adventures that I’ve just set in motion. Who knows, maybe my quaint little sci-fi film will find true fans at one of those friendly and enthusiastic festivals. Maybe new friendships will be forged. Maybe one of the foreign festivals (there’s a really fun one in Germany!) will get intrigued enough to fly me out for a future event. I know, I’m getting way too carried away here, but there’s no harm in dreaming, eh?

If nothing else, my life is gonna get a lot more fun and random: in addition to the notifications from 10 or so big film festivals I’ll focus on, I’ll keep getting random notifications from the 33 festivals I’ve just joined. There’s pretty much no way to keep track of something like that, so every single week will be an exercise in randomness, with unexpected “thumbs up / thumbs down” messages dropping into ye olde inbox.

And hey, maybe my film will actually win an award of some sort! It’s an honour just to have it screened in front of live audience (twice so far), but if I do actually win something, somewhere… I have many many plans for that sort of eventuality.

What a weird little hobby.

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Dam Short Film Festival, or thoughts on my first-ever top-1% fest

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February 26, 2025

Short version: It was amazing!

Slightly longer version: It was amaaaaaaazing!!

Much longer version: The dictionary definition of “amazing” should refer – at least in passing – to the Dam Short Film Festival (DSFF) held in the beautiful Boulder City, NV. (Not far from Las Vegas.)

I had the absolute, incredible, mind-blowing honour of having my sci-fi short film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” screen at that beautiful festival. They accept only 23% or so of submitted films, and they’re among the top 1% film festivals in the world, out of about 15,000 or so. I first learned about the DSFF through an old friend of mine, Aaron, who lives in Nevada and occasionally volunteers. I’d never heard of DSFF before and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was, “Well, that’s one goofy-named festival.” Heh. (The Hoover Dam has been a really big influence on that town’s history.) In the end, it was a matter of paying $50 for a submission fee in September – and I’m so very, very glad I did.

The notification email dropped on January 1: I was in! What a way to start the year, y’all. What followed was a frenzy of activity, since the festival began just six weeks later. Found a ridiculously cheap flight deal out of Montreal (thanks, Kiwi.com!), secured a couch to crash on (thanks, Aaron!), and started counting down days…

I won’t bore you with the minutiae and the many, many stories of fun shenanigans that happened in that desert town. Fun was had. Many many new friendships with fellow filmmakers were forged. Great vibes were shared. Much beer was drunk.

The staff, the volunteers, and the locals were so ridiculously, over-the-top friendly and enthusiastic… And there was so much variety among the films. Mine was an experimental 2.5-minute (not a typo; two-and-a-half minutes) short film made with NASA’s archival footage and a $15 budget. It aired alongside films shot on an iPhone in two days, films made with animated paper figures, Netflix-quality student films, and a film on sweatshops (Anuja) that’s up for an Oscar this year! Not every filmmaker was there, but there were still dozens of us, and we all rubbed elbows at the early-morning coffeeshop get-togethers and the almost-nightly afterparties. (Huzzah!)

While we were there, it rained for the first time in 10 months. Such a rarity in the desert… I’d spent 10 years of my life in Nevada, all over the state. I’m not sure if the others truly gathered the rarity of that event.

My film screened during the sci-fi block on Saturday afternoon. The theater was full: probably 250-300 people. It was incredibly nerve-racking. (Also didn’t help that I hadn’t eaten much beforehand…) It reminded me of the first time I did nude modeling: intellectually and logically, you know everything will be okay – but emotionally… Emotionally you’re a wreck, and you keep imagining wilder and wilder scenarios. (Incidentally, there was an excellent film from the festival that explored that very concept! Please enjoy The Bell Never Rings Again, a 15-minute masterpiece by Matthias Fuchez. Hurry, because I don’t know how long he’ll keep his film up for streaming.)

But I digress, eh. The nerves. Yeesh… After my film screened (without any booing or rotten eggs or riots!), there were a few more, and then it’d be time for the official Q&A on stage. I’d spent the entire day mentally rehearsing my answers to the most likely questions, trying to keep it my replies short as possible. (No one likes a microphone hog.) I sneaked out during one of the following film’s credits, went to the movie theater’s bathroom, and did the most stereotypical thing possible: splashed water in my face and gave myself a pep talk in the mirror. Long-time blog readers might know that one of my many, many online nicknames is “Grigorius of Tomsk, Devourer of Pop-Tarts, Victor of Many Battles.

Soooo, yeah, I stood there, in the empty bathroom, trying to psych myself up for the huge Q&A in front of hundreds of people, by staring my reflection in the eye and saying – repeatedly – “You are Grigorius of Tomsk, Devourer of Pop-Tarts, Victor of Many Battles. You got this!” And you know what? That actually helped! (It would be so very, very funny if there’d been a volunteer or just a random guy who stood just outside the bathroom, afraid to go in, wondering what the hell was going on. I guess I’ll never know!)

So, anyway… The Q&A. It was myself and the guy that did special effects for one of the other sci-fi films. Just the two of us on that big stage. Something went sideways during the planning process, apparently, and the entire Q&A ran for just three minutes, not 10-15 like I’d anticipated. Bah, humbug. Still, I got a couple of quick answers and didn’t make a fool of myself. That’s not bad, eh.

I’ll fast-forward here and say that I didn’t win the audience prize for the best sci-fi, but that’s alright – there will always be next year. The festival went above and beyond with their red carpet experience on the awards night. They ferried each filmmaker (or filmmaker team) in a fancy car, ranging from a famous pickup truck to a red Corvette (I got to ride in that one, wooo!), with an actual red carpet, a local pageant winner escorting you from the car, arm in arm, the local media doing a quick interview, and about a hundred people cheering and whoop-whooping at the top of their lungs as you made your appearance.

That was phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal and over-the-top and brilliant and amazing. (The final afterparty was fun, too!) I say this with utmost honesty and without any exaggeration: that was the greatest week of my adult life. I am addicted now. I shall return. And also, now I’m spending a lot of time looking up other top-rated festivals, as well as those that aren’t in the top 1% but have rave reviews focused on hospitality and enthusiasm.

This festival gave me a ridiculous boost of self-confidence and inspiration. During the flight back to Quebec, and the days that followed, I wrote two new short stories from scratch (for upcoming anthologies) – and I have a great feeling about them! A couple of days ago (the festival ran February 12-17) I chugged my emergency NOS energy drink, sat down with no distractions, and knocked out three new short films. All three were made with found footage, and with sub-$50 budgets. Two of them were drafts I’d never gotten around to finishing, and the third one was something I’d gather the components for but never quite assembled. Well, they’re done now: just need to make a few more tweaks after my beta-viewers’ feedback, and voila – three new shorts I’ll bring to the festival circuit, right after I finish hiking from Mexico to Canada. (Again.) ((My life is very strange.))

I still can’t quite believe any of this is happening. If you’d told me this a year ago, I would’ve called you a damn liar. Making my sci-fi film was just a fun distraction while I waited to hear back from literary agents. (Still waiting!) There are some mighty interesting implications in the fact that it’s literally easier to break into one of the top film festivals in the world than it is to simply find an agent. (Not a publisher or a writing award – just an agent.) I suppose I may have to rebrand myself from “writer who dabbles in editing” to “experimental filmmaker who occasionally writes.” Heh.

Oh, and before I forget – I have my own IMDB page now, woooo! It’s pretty funny how you can add almost anything to your own trivia page.

So… I suppose I’m officially a filmmaker now. Got many many new ideas. Grandiose plans. Strange stratagems… Or, you know, the usual. This is a wild, unpredictable, amazing new chapter of my life, and I am loving it. Here is to many more film festivals, my friends.

P.S.: they’re still processing the red carpet pictures, but you can find the rest on my Instagram here, here, and here!

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New e-book! “Delays, Denials, Deposals: the Devolution of America’s Healthcare”

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February 5, 2025

Great news! My new e-book is out – and it’s free for the next few days. “Delays, Denials, Deposals: the Devolution of America’s Healthcare” was inspired by Luigi: the more I kept digging into the history of America’s healthcare, the more disturbing facts I found… This book collects 13 historical documents, starting with 1912, that detail what kind of compromises, bad choices, or outright capitulations happened along the way, to bring us to the here and now. This book isn’t about Luigi or Brian Thompson: it’s about the origins of this twisted situation. It’s about the choices not taken. It’s about us.

The e-book will be free to download until the end of Sunday, February 9th: click “Buy now with 1-Click” right underneath $0.00.

If you like it, please leave a quick review or even just a rating. If you hate it, then hey, it was free. All feedback is always welcome. Happy reading!

…as a side note, Amazon’s algorithm is getting stranger as well as stupider every single year. The initial version of this e-book had “Delay, Deny, Depose” in the title. That met with the harshest possible opposition as they refused to publish it, refused to give a reason, and kept ignoring my escalations for weeks without ever specifying why exactly my e-book broke their rules. But lo and behold, if you just change those first three words and remove Luigi’s and Thompson’s names from the introduction, you get a near-instant approval. And that, friends, is how we’re gonna have to fight the artificial intelligence in the future: the gatekeepers may be tireless machines, but they’re also mindless idiots.

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Project 2025 Down South

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January 30, 2025

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. Either way, I’ll leave it up – what’s the point of having a lifelong blog if you slash and burn the parts you no longer like?

Donald Trump got sworn in for the second time just nine days ago, and things are not going well. Looks like the Republicans’ Project 2025 playbook was, in fact, their game plan. They’re currently acting like gremlins in a super-computer: turning random things off and on, just to see what they can get away with. (For example, Medicaid payments got temporarily suspended.)

One of the wilder things, and one that (as far as I know) wasn’t part of their playbook, is Trump’s apparently sincere desire to annex Canada and Greenland. Google has already submitted and showed its belly: Google Maps users within the US see the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.” For the rest of the world, the original nomenclature remains. Ipso facto, Americans live in a bubble of their own making, with their collective reality separating from that of the rest of the world. That chasm will likely grow wider.

One other thing Trump wants to do is take over the Panama Canal… In political science, there’s the concept of the Overton Window: the acceptable range of public perception that shifts one way or another, and can be manipulated. For example, the first school shooting was a tragedy. Now, despite being just as tragic, they barely make headlines. The Overton Window at work.

Likewise here. If he succeeds at even one of his bizarre annexation schemes, it’ll become that much easier to orchestrate the rest of them: the window will have shifted. Just like Putin, with his limited military campaigns over the past couple of decades: attack Georgia, then gobble up half of Ukraine, then try to take over the other half. (I fear the resistance will end soon.)

And so… As a Russian-American-French-Canadian with three passports, having moved from Russia to the US to Canada (and specifically the French Canada), I just want some peace, y’all… It’s possible the next prodigious 19-year-old will use a hunting rifle instead of an automated rifle. (Seriously, who does that?) It’s just as possible Trump will live on for quite some time. It comes down to a binary choice: will he or will he not attempt to invade Canada? (Because it sure as hell won’t join voluntarily.) If yes, then will he succeed?

The very fact that we must entertain such an insane notion is disturbing. But if that does, in fact, happen… Canada is still part of the British Commonwealth: we have their royalty on our national currency and all that. Just spitballing here, but it’d be interesting to see if – in that worst-case scenario – the UK will allow its Canadian cousins to move in. Probably without any financial assistance, but with a fast-tracked path to citizenship as long as you can pay for your own ticket. Conversely, it’d be funny if France made the same offer to Quebec’s residents – partly due to the shared cultural heritage and the Quebec/France pipeline, and partly just to poke the UK.

As a Canadian citizen and a proud Quebecer, I’ll win in either of those scenarios, eh.

My big Continental Divide Trail thru-hike will start in less than three months, on April 28. This time, less than three months from today, I’ll be deep asleep somewhere in the New Mexico desert… There’s very little cell reception in the wilderness. Even when I do get it, during my five-month thru-hike, I’ll make a deliberate effort not to look at any news – nothing beyond what I’ll spot in newspaper headlines when I visit towns. (That was how I’d learned about Roe v Wade being overturned, back in 2022. Oof. Oof, I say.)

I look forward to that complete information blackout, and it can’t come soon enough… At the current rate of gremlins wrecking things, it’s entirely possible the US will break long-standing diplomatic rules even before I fly out to New Mexico. Likely, even.

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. If you’re reading this in the future (way beyond 2025), then you already know how this ended, you lucky bastard. Before you chuckle, I just want you to try and imagine what it was like to be stuck here, now, at this point in history, at this point in space, just north of an empire gone mad. I really, really don’t want to have to obtain my fourth passport, my fourth citizenship… But there’s a greater-than-zero chance that’ll happen whether I like it or not.

This will be one strange year.

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Year in review: 2024

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January 8, 2025

2025 isn’t getting any younger, and I suppose I should continue this little tradition I’ve started…

2024 was a weird year for me. It was the third full year of my early retirement – the fourth if you include the seven months of 2021. I’d thought it’d be a quiet sort of year: no thru-hiking, no full-time French classes, just helping my gf move all her stuff (so much stuff!) to her new place in the middle of the summer. I’d underestimated how wacky that year would be.

I haven’t blogged a whole lot, so this post will be a bit fragmented: a bit about everything.

The eclipse

In April, Quebecers got the unique opportunity to observe the total solar eclipse: it was almost next door to us. Here in Quebec City, folks would’ve caught just 97% of it, and would’ve missed the totality. It was rather disappointing to learn how many of my local friends chose to stay here rather than drive just two hours east to catch the full 100%. (Work was no excuse: no work was done at all on that day.) That was an unexpected sort of litmus test to see which of my compadres had the potential to become an adventurer. Oh well.

I joined a local group of hikers and carpooled with them: we drove to, and then hiked on top, Ham Mountain. There was no ham, though. Or ham-related puns. Shame, really – such a missed opportunity.

The totality itself was… Magical. It was simply magical. If you’ve never seen it, you wouldn’t believe me. You can look at all the pictures and videos in the world, but they will not prepare you for that magical, otherworldly moment where the sky turns black, the sun becomes safe to look at, becomes a solid black disk, and tendrils of white light whirl all around it. Even knowing all the physics of what was going on, I was shocked, stupefied – and, on some deep animal level, a little scared and more than a little awed. Natural wonders of that caliber used to inspire myths and religions in the olden days…

Citizenship

I became a Canadian citizen just a few days before the eclipse! That was a busy week, eh. I’d moved here in March 2019, and became a full-fledged citizen just over five years later. If I hadn’t left on my big PCT adventure, and if I’d done the math a little better, I would’ve gotten it even sooner than that. Canada’s immigration system isn’t perfect, but it’s so much faster than the American system.

The citizenship application itself was pricey: somewhere around $800 CAD, if I recall correctly. They sent me a free booklet with all the information about Canada’s history that might appear on the test. The citizenship test was done online, and it was pretty funny… You had to answer at least 15 out of the 20 questions, and you had 40 minutes to do so. I got 20 out of 20, and it took me exactly two minutes. Heh.

The citizenship swearing-in ceremony was done entirely online, which was disappointing, and didn’t feel quite real… My US citizenship ceremony, back in 2011, took place in a courthouse, and even though the judge kind of fumbled it, it still had that saccharine, Disney-ish, smiles-all-around feeling and good vibes. When you do the same thing over Zoom… Yeah, no, sorry, it’s just not the same. We have covid vaccines now, so there’s no logical reason for such precautions, but I suspect we won’t get real-life ceremonies back anytime soon.

There were about 160 of us, connected into one big video chat through our webcams at home. Some folks went all out with Canadian-themed decorations and balloon displays in the background. (I had my giant Canadian flag hanging behind me.) The ceremony would get disrupted all the time by folks forgetting to mute their microphones. After hours of speeches (in English as well as French), we all raised our right hand, recited the oath in English and then – very haltingly – in French, and sang the Canadian anthem, karaoke-style. (Or at least tried to. 160 people trying to sing in unison was pretty funny.)

The funniest, most Kafkaesque part of the ceremony was the picture-taking bit. It’s important for folks to have at least some sort of memento from such a huge event in their life, so the judge posed for pictures on her end of the video chat and told us we could take selfies with our computer screen. She then sat immobile for a solid minute, adopting several different grins and smiles. (But no thumbs up.) That was weeeeird, y’all.

Eventually, the ceremony was over, and we logged off, and I applied for my Canadian passport. The processing time is so much shorter… A couple of days if it’s an emergency, or just a couple of weeks otherwise. This is my third passport, in addition to my American one and the expired Russian one. It looks a whole lot less aggressive than the US passport: no pictures of angry eagles, no quotes about war or bloodshed. Instead, it has cute pictures of moose and beavers and other Canadian symbolism. Neat, eh.

Creative endeavours

In early 2024, I finally completed “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide” – my sci-fi novel I’d started wayyy back in 2015. Ironically, it took the soul-crushing full-time French classes at the local community college to spur me into action. I didn’t want to feel like I wasted even a day of my life, so each evening, I spent an hour studying genetics (a fascinating topic!) and another hour writing my novel. And it worked!

I gave it a few months, did a bunch of edits, trimmed the length down from 106K words to 103K and ultimately to 99K, and entered the query trenches to find myself a literary agent. That’s a whole different story…

Bad news: no luck yet. Good news: I have my full manuscript with five literary agents, and now I have my toes and fingers crossed. But even if the answer is a resounding “no,” that still won’t be the end: the next stage would be contacting small publishers. Someday, my novel will get published. It’s only the details that are vague and fuzzy.

Along the way, I prepared a full outline for my non-fiction book – a tell-all memoir about life at Amazon. (Currently sending out tentative queries.)

After one agent replied with a “schmaybe” to my full manuscript, they also gave me an idea for a Young Adult novel that deals with one of my areas of expertise… That secret project is almost done – 62,000 words in, and only six chapters left to go!

Also, a pro tip: don’t wait for a muse to come and find you. I tried that with my YA novel, and the result was equal parts hilarious and miserable. I’d sit down, write a bunch of new words (the first draft doesn’t need to be pretty; it just needs to exist), and then I’d walk away from the novel for several weeks. That resulted in very slow progress. A month ago, I sat down and outlined what I actually wanted to tell in the rest of the story, and how that would break down by chapter, with a quick synopsis thereof. It’s embarrassing how much that helped me: now all I need to do is sit down, consult the next chapter’s synopsis, and just write. I’ve been knocking out anywhere between 1,000-5,000 words per day, and it feels amaaaazing. The first draft will be finished quite soon. And then… And then we’ll see.

I need to get better and more organized about writing my sci-fi short stories: I have a few, and I feel like I’m getting better, but – yeah – the muse syndrome again. I did get one of them published, though! “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” appeared in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume I. It was a 1,000-word flash fiction story, and the payout was $10, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am now a published author, huzzah! The anthology is out in print and on Kindle. It has been nominated for several awards, so we’ll see how that plays out. Meanwhile, I keep writing more stories and submitting them to online publications… Allegedly, there are far fewer short-story markets now than way back in the day. I like a challenge.

Along the way, while I was devouring all the advice on finding literary agents, I found one particularly interesting tip: branch out into other media to get more spotlight on your book. That meant writing editorials, or creating art, or making films… And so I asked myself, “Self, what exactly is stopping us from making a film?” Sure, there are lights and cameras and actors, but what if you could find a shortcut?..

That’s how I ended up using public-domain footage (including from NASA’s archives), public-domain music, and an incredibly talented British voice actress from Fiverr to make my debut short film, “Please Don’t Send Help.” I wrote the script (all 167 words of it), taught myself video editing (OpenShot is free and pretty great!), and spent a lot of time splicing it to make it perfect. The final budget was $15 USD: $10 for the voice talent and a 50% tip.

The end result is beautiful, even if it’s just 2.5 minutes long. I submitted it to the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and made it all the way to the final round! I’m waiting to hear back from a few more film festivals, and I’ve completed (or almost completed) a few more films with public-domain footage, which will go to even more festivals later this year… Mwahahaha.

Travel

I didn’t get to go on a big thru-hike in 2024, but there was still a lot of traveling! In February, I went to hang out with my sister and her family in New York – and ended up in the audience of Stephen Colbert’s show along the way. (Great guy!)

A very fun and exclusive recurring party (which, unfortunately, went out of business a month ago) had me coming and going to Montreal quite a lot – huzzah for rideshare! One of those times, late at night, our driver was falling asleep at the wheel, squeezing a candy wrapper over and over to keep herself awake… I was even more tired than she was, or else I would’ve asked to take over the wheel. In some alternate universe, we probably crashed into the oncoming traffic.

July had the Montreal Comic Con. It was fun, but surprisingly more conservative than the Comic Cons I’d attended in the US. In particular, cosplay consisted almost entirely of online-bought costumes. How weird is that? The highlight of the event was Giancarlo Esposito, who gave us two hours of his time as he answered questions and participated in a celebrity panel.

September had a two-week trip to Seattle to catch up with my family and put my suburban condo on the market. That did not go well… It’s still on the market, and the whole thing is mighty ridiculous, as usual, but at some point this year, I just might free myself from that ridiculous source of stress in my life.

October had an unexpected trip back to New York, to attend the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival in person. It was small but extremely welcoming and hospitable. My film was screened in front of a live audience, and it was beautiful… Afterwards, a professional actor approached me outside the movie theater. She spent the next 90 minutes telling me how much she loved my imagination, and that did dangerous things to my ego… (Her boyfriend – the director of her film – was chatting to his own fans right next to us, so no, it wasn’t that kind of admiration, you bunch of perverts.)

While in New York (crashing at my friend’s place in the Jamaica neighbourhood of New York City), I accidentally found out the annual New York Comic Con would take place the same weekend. I managed to snag one of the very last remaining Thursday tickets, and wow – that was one overwhelming day. I blogged about it earlier over yonder.

There was so much travel that month – including picking up gf from her flight in Montreal – that at one point, over the course of five days, I woke up in two different countries, in three different cities, and in five very different places. (Those places included someone’s carpet, as well as a parked car.) That was exhausting but so, sooo much fun.

Life weirdness

Weird and improbable things happen to me quite often, and I’ve made peace with it. Unless I’m forgetting anything…

There was a ridiculously incompetent French teacher at my community college… In 2024, she hired lawyers to send me a cease-and-desist letter in response to a long blog post I made in November 2023. Apparently, she saw it when she googled her name. Heh. The letter was 10 pages long, entirely in French, and demanded I delete the offending blog post. I did so, and replied with just “LOL OK.” I hope they hired a translator to decipher that, and billed her extra for that service.

In February, a cop tried to barge into my apartment at 4am while not following any official protocols – such as, say, identifying himself as a cop. In my sleep-deprived state, I assumed that was a burglar pretending to be a cop, especially when he took out the skeleton key and started trying to unlock my door… There are moments in life when you suddenly realize what kind of person you truly are. At that moment, I learned something about myself: I’m okay with the idea of using violence, at least in self-defense. As my lock rattled and turned, I stood in the door’s blind spot, holding my trusty ice axe in one hand and a sharp knife in the other… If he had actually managed to unlock that door, things would’ve gone very badly for him. (I was quiet. The lights were off. He expected an empty apartment.)

Afterwards, I learned that the cops responded to a domestic violence call, couldn’t find the exact apartment the noise was coming from, and kicked down at least one wrong door by mistake. I escalated to the local ethics commissioner, which resulted in a long process that led exactly nowhere. Ah well, at least I made that particular cop’s life a bit difficult. Incidentally, now I understand why so many people in Quebec City hate the police.

Last but not least – I was attacked by (and then fought off) a gang of feral teenagers. Gf is more optimistic about the human nature than I am: when someone replied to her Facebook Marketplace ad and offered to pay her more than she was asking for her old iPhone, that sounded odd. When they set the meeting place in a local park after sunset, that was strange. When they kept changing the meeting location, that was just a giant red flag. She sent me there in her car, holding her phone in my hand, on speakerphone, calling me paranoid when I said that was clearly a trap.

Reader, that was clearly a trap. They were expecting a short, slim woman. They got a tall, hairy, broad-shouldered guy. I stood there, underneath the single streetlight, yelling the name of the owner of that anonymous profile that set up the meeting. Finally, the teens loitering nearby said it was them, and they proceeded to waste an hour of everyone’s time as they tried – and failed – to trick me into surrendering the iPhone while pretending to ask about its settings, battery life, etc. Finally, the gf had enough of that, gave them a one-minute countdown, and told me to head home – the deal was over. I put her phone in my jeans pocket, and was just about to apologize to the teens, when one of them pushed the heaviest teen right at me…

There were five teens, all around 16 years old, and quite overweight, and that impact knocked the air out of me. I stumbled, but I didn’t fall.

…I go through life deliberately trying to appear harmless, non-creepy, and non-threatening. That involves body language, smiling much more than any Russian is comfortable with, etc. In that moment, all of that went out the window. I straightened up, extended my arms (imagine Frankenstein’s monster, but hairier), and shouted “PAS COOL! PAS COOL!!” (“Not cool”) at them. They jumped on their bicycles and fucked off into the darkness. The gf was mortified afterwards, and extremely apologetic. Ever since then, all her marketplace meet-ups happened in crowded public places, and in broad daylight.

Miscellaneous

This is getting a tad longer than I’d anticipated, so just a few more observations.

Trump won. Again. He’d gotten 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million votes in 2020, and 77 million votes in 2024. Looks like America has spoken… There are still 12 days until the inauguration, and his coalition is already falling apart, partly because of Elon Musk, partly because the architects of Project 2025 are openly gloating about their plans. Trump himself keeps not-quite-joking about annexing Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal – using the military if necessary. There’s a really good chance nothing will come of it. There’s a greater-than-zero chance this will shatter the NATO.

The AI bubble looks like it’s about to burst. OpenAI is trying to convince the UK government to let them feed all the copyrighted books into the maw of their plagiarism machine. The new iteration of ChatGPT seems to be especially useless, since they no longer have enough new data to feed it with. The internet is swarming with bots that use ChatGPT to generate the most banal platitudes imaginable, which they then post on social media, pretending to be humans. Goddamn creepy is what it is. All the earlier headlines praising the AI success were significantly overblown, and rightfully should’ve had gigantic asterisks. When the AI bubble pops, it’ll take the tech sector down quite a bit. Should be interesting.

Last but not least: it took a while, but the CEO hunting season has officially begun. On December 6, Luigi Mangione (allegedly) shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of the biggest and most hated health insurance company. Luigi is a folk hero now: he’s being charged with terrorism, which is in stark contrast to all the school shooters who got taken alive and never got that charge. Priorities, eh?

Weird year, 2024. Weeeeird year. 2025 will have a lot more hiking, more film festivals, and maybe even a book deal! Here is to more adventures.

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Dear alphabet agencies…

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
January 4, 2025

Dear CSIS, FBI, CIA, NSA, and other shadowy government agencies,

I’m about to watch a bunch of videos on assembling and disassembling an AK-47. Please rest assured that this is harmless research for my dystopian YA novel, and not in any way an indicator of any sinister intent on my part.

We cool? We cool.

Later, gators.

(…yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s gonna land on me on at least two new watch-lists. I need to have authentic details for that chapter, though, so YOLOLOLOL!)

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The thing about conspiracies…

Filed under: analysis — Leave a comment
December 29, 2024

The US presidential election came and went. Trump got re-elected. One of the reasons Kamala Harris lost – not a key reason, but one of them – is that she’d had just three months to campaign.

If you’re reading this way after 2024 (you lucky bastards) or if you just didn’t pay that much attention (I don’t blame you), Harris got her party’s nomination during the convention in August, after it became clear to all that Joe Biden started experiencing a noticeable mental decline. How did we get there? Well…

The thing about conspiracies is that they’re hard to pull off. Not impossible, but hard. Conspiracists get a lot of bad press and ridicule, but some of the things they banged their drum about are now part of established history. The Tonkin Bay incident, used as the reason for the United States to send troops to Vietnam, was never real: that was decried as a conspiracy until much later, when the truth came out. Snowden’s revelations about the full extent of the NSA’s domestic spying confirmed – and exceeded – the biggest claims that had been written off as conspiracy theories earlier. Covid-19 was allegedly just a bad case of flu, but the folks who paid attention learned about it as far back as in December 2019. (That r/collapse subreddit can be a bit sensationalist, but they called it, and they were correct.)

Mocking every single last unusual statement and calling them all baseless conspiracy theories is like permanently gluing a set of blinders on your own head. Sure, you won’t get distracted by all that pesky peripheral vision anymore, but you also won’t jump away when something comes at you from the side.

I will preface this by saying I’m not a right-winger. Right-wingers get mocked for all their conspiracy theories, but they were completely, absolutely, 100% correct in 2023-24 when they claimed that Biden was going senile, that the conspicuous lack of press conferences and public appearances meant his handlers and his cabinet members could not control him. Depending on how far in the future (ya lucky bastards) you’re reading this, you might not be able to find all the context or all the social media posts from that timeframe, but take my word for it: there was a lot of mockery, and there were a lot of otherwise respectable left-wingers inventing a million reasons for why nobody has seen the president of the United States of America in person in months. In many, many months.

Something unusual happened in the summer of 2024. Normally, the presidential debates start after both parties have their conventions. Not before. As the incumbent, Biden had his party’s nomination by default, because incumbents typically (though not always) win. That’s despite his 2020 promises that, if elected, he’d serve only one term. (That was in response to the concerns about his age: on the 2024 election day, Biden, just weeks shy of his 82nd birthday, was the oldest US president in history.)

The presidential debate between Biden and Trump was held on June 26, 2024. It did not go well for Biden: he stammered, he lost his train of thought, he sounded and appeared weak and confused. The news and the social media lit up: he was quite different from the way he appeared back in 2020. That was followed by a few media appearances and interviews, during which his cognitive decline became even more apparent. The party insiders panicked. The richest donors grew concerned.

With mere weeks to go until the Democratic Party’s convention in 2024, Biden was convinced to make an announcement: he would not run for a re-election (despite his assurance that he would run, just days earlier) and he endorsed his VP, Kamala Harris, instead. The rest was history: the party united around Harris, gave her the nomination, and then, less than three months later, she lost.

There’s been an awful lot of finger-pointing after the election, but nobody (that I have seen, at least) bothered to look back and ask one single question: was Harris involved in the massive, multi-year cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline?

There’s not a lot of subtlety there: it’s a binary choice. Did she know, and did she participate in the cover-up? Or is there a plausible argument that she’d spent over a year without any personal content with Biden and his cabinet? If such an argument exists, then I have yet to hear it.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1967) accounts for this situation in section 4: if the president is no longer capable of doing their job, then a simple majority vote can transfer the president’s power to the VP. (The majority vote = the VP + most of the cabinet, or the VP + most of whomever the Congress designates instead of the cabinet.) Unfortunately, that provision doesn’t account for human empathy. It did not get invoked during Reagan’s second term, when the signs of his cognitive decline became apparent. It also did not get invoked during the year when Biden’s decline was concealed from the public – or even after his decline became apparent to the entire world.

In my book, as an American and as someone with a degree in political science (hey, I was into the 25th Amendment before it was cool!), if you participated in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, you should not be allowed anywhere near the halls of power. No taxpayer-funded salary, no elections, no consulting gigs. Shoo. Unfortunately, I don’t run the world, so they’ll all go on to enjoy nice and cushy lives.

If Harris did know about Biden’s decline, and if she was part of that cover-up (which is almost certain), then the unusual decision to hold the first presidential debate before the convention becomes a lot more interesting. There are two explanations. The first is hubris. The second is a deliberate tactical move.

If the extra-early debate was due to hubris, it’s possible – just possible – that Biden’s cabinet had decided that he could be medicated and motivated enough for just one public appearance, that he would crush the debate, and help dispel all doubts. (That did not happen.) The second, more cynical explanation, is that Harris’s allies within the cabinet were too afraid to go with the 25th Amendment option, so they deliberately staged the debate before the convention, which made Biden’s mental state apparent, and resulted in Harris winning the nomination less than two months later.

The irony here, of course, is if they hadn’t done that, if Biden had refused to do public appearances, if he’d gotten the party nomination by default (with Harris still as his VP), then he might have defeated Trump, and Harris would’ve just had to wait a bit until Biden died, or resigned, or got 25th-Amendement’ed out of office.

There was at least one conspiracy going on at the time – the cabinet’s year-long (if not longer) charade that Biden was still fully competent, going so far as to stage tightly scripted and orchestrated cabinet meetings where everyone knew their lines and parroted them off in front of cameras.

The election happened more than seven weeks ago. By now, there are probably quite a few tell-all memoirs from Biden’s cabinet making their way through the publishing pipeline. There’s a really good chance that Bob Woodward will publish his own book of insider info, just like he did about Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic – but months after that could’ve done any good. I expect most of those memoirs (especially Harris’s) to gloss over the topic of Biden’s mental decline. I expect at least one of those books to share ugly firsthand accounts of what Biden’s average day looked like, of how they hid him from the public each day, each week, each month…

Either way, the cash-grabbing, most likely ghost-written tell-all books will be ugly: they tell either too many lies or too much truth.

And, just like with Reagan, just like with Biden, just like with whomever else America will elect far past the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers (56) or airline pilots (60-65). Because we learn nothing. And because sometimes, just sometimes, conspiracy theories are true.

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The Continental Divide Trail grows closer…

Filed under: adventuring — 2 Comments
December 23, 2024

I’ve just bought the pricey ticket ($175 USD) for the desert shuttle that would take me from a tiny New Mexico town all the way to the Mexican border on the morning of Monday, April 28th, where I’ll begin my Continental Divide Trail adventure. The shuttle ticket also comes with five water caches every 20 miles because, you know, desert.

So close now… Only 126 days away. Not that I’m counting or anything. I still need to buy a one-way ticket from Quebec to Albuquerque (how is that for a mysterious itinerary? heh), where I’ll crash at an old friend’s place: a bunch of catching up and hanging out, then food-shopping and sending resupply packages to my future selves, and then a 4-hour buddy-buddy roadtrip to Lordsburg, woot! Spend the night there, hop on the shuttle at 6am, and spend a looong 3-hour intro sequence (video game-style) with other CDT adventurers as we all drive to the border. (Ironically, all so we could hike back to the town the shuttle leaves from.)

Most of the gear from my 2022 Pacific Crest Trail adventure is still good, even if the tent has a bit of a broken pole and looks mighty sad when it’s assembled. (Still functional, though!) The biggest expense thus far was the anti-bear Ursack, which allegedly keeps all the snacks away from the many, many bears along the trail. The riskiest part of the resupply will be shoes… I have flat feet, and the Altra Lone Peak shoes are the only ones that work for flat-footed hikers. (I learned that the hard way. Damn Merrell.) Problem is, Altra fell prey to the MBA brain rot, and the latest Lone Peak model has much worse quality: they’re still marketed as hiking shoes, but they seem to fall apart in less than 250 miles, as opposed to the 500+ miles like they used to. A friend of mine had to end his big recent thru-hike prematurely specifically because his new Altra Lone Peaks fell apart, and he couldn’t hike without injuring his foot…

I snagged two pairs of hiking boots by the same brand, so here is hoping they’ll be a bit more durable than the plain old shoes, eh.

All in all – assuming I find a good deal on my plane ticket – my transportation + supplies will cost me less than $1,000 USD. A great deal, considering I’d spent over $3K on all that stuff when I had to buy basically everything for my PCT hike three years ago. (I’d had some gear left over from my Search & Rescue days in Seattle, but that was for short outings, and not at all for long-term hiking. The compass was pretty much the only piece of that gear I ended up using.)

For a wide variety of reasons, I’ll also be technically homeless during my hike: gonna break my apartment lease by the end of April, sell my furniture, yeet the rest of the stuff into a storage unit, and save on five months of rent. (#lifehack, I know.) It’ll add yet another reason not to give up during the inevitable bad days because coming back would mean the long process of apartment-hunting and moving, and nobody enjoys that.

And so… 126 days. Just 18 weeks from now, I’ll be sleeping somewhere else. Somewhere distant. Somewhere goddamn adventurous. Can’t wait.

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An update from the querying trenches

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
December 18, 2024

My big adventure this year was to find a literary agent for my debut time-travel novel. That quest led me down some mighty weird rabbit holes…

After polishing, re-polishing, and starting all over again with my query letter, I got the attention of seven literary agents. One requested a partial (the first 100 pages) but then politely declined. One agent requested the full manuscript (full MS) sort of declined, but said she’d be quite interested in reading a dystopian YA novel based on something I mentioned in my query. Four more requested the full MS during the summer/fall (it’s considered impolite to nudge until at least six months have passed), and earlier this week I received a very enthusiastic reply from a literary agent I’d queried in October. He too asked for the full MS.

Normally, there are two outcomes to a full MS request: either a “thanks but not thanks” or an offer of representation. That’s the holy grail for writers, and it sets off a whole new domino chain… (Still, it typically takes a couple of years for the actual book to get published.) This was my fifth pending full MS request, and – thus far – the most enthusiastic one. I expect to hear back from him within a month…

I had some time away from technology two days ago (horrible, I know!), so I sat down and outlined the final 40% of my dystopian Russian YA novel, and split that outline into 22 small-ish chapters. Knowing that the end is in sight makes the whole thing a lot less scary, and far more manageable. If I go ahead and at least try to write up one chapter per day (no matter how poorly), then huzzah – my first draft will be finished in just 3 weeks. I’ve been knocking out a chapter per day for the past two days (today’s total: 2,667 words!), and I rather like this sort of architect-style self-imposed framework. It doesn’t matter how clunky the outcome is, because the first draft’s job is not to be pretty – it’s merely to exist. To serve as the foundation. And after that, you just keep piling more stuff on top of it, and improving, and brainstorming…

And last but not least, during all my research on the publishing industry, I’ve learned something very peculiar. Turns out, you need the full MS when you’re shopping around your fiction novel, but you do not need that when you have a non-fiction book – such as, say, a memoir/exposé about my 11.5 years at Amazon. (If any agents are reading this, drop me a line!) I honestly had no idea this was how things were done in the non-fiction circles. This entire time, I thought you had to sit down, produce a full-length book, much like with fiction, and then go agent-hunting. I really wish I’d learned this sooner… But oh well. What matters is that, after a great deal of research, I’ve assembled a professional-looking book proposal for my Amazon book. It includes the introduction, the first chapter, my self-promotion plan (podcasts and newspapers and all), the outline, and a whole lot more.

Querying a whole new project while the previous project is still in the querying trenches almost feels like cheating, like taking a brand new sports car out for a test drive. (Vroom vroom!) A whole new slate of agents to email… So far, I’ve identified and contacted the eight agents who have the best sales record in the memoir category and the fastest turnaround time when replying to queries. If my non-fiction query letter sucks, at least I’ll find out right away, eh.

…this is all so wild. I finished writing my sci-fi novel less than a year ago, at the very end of December, and I never would’ve imagined that a) a bunch of actual agents would show interest, and b) one of them would request a spec novel based on my dystopian Russian childhood, and c) I’d start querying an Amazon memoir. Oh, and, of course, that I would become a festival-going filmmaker. (More on that soon.) Huh. All that, in less than a year. Life is so random and beautiful…

And now we wait… And write. And write some more.

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