Tag Archive: sci-fi


In which the author takes performance-inducing drugs

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July 12, 2025

…by which, to be clear, I mean caffeine and sugar. Mostly caffeine, really. So much caffeine.

I know this is ultimately unhealthy, and I know that Brando Sando (allegedly) doesn’t even consume coffee, but he’s the unattainable ideal of us writers. (The man wrote a bunch of full-length novels in secret while writing his regularly scheduled books during the lockdown.)

On the other hand, there’s Stephen King and Philip K. Dick, both of whom abused hard drugs with gusto. King said there are entire novels from that part of his life that he simply doesn’t remember writing, and PKD’s output was legendary – until he died of stroke at 53. (To be fair, even goody-two-shoes folks can get fatal strokes, and it can’t be proven that the drugs played a part.)

And then there’s me, chugging an extra-large black coffee with a Tim Hortons donut, which had been preceded by a passable cup of coffee and an above-average slice of chocolate cake at a fun little coffee date… The nature of my creative fuel is almost hilariously geeky by comparison, but hey, if it works, it works.

During the long walk home (the damn bus strike – still – but also, the weather was perfect), an old seed of an idea finally sprouted and, well, I aim to spend the rest of the night typing up the first draft of my first foray into a horror story. (With heavy sci-fi elements, of course, because come on…) Then I’ll sleep on it (after binge-watching a few more episodes of Alone), apply several coats of edits and shoe-shine – and then it shall join the ranks of my as-yet-unsold short stories and start the big bounce between the genre magazines looking for this sort of thing.

And now… Time to type, eh.

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In which the author gets his daily steps – and then some!

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July 10, 2025

If my eventual cause of death isn’t “misadventure,” I will be very very surprised. For anyone in the distant future trying to make sense of my life and/or to create a facsimile virtual mind (good luck with that, bud), this here is a fine example of one of the core parts of my personality…

Quebec City’s bus drivers are on strike. Again. This time, the strike is 13 days long, timed specifically to coincide with the gigantic annual music festival, FEQ. I had been under the (very wrong, very misguided) impression that the strike had ended. That was incorrect.

When I got up, my plan for the day was fairly simple, as those things go: take a leisurely 90-minute walk (yes, 90) to the local Ikea, enjoy their 50% off Thursday dining hall, get a few tiny parts for my bookshelf (each move takes its toll, eh), then take the bus to the tourist sector, return a couple of library books, pick a new book, then rush back to the bus to take advantage of the 90-minute bus pass window, and head home. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong.

The 90-minute hike went fairly well: I got to experience a new (and not very impressive) part my city firsthand, with my own feet and nose and eyes. The Ikea visit was only partially productive, but their diner was fine as always. And then… Well, then I realized I could either walk 90 minutes back home, or 150 minutes (that’s 2.5 hours) to the tourist sector (aka Old Quebec), followed by a two-hour hike home afterwards. Reader, I chose option B.

I have two legs, high stamina, and way too much stubbornness for my own damn good. (Incidentally, this is yet another reason women usually live longer than men.) If I went home, I might as well have postponed all my library-related plans for 96 whole hours, assuming the strike ended on schedule. I support the drivers’ right to strike, but I also refuse to stay put. My 2022 PCT thru-hike is partially to blame: after you walk from Mexico to Canada, from that point on just about anything is in walking distance. It’s only a matter of logistics, really.

And, well, that’s how I got my 56,800 steps for the day, aka 28.4 kilometers or 17.6 miles. With a roughly 10lb backpack on my back. Also got a damn fine dose of vitamin D, and a bit of a sunburn on my face, but it wouldn’t be the first time. (Though, admittedly, the contrast between my arms (currently a nice shade of brown) and the rest of my body (Snow White’s long-lost brother from another mother) is mighty hilarious.

No regrets. Ever.

In creative news, my debut film (Please Don’t Send Help) has been accepted by two film festivals! One has asked me to postpone the announcement till later (secrecy makes everything more exciting), and the other one is ReadingFilmFest, an annual film festival held in the town of West Reading, PA. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania in my life, so it’ll be exciting to attend that fest in person in October. (Their generous assistance with lodging is much appreciated!) I’ll make another post soon about my rather ambitious plans to make a film festival circuit of my very own… ReadingFilmFest was definitely part of that list. One down, many more to go!

And now, time to lean back, enjoy a big cold beer, and play some Stardew Valley to unwind… Aww yeah.

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In which the author experiments with ultra-minimalism

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June 26, 2025

Been sleeping on the floor these past five weeks. This has been due to a very logical set of decisions culminating in a pretty eccentric conclusion. I wrote about it a few posts ago, but briefly: my attempted thru-hike from Mexico to Canada ended prematurely, all my things were in storage, and I still had my empty apartment’s lease till July 1.

Ipso facto, didn’t make much sense to deal with a moving truck for just a few weeks.As of right now, my studio apartment has one small cooking pot (no lid), one fork, one pocket knife (mangos are hard!), a small pile of clothes, a laptop, a cellphone, a few chargers, some hygiene stuff, and two empty backpacks. Oh, and the sleeping bag I use on the floorboards (I’m not a barbarian), though without a mat (I’m not a king). There are also kitchen appliances (fridge, freezer, stove), but they’re more or less a default setting for rentals.

And… that’s pretty much it. Since mid-May, I joined a nice little anglophone library, attended a book sale, and have acquired a small stack of books that I haven’t quite read yet. In other words, the usual routine has been reestablished.I like to think of myself as a minimalist with a bit of an art hoard, but this is mighty minimalistic even for me, eh. This strange little lifestyle design experiment has had some interesting outcomes…

For example, I don’t miss my art, or my cool gem and mineral collection. Not sure if that’s because I’d gotten so used to them over the years, or because mentally, I’m still in a flux over the failed thru-hike adventure. (Not bad, just weird; a lot of compulsive walking.)

I have internet access through my phone’s frankly exorbitant data plan, and I use my phone as a hotspot whenever I need to do something on my laptop. I’m not streaming anything because I want to preserve all those gigabytes, and I rather miss Netflix. And gaming, even though I realize how addictive that hobby is. (I literally dream of Skyrim.)

Ironically and unexpectedly, the thing I miss the most is radio. Just a plain old little radio-clock cube thingy that can be set to a local station, to babble at me in that beautiful blend that is the Quebecois French, because, frankly, it’s impossible to learn from any app. (The continental French is an entirely different animal.)

One objective improvement has been my productivity. With my desktop in storage, I haven’t made any new short films, but now I have so much time (and so few distractions) to simply write. Over the pasy five weeks, I’ve written five short stories. They range in length from 333 to 5,400 words, and one of them has already been accepted by a Canadian anthology, woooo! (More on that later, once the contract is signed.) Also, I’ve just signed the contract for another anthology – this one will be about superheroes, and will feature my February story “To Fly or Not to Fly.” (Inspired by my experience with bureaucracies and the time I jumped into traffic to save a feral toddler.) The other stories I’ve written recently (and earlier) are awaiting replies from a wide variety of magazines. There’s one particular (and major) magazine that has been sitting on my new submitted story for quite a while now… I’m cautiously optimistic, given that their usual turnaround time is just a day or two.

All in all, this has been the most productive stretch of my life, writing-wise. Perhaps it’s the near-isolation, or the sheer emptiness of my living space (my studio isn’t big, but it looks huge without 97% of my stuff), or the fact that the weather is finally good enough to go on looong walks (think 2-5 hours) without being threatened by the elements – just walking and thinking and meditating on new plots and absorbing random new experiences. (Quebec City didn’t get its T-shirt weather till late May. I love this town, but I swear, the spring is getting colder every year.)

Or maybe it’s none of those things, and the wacky desert adventure, where each day had more new experiences than a fortnight in this town, reshuffled my brain and finally helped me internalize the way the narrative process works. I had so many stranger-than-fiction encounters in that desert… I miss it.

Or maaaaybe the secret factor here is that I’ve been doing a helluva lot of reading. In addition to going through my gigantic “to read” list (it’s in triple figures!), I’ve also been devouring the Wolrdcon finalist packet. Worldcon is the biggest annual sci-fi/fantasy convention (held in Seattle this year), and since they picked me for their short film festival, I figured I might as well go for the full event, not just for one day. $275 bought me full membership privileges, the convention pass (it’ll be so much fun to finally meet all my favourite authors), and the PDF versions of all the short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels (and many other categories) that made it to the final round of voting.

I take my newfound responsibility seriously, which is why I’m reading all of them. Every last one. They are delicious, eh. Currently almost done with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Service Model” – that novel is an absolute blast. (Think Wall-E mixed with Fallout.) I’ve literally laughed out loud – and often – while reading it. Five stars, highly recommended.

So, yeah, inspiration galore. About a week from now, I’ll move into my new apartment (it’ll have a balcony! but no bathtub…) and get all my things from storage, and my life will once again have Netflix, and video games, and other time magnets. Here is hoping the new habits will stick.

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In which the author gets agented!

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April 11, 2025

I spent a very long time anticipating the day when I’d be able to use this header. And, of course, then I wrote it three days too late. But hey, time is a flat circle, right? (In my defense, I’ve been doing a lot of celebrating, and even more editing and rewriting.)

My awesome new agent is Brandy Vallance of Barbara Bova Literary Agency. (The same agency that brought us “Ender’s Game” – wooo!) Brandy is an author-turned-agent, an expert in the craft of writing, and the best advocate and supporter an author could ever ask for. Together, we shall find the perfect home for “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes.” (And then, afterwards, for “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide” – and many more to come!)

Brandy was one of the very first agents I queried when I started agent-hunting over a year ago. The query odyssey was long and convoluted, and this post is not about that. Some other day, perhaps. Suffice to say, I’m not merely happy that I’ve leveled up as a writer – I’m ecstatic that I won’t have to deal with query trenches ever again!

Being agented is… wild. It’s a wild feeling, eh. I don’t have the numbers (and I don’t think anyone does), but I guesstimate that only 1% (if not less) of the folks who finish their novel ever end up agented. From what I’ve heard, it’s gotten even more difficult after covid. Some think that’s because millions of people had a chance to finally write their novel during the lockdown. Others blame ChatGPT: when anyone can generate a bunch of slop in a single afternoon, the number of queried novels goes way up, resulting in severe bottlenecks.

Whatever the case, it feels so strange – though in a good way – to be an actual agented writer. That’s not something you can buy, not something that’s awarded based on your looks or height – that’s based on merit. I’d started tinkering with my first novel way back in 2015, and didn’t finalize it till 2024. The novel Brandy and I will focus on had taken me just eight months to brainstorm, write, and edit. (Yes, that timeline is pretty symbolic, I know.) Between 2015 and now, I tried my hand at quite a few short stories, some of which actually got sold. I’ve been writing non-fiction Kindle e-books since 2011, and while they are, well, not fiction, that also gave me a fair bit of practice.

I’ve never taken a writing course, though I do have a growing collection of books on the craft of writing. (My top two recommendations are Chuck Palahniuk’s “Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different” and Damon Knight’s “Creating Short Fiction.”) I don’t know a single person even remotely close to the publishing industry. I’ve never been to writing workshops or retreats, and I can’t even imagine what goes on in MFAs. I’ve never been to a writing conference, and the only real-life pitch I’ve ever done was during a small panel at last year’s New York Comic Con – something I’d found completely by accident. (The feedback I got after my 60-second speech? “…I like the title.” Oof.)

I’ve been a lifelong reader, though, and a careful learner, with lots of time to think and brainstorm.

My method was simple: I just sat down and forced myself to overcome my hesitation and my self-doubts, and then I started writing. Perhaps not every day (though I tried to), and with a lot of outlines, powered by stubbornness and perseverance – because waiting for a muse didn’t prove to be a reliable strategy. And then… I developed a very thick skin: some of the rejections were hurtful; many queries just got ghosted, without even a token reply. I spent a lot of time spent querying, and revising my novels, and keeping the wordcount below 100,000. And I was patient. Very, very patient.

And even then success is never guaranteed. The nudge for my new novel (think “Ender’s Game” x “Chernobyl” x “The Umbrella Academy”) came from the most unexpected and unlikely source, though that’s a whole different story. If not for that, “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes” might never have been written.

So if you’re currently in the query trenches, and you’re reading this… I don’t have the secret recipe, or the secret sauce, or a $9.99 book of advice that would boost your chances. You almost certainly already know all the advice I’ve mentioned. There’s nothing I can do to actually help you with your query, but I hope you will find some solace and encouragement in my words. I was just a guy, and then I started writing, and it took me a very long time, but I got signed. I’m not so insensitive as to say, “If I could do it, then anyone can do it” – but I hope my example will give comfort to other outsiders, to other folks who have no credentials beyond their love of fiction and their penchant for writing.

Onward, eh.

Ever onward.

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In which the author’s stratagems bear fruit

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April 5, 2025

There’s a fairly old video game, Red Dead Redemption, and it has a beautiful theme song… The lyrics are beautiful, but this bit in particular always resonated with me:

“And all the storms you’ve been chasin’
About to rain down tonight.”

The sum total of long-term plans, all coming to fruition at the same time. This week has been like that for my writing endeavours.

First, the Pulp Asylum magazine bought my short story “Murder of the Orient Express” (of, not on). After that, Story Unlikely bought the reprint rights to my very first sold story, “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace.” And last but not least, I’ve sold my first-ever non-fiction work! My essay “The Hierarchy of Apocalypses” will appear in an upcoming issue of Phano. It’s about my video game escapism during the pandemic, and the many, many ways we as a society have chosen to outsource our humanity to machines. I’ve written quite a few non-fiction Kindle books before, but this is the first actual non-fiction essay sale. Hopefully, the first of many!

Also, I’ve finished yet another short film! That particular project is still top-secret, but it is – for once – not sci-fi, and it deals with a quixotic astronaut. Gonna add a few finishing touches and then try my luck submitting it to some A-list festivals. (The odds may be against me, but I have infinite time and optimism.)

Needless to say, this week has been one long series of celebrations. It’s a good thing I’m trying to gain as much weight as possible for my upcoming Continental Divide Trail adventure. (I fly out in just 17 days, wooo!) And on top of that, I have a very very enthusiastic agent reading my new novel (“The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes”), and a few more stories submitted to anthologies – which have not yet been rejected on sight. (That’s always a good sign!)

I can’t quite describe how great this feels: after months of rejections, receiving three acceptance emails (and on the same week!) is an unbelievable dopamine boost.

I track all my story submissions (and rejections) in a plain old text file – that’s fast and easy. At this point, I’m starting to run low on the unsold stories, which is an excellent problem to have! I’m currently reading the wonderful “Creating Short Fiction” by Damon Knight – reading it slowly, because (unlike so many writing guides…), it’s choke-full of advice and food for thought. The goal is to read it and internalize its lessons (or most of them, anyway) before my big CDT hike. I won’t have a lot of free time on my adventure, but I’ll have some – and I’ll have many many hours of nothing but hiking, and thinking, and brainstorming. This isn’t one of my primary goals for the hike (and not even in the top-5), but I suspect I’ll finish it with quite a few new short stories and poems. We’ll see, eh.

Here is to more acceptance letters from editors!

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Short story level-up!

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March 25, 2025

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.

Good luck, eh.

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In which the author finishes his second novel

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March 24, 2025

Short version: HUZZAH!!!

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.

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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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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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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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