Tag Archive: sci-fi


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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An update from the querying trenches

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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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Two new firsts

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August 29, 2024

This is probably the inevitable side effect of having played way too many video games, but I tend to view life in terms of levels, scores, and achievements. Some achievements are quite common: you’ve devoured a dragon fruit, huzzah! But so have billions of other people. Other achievements, however…

This week, I have two rare first-time achievements, and they’re mighty fun.

First, I’ve officially become a published author! Not self-published, mind you: I’ve been selling my e-books on Kindle since 2011 or so. No, something I wrote appeared in an actual book, and I got paid for it, contract and all. This also happens to be my first short story sale! My story, “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace,” has been published in a brand new time travel anthology, “Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel.” (Available wherever you buy your books online.)

This is… Somewhat unreal, eh. I’ve been low-key writing and trying, and finally I got it done. These days, there are more short story writers competing for fewer slots than, say, 70 years ago, during the pulp era. In terms of sheer competitiveness, this is a bit like Olympic gymnastics: if you watch videos of gold medalists from 80 or so years ago, today’s gymnasts (especially Simone Biles!) are basically superheroes compared to them. It’s fun to live in a world that’s advanced so much in just about every competitive field, but that also means we’re playing at a much higher difficulty level than the earlier generations.

In any case, huzzah – and here’s hoping I’ll manage to get more publication credits. Also, that short story takes place in the same universe as my thus-far-unagented sci-fi novel “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” With any luck, this will give me that extra bit of visibility that would attract an awesome literary agent. I’m trying multiple things at once, and I’m positive at least one of them will work.

The second fun new achievement is my interview on CBC radio! There’s a weekly meetup group for expats here in Quebec City, and it’s called Bla Bla Language Exchange. Not long ago, we got a visit from a radio journalist who conducted short interviews with some of us. Part of my interview made it into the final broadcast. I’ll never get used to the way my voice sounds on tape, but I suppose that’s a universal human experience, eh? Anyway, head over yonder to listen to the segment (it’s quite fun!) – my part starts at 9:45.

This year doesn’t have a grand hiking adventure (that’ll be in 2025!), but it does have a lot of mini-adventures, each of which is just as fascinating in its own little way. Here is to many, many more.

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Done at last

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March 16, 2024

At last. At long, long last. It is done.

A few nights ago, I made the final edit to my brain-baby, my first-ever novel-length work of fiction (science fiction, to be precise), my “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I got the idea for it way back in 2015, if not before, and I started to slowly but surely gather the information on all sorts of myths, fun historical anecdotes, and just about anything else I could blame on a careless time traveler. (There’s quite a lot of that, it turns out.) Then I started scribbling my first draft, and then…

Workaholism. Years and years of it. Zero stars, two thumbs down, would not recommend. You can see it even on the sideline of this blog: there were hardly any entries in 2018, and that was pretty indicative of my slump in creativity and, to be honest, overall higher brain function. (85-hour workweeks will do that to you.)

There was another attempt to resume my novel in 2020, when there wasn’t much else to do. Soon enough, the fear of covid and the pressure of negative news extinguished even that.

Ironically, I should credit my slow-paced year at the nearby community college last year with giving me that final push. By the end of each day, frustrated with the pace of school, I would spend an hour writing my novel and an hour studying genetics (thanks for the free course, MIT!) just to feel I’ve done something – anything – productive at all with my day.

And then an old college friend of mine published his own sci-fi trilogy, and that filled me with all the conviction I needed. Finally, here was a real-life person from my own social circle who managed to get a bona fide book deal! Without him, my own novel might not have happened. Thanks, D-Clark!

And so… It’s done. It feels unbelievably strange to no longer have that pressure on the back of my mind, that guilt of procrastinating when I could be writing and sharing my unusual take on time travel with the world. All in all, this 104,000-word novel took me 9.5 years – almost half of my adult life. How weird is that? The other day, a friend of a friend lost his video game account – some sort of MMORPG where you can grow your own empire and level up from a peasant to an emperor. His account got deleted because he instigated an online fight with another player outside the game. He’d spent 15 years of his life on it – his entire adult life. And now it’s gone, deleted without trace. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like… But it’s also a startling contrast: different people spend their free time doing vastly different things. Some exercise to the point of winning athletic competitions or bodybuilding contests. Some build virtual empires that might get deleted with a single click. Some write huge sci-fi novels. Choose your own adventure, eh?

This feels quite strange. I have nearly infinite free time and a bulletproof self-esteem, so I will keep submitting my novel to literary agents until one of them accepts me as a client (hi, agent-friend! thank you for checking out my blog!!) and then helps me find a publisher. I am convinced that at some point in the future, my book will end up on store shelves. (No more Kindle samizdat, not ever.) By having written my book, by having contacted my first prospective book agent, I’ve set in motion a chain of events that may never be undone. I have no illusions of awards or mass recognition, but I will be a published author as the result of my actions, and there’s no way to scuttle back when that happens. One way or another, a whole new chapter of my life will begin.

This sensation is similar to the time I made a very big (and, ultimately, successful) investing decision in 2020, or left my ridiculously safe (but stressful) Amazon job in 2021, after 11.5 years with the company. It’s partly fear, partly excitement, partly realization that once I take this step, there is no going back. It is a unique, terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating feeling, and it is absolutely goddamn beautiful.

Here is to the future.

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Book review: “Artemis” by Andy Weir

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February 11, 2018

In his second sci-fi novel, Andy Weir, the author of “The Martian,” tried to do a 180 turn and write something different. His novel “Artemis” was only partly successful.

“Artemis” takes place on the sole human settlement on the moon, where everyone has a specific task, laws are mostly guidelines, the population is just a few thousand people, and everybody knows and (mostly) adores our protagonist, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara.

Jazz is a 26-year-old full-time porter, part-time smuggler, whose family left Saudi Arabia when she was a kid, and who ends up getting in the world of trouble as the novel begins. It’s unclear what Weir was going for with this character: she has the mentality of a 16-year-old and the inner monologue of a teenage boy. (John Scalzi’s “Zoe’s Tale” came much closer to adopting the persona of a female protagonist, and he said that it took him ages to hone in on that writing style.) It doesn’t help that Jazz is Mary Sue incarnate: she can become an expert in electronics in just one day, or understand a groundbreaking PhD dissertation in chemistry after spending a few hours online.

To be fair, the science part of this science fiction novel was beautiful: Weir goes to great lengths to explain why Kenya would end up as a spacefaring superpower with its equatorial location; how to survive a fire in an oxygen-rich moon city; how and why an aluminum processing plant would prosper on the moon. The economy he describes is interesting as well: a single credit can buy you a gram of cargo shipped from the Earth.

Overall, the book is great sci-fi but with a supremely flat main character. When it inevitably becomes a movie, the screenwriters will probably do yet another 180 and give Jazz a personality transplant. Until then, however, I don’t recommend picking up “Artemis” until and unless you finish everything else on your “to read” list.

I give this book two out of five stars.

Full disclosure: I received an advance reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Buy “Artemis” on Amazon here, if you so choose.

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Book review: “It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel”

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November 6, 2017

I really, really wanted to enjoy the new Welcome to Night Vale novel. As a faithful podcast listener who went to the live shows and enjoyed the first novel two years ago, I’d expected something as fulfilling and creative, but I was a bit disappointed in what I found.

The new novel focuses very little on the characters we all know and love from the podcast. Instead, Cecil, his family, and the protagonists of the first novel make a brief appearance, and Carlos shows up for a little while, but most of the action is concentrated on brand new characters. One is Nilanjara Sikdar, one of the scientists who arrived to Night Vale with Carlos. The other one is Darryl Ramirez, a faithful follower of the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God.

This novel is yet another attempt to approach the ancient debate between science and religion. The two main characters, unfortunately, are two-dimensional stereotypes with a fair amount of personality slapped on top. As they team up to investigate the strange phenomenon (or possibly a creature) that devours parts of Night Vale, the anti-religion scientist learns to accept unscientific things and hunches, while the super-naive religious guy reconsiders his beliefs and offers some moral pointers to Carlos and his merry team of scientists.

This novel has some great writing, and oh-so-many quotable passages, as well as little jokes that make Welcome to Night Vale so great. (“D-Day is short for Dog Day, which happened during World War II, when we defeated the Germans by not letting them come over to pet our dogs anymore.”) It has some insightful thoughts about the nature of humanity and the overall silliness of humans. But overall, it’s not an entertaining novel that was written to entertain the reader. It’s a story about science and religion, with some characters thrown in to keep it going and bring a preachy ending that’s relatively easy to see coming.

Without giving away any of the plot, let me put it this way: if you enjoyed the postmodern romance movie “500 Days of Summer,” which was cleverly written and shot but had a very non-traditional ending, you’ll enjoy this book. If, on the other hand, you want your leisure reading to have a concise story where everything ends well and everyone lives happily ever after, you might want to skip this book – or get it from the library.

Come to think of it, a good analogy would be the Narnia books by C.S.Lewis: it’s a fun and interesting story on the surface, but then you realize the author is preaching to you, and it becomes far less enjoyable. In this case, the preaching is balanced out and neither side is fully right, but that doesn’t make it better in my eyes.

I give this book three out of five stars.

Buy “It Devours” on Amazon, if you’re so inclined

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Book review: Paradox Bound by Peter Clines

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October 27, 2017

I love time travel novels: they’re challenging to write and fun to read. There are inventive plot twists, creative time machines, and tons of historical trivia. Paradox Bound, the new novel by Peter Clines, is all that and much more. According to Clines, he’d spent more years writing Paradox Bound than he did any other book – and that certainly shows!

It’s tough to describe the plot without giving away the wonderful, delicious surprises, so I’ll just state the very basics. It’s a story about a Millennial guy named Eli who lives in a boring small town in Maine and who has a crush on the mysterious woman who passes through every few years, wearing antique outfits and driving a souped-up Ford Model A. It’s a story about America and its history, both the heroic past and the uncertain future. It’s a story about a community of time travelers (or “history travelers,” as they prefer to be called) who travel through history in their antique cars. (Similar to Chuck Palahniuk’s “Rant,” only with less NC-17 content.) It’s a story about the pursuit of a dream above all else.

It also features faceless government men, an ancient Egyptian god, the Founding Fathers, and subtle references to every other novel Clines has ever written. The many, many plot twists kept me glued to the book: some of them could be guessed, while others were both beautiful and brilliant in their complexity. It helps that Clines used to be a Hollywood writer and knows his way around pacing, dialogue and overall structure – the book flows like a dream. (Or like the 2030 Tesla X!)

The only other time travel novel I’ve read that achieved this level of beauty and twisted complexity is The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold, an underappreciated 1973 masterpiece that was ahead of its time. Clines left enough loose ends for there to be a sequel, which I’ll await most eagerly.

Paradox Bound also touches on some deeper themes. There is an interesting encounter with a folk hero from the 19th century whose story is told from a different angle. There’s the uncomfortable fact that female time travelers have a much easier time if they disguise themselves as men in their trips to the past. There’s an interesting subplot of cops forcing another cop to sign a document that would permanently change his life. (And not for the better.) The book doesn’t preach, but it gives more than enough food for thought to its careful readers.

One word of caution: there are a couple of mild adult moments in the novel, so you may not want to give it your 8-year-old – wait until they hit their teenage years. If, however, you’re buying this book for yourself and if you enjoy time travel yarns, inventive plots, and strong female characters with low tolerance for nonsense, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I give this book five out of five stars.

Full disclosure: I received an advance reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Buy Paradox Bound on Amazon

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Book review: “All Our Wrong Todays” by Elan Mastai

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January 29, 2017

Have you ever wondered if our world made a wrong turn somewhere? Sure, we have computers and smartphones and shiny video games, but what happened to the yesteryear dreams of jetpacks and space travel and flying cars? Well, now we know whom to blame: Tom Barren, the world’s worst time-traveler and the protagonist of Elan Mastai’s debut novel “All Our Wrong Todays.”

As it turns out, the most important event in human history happened on July 11th, 1965, when an eccentric scientist named Lionel Goettreider launched a device that harvested a new type of energy. The Goettreider Engine revolutionized everything, solved the energy crisis and turned the world into a utopia. Goettreider himself dies during the experiment (taking 16 fellow scientists with him), but that just helped cement his status as the new messiah of the utopian world. (The unfortunate scientists are remembered as “the 16 witnesses.”)

The story begins when our hapless protagonist, the scion of a famous physics professor, gets picked as a backup in the first ever time travel expedition. The grateful people of the futuristic 2015 want to go back in time (and space, accounting for the planetary movement) to witness the famous 1965 experiment. The end result is Tom waking up in our timeline, in our 2015, which to him seems like a dystopian nightmare. The Goettreider Engine doesn’t exist; buildings aren’t organically grown from smart materials; we use gas-guzzling cars instead of the fancy flying ones; worst of all, you have to pay other adults to pay your hair! And, on top of all that, the world he grew up in has ceased to exist, along with all his friends and relatives. Meet Tom Barren, destroyer of worlds.

As a self-proclaimed sci-fi junkie, I have to say – this book is probably the best time travel book I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. (The runner-ups are “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu and “Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey” by Chuck Palahniuk.) It deconstructs just about every time travel trope out there, flirts with a few that are either brand new or downright extinct, and provides dozens of quotable zingers and assorted deep thoughts.

The 380-page story is told from a first-person perspective, and we get to know Tom Barren well: an aimless 32-year-old who grew up in the shadow of his father, never had a lasting relationship and, despite being smarter than an average bear, has a remarkable talent for ruining things. (The fact that he has to share his mind with his alternate-universe self doesn’t help.) The ongoing, unceasing mental narrative reminded me a lot of the aforementioned “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” expect much more so.

“All Our Wrong Todays” offers something unique for fans of both hard sci-fi and human interest stories. On the one hand, the book goes into quite a lot of detail regarding the plot holes of most time travel stories. (A recurring plot point is having to track down the exact spatial coordinates – miss by 3″ and you’re done for.) On the other hand, a huge part of the plot is dealing with the impossibly large implications of wiping out an entire timeline. On top of that, there’s time travel ethics: if you change history and end up accidentally getting a new relative, would reversing the change count as murder? If you liked “Safety Not Guaranteed” (probably the best human-interest time travel movie out there), you’ll love this book because it’s just like that, but amplified tenfold.

It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel: there are plot twists you won’t see coming, turns of phrase that will stick in your mind long after you finish the book. It sets a high standard for all the other sci-fi writers, newbie or otherwise, and should be on every sci-fi fan’s bookshelf.

I give this book five out of five stars.

Full disclosure: I received an advance reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review – but then loved it so much that I pre-ordered a hardcover copy.

Pre-order “All Our Wrong Todays” on Amazon. (Release date: February 7th, 2017)

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