Adam Perin's Blog

I wrote Long March over ten years ago.  I’ve always had an affinity for historical dramas, and the Great War seemed like an era that was woefully underrepresented in modern cinema.  It was never meant to be a true story, or even based in truth.  What I wanted was to set fictional events against historical events, and weave a story that veered between being a war drama and a supernatural thriller.  I suppose that was my way of making the story more unique.

Long March follows the story of two men, one an American serving in the British Army and the other a German sniper.  The story takes place against the Battle of Passchendaele, which ran from July to November of 1917.  This battle, also known as “Third Ypres,” became famous both for the extreme numbers of casualties suffered over its duration, and also for the mud that so typified the landscape.  When you see the very typical pictures of World War I “No-Man’s Land,” those nightmarish scenes of unimaginable mud, barbed wire, trenches and machine guns, Passchendaele embodies all of it.  This video below gives some good background on the battle, and is pretty interesting too!

Long March is a work I am singularly proud of.  I put an immense amount of work into the screenplay, particularly on research and characterization.  I think I succeeded in creating at least a mostly accurate portrayal of the time, even given the more fantastical nature of some events in the story.  The overarching story of two men who are diatmetrically opposite reflections of one another, inevitably drawn together across the killing fields of World War I Belgium, is one of the best things I’ve ever written.

I hope you’ll take a moment to visit the Long March screenplay page and take a look.  You can either read it right here on the site or download a .pdf.  Either way, I invite you to little taste of World War I and the bizarre events that take place therein.

 

The post Long March appeared first on Adam Perin's Author Website.

Writing is a process and everyone’s process is different.  I’ve always had a great deal of interest in how other writers get from point A (the idea) to point B (the finished story).  How many times have a read a story or watched a movie and thought “that was a great idea, how did they come up with that?”  Well, in the interest of that question I’m going to share a little bit about my method and how I write a short story.  In this case, I’ll be discussing One Little Spacepod.  (***SPOILER ALERT*** – if you plan on reading the story, do so before reading this post!)

Ideas come randomly at all hours of the day.  There is almost never a case where I’ve sat down and thought “I’m going to conceive a story right now,” and proceed to work it all out in one sitting.  I wish I could do that, but I can’t.  There is usually a fragment of a concept that occurs to me, unrelated to anything else, that serves as the seed of the story.  It can come from reading a news article, watching TV, a conversation, or just while walking the dog.  That’s the easy part.  The hard part is taking that seed and turning it into a coherent story.  I have many, many seeds that never grow into stories.  Most rot away in a notebook somewhere waiting for their turn to be written and end up waiting forever.

The hard part is taking that seed and turning it into a coherent story.  I have many, many seeds and very few grow into stories.  Most rot away in a notebook somewhere waiting for their turn to be written and end up waiting forever.

In relation to that, I always write notes in black-and-white Mead Composition books.  It’s all I use and ever have used.   They are the repositories for countless snippets of ideas, information, characters, situations, plot points, themes, and vocabulary that may or may not ever find themselves into a story.  I have many of these notebooks sitting on my shelves, filled up cover to cover.

For One Little Spacepod, I simply wanted to try my hand at writing a mystery.  I had been on an Agatha Christie kick for a little while and thought I’d take a stab at it.  It also occurred to me that you don’t see that many murder mysteries set in science fiction settings, so it seemed like a good idea.  So, I started putting things together little by little.  Building the story, even a short story, for me is a somewhat slow process.

In the case of every story, screenplay and novel I’ve ever written, I figure out the ending first (point B), then the opening scene (point A), then connect A to B.  Depending on the length of the story, there are several plot points between A and B that lead you through the story.  Short stories may not have many of these, while novels and screenplays have many.  Spacepod is a novella, so it lies somewhere in-between.[image error]

Plot points in these case are obviously the murders.  That made plotting a little easier.  The characters, however, were very difficult.  Or rather, the characters and their relation to one another.  In this type of mystery (the so-called “country house” mystery), you have a small group of people in an isolated location that fall victim to an unseen assailant.  The characters, who at first seem unrelated, are revealed to unexpected relationships to one another that make each of them suspect in one way or another.  Each character must also, of course, have a secret of some kind.

So in the case of Spacepod, it took me a while to conceive of the characters first, but then to arrange them in such a way that there were relationships between each of them.  The picture I’ve included here is a page from my notebook where I’ve drawn a picture of who is connected to who (via their initials).  I had several more pages where I fleshed out each of these relationships more clearly.  A lot of these relationships involve either bad blood between people or hidden romantic liaisons, either of which provides good fodder for murderous intent!

The other big decision to make with this story was the location.  By necessity, a story like this has to be set somewhere isolated and cut off from outside intervention.  It should also be impossible for any of the characters to “escape” and simply run away once people start kicking the bucket (that wouldn’t be too exciting, would it?)  So, I arrived at an isolated outpost in deep space, a listening post whose very existence is a secret.  That would ensure that 1) no one came to help and 2) no one can just walk away.  The impending arrival of the Cnidarians (and the horrible death and destruction they would bring) serves as a countdown clock th[image error]at adds tension to the situation.  The setting for these type of mysteries is important, not just for where it is but how the scene is laid out.   Agatha Christie would sometimes include diagrams in her books depicting the layout of the scene of the crime.  This picture would be referred to often so the reader can relate the position of characters at various times in the story, helping to deduce who was where and when.  Such clues are often vital to deducing the murderer.

I didn’t include a sketch of the outpost in the story, but I did make a sketch for myself!  In my own mind, I needed to know exactly where all the characters were at all times.  This image shows the sketch I made, solely for my own reference as I wrote the story.  The numbers you see annotated on the picture correspond to the murders (they are numbered in the previous image).  Each murder occurred a definite day and time, and for each I had to know where every character way and what they were doing.  The next image is a chart I made of each murder, listing where each character was at that time.  You’ll notice I’ve crossed out a few entries and re-written them.  Normally what I plan to ha[image error]ppen at first and what ends up actually being in the final draft are very different.

So I have the opening, the ending, the location and the characters.  I know who’s going to live and who’s going to die.  I know how they’re going to die (it took a while to figure that out).  Finally, I made a list of the clues (what kind of a mystery doesn’t have clues?)  A lot of these were informational fragments or ideas (“bracelet,” “bloody crowbar” “seeing Michalik and Wenona together” “lack of bloody footprints in lab”).  Often I had no idea how they would work into the story.  I probably wrote about thirty or forty of these and ending up using less than then.  Some of these also spurred the method of murder for a particular character, too (Which came first, the murder or the clue?)

After all that, the writing is the easy part!  I probably wrote the first draft in a couple weeks once I sat down to do it.  The prep work (all the above) took much longer.  Normally, I write a first draft, set it aside and work on something else, and come back to it weeks later to try to look at it “cold.”  Then I’ll revise it and do it again for three or four drafts before I get sick of revising and decide its complete.  I wrote this story with the intention of selling it to a magazine, but that was always a longshot.  At over 16K words, its too long for most publications.  The market for science fiction novellas is microscopically tiny and occupied mostly by established authors, so it was no surprise to me that no one wanted it.  But, I knew that going in and did it anyway.  I wanted to see if I could do it and I enjoyed it!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into my writing process.  I wish other authors would put their methods out there.  I’m always curious how others do it and I can’t be the only one.  Until next time….

 

 

The post On writing a mystery – “One Little Spacepod” appeared first on Adam Perin's Author Website.

For the inaugural post in my blog, I’m going to invite you to download and read my novella, “One Little Spacepod.”  This is a previously unpublished work, available for the first time here and absolutely free!
“One Little Spacepod” is a science fiction ‘whodunit’ in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie.   Or, I should say, it is my humble and I’m sure ultimately insufficient homage to her work.  Christie was a master of the genre and an unparalleled genius.   So of course like any overly ambitious author, I liked her stories so much I thought I’d take a stab at writing one myself!
“One Little Spacepod” takes place at an isolated outpost on a small moon in deep space.  This story, like almost all my science fiction stories, take place in the same universe but at wildly varying places and times.  In that universe, the Earth has been at war with a fierce alien race known as the “Cnidarians” for many, many years.
This story is but a small piece of a far flung corner of that conflict.  It’s a sci-fi take on the well-worn trope of the “country house whodunit” where a spooky  isolated mansion, several seemingly unrelated guests and a murderer in their midst sets the stage for a great mystery.  Popular examples of this setting come are Christie’s “And Then There Were None” and Neil Simon’s hilarious satire “Murder by Death.”
So that’s it for now.  Please go to the “Stories” tab and visit the “One Little Spacepod” page.  Download and enjoy.  In my next post, I’m going to discuss the story more in depth, and explain my process for writing a whodunit, which is MUCH more complicated that you might think!

The post Welcome to my blog and my first free story! appeared first on Adam Perin's Author Website.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

I’m pleased to announce that my story, “The Suns of Quetzalcoatl,” has sold to Deepwood Publishing to appear in their “Ancient New” anthology!  This collection focuses on strange collaborations between new technology and ancient societies.

The story is an alternate history tale set thousands of years in the future, where the Aztecs have become Earth’s dominant space-faring race.

I’m pretty proud of this story.  The anthology’s release date is still TBD, but I’ll put the word out when a publishing date becomes available.

 

I'm pleased to announce that my story, "The Suns of Quetzalcoatl," has sold to Deepwood Publishing to appear in their "Ancient New" anthology!  This collection focuses on strange collaborations between new technology and ancient societies.

The story is an alternate history tale set thousands of years in the future, where the Aztecs have become Earth's dominant space-faring race.

I'm pretty proud of this story.  The anthology's release date is still TBD, but I'll put the word out when a publishing date becomes available.

 

Another short story of mine, “All Hail, SunSavior!” is now available as part of the “Mass Dissidence” Anthology from Pill Hill Press.  This is an anthology of dystopian tales, and my contribution is the story of a dismal society that works tirelessly on a massive project called “SunSavior” that no one really understands while their world crumbles around them.  It’s got a charismatic dictator, an interplanetary monument building company, water laced with sterilants, hamburger made from recycled human waste (this is happening today, believe it or not), an unplanned pregnancy and gigantic metal bubbles that house all of humanity!  I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few *wink wink* political references in it!

 

Another short story of mine, "All Hail, SunSavior!" is now available as part of the "Mass Dissidence" Anthology from Pill Hill Press.  This is an anthology of dystopian tales, and my contribution is the story of a dismal society that works tirelessly on a massive project called "SunSavior" that no one really understands while their world crumbles around them.  It's got a charismatic dictator, an interplanetary monument building company, water laced with sterilants, hamburger made from recycled human waste (this is happening today, believe it or not), an unplanned pregnancy and gigantic metal bubbles that house all of humanity!  I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few *wink wink* political references in it!

 

Sometimes you write something knowing in all likelihood that no other living soul will ever read it.  But you still pour your heart into it, obsess over it, and scrutinize it until you know every word by heart and your eyes are bloodshot and sore and your hands cramp from hanging over the keyboard long hours into the night.

I wrote Long March about ten years ago.  It was the fourth screenplay I'd written, and I remember my initial thought was simply to write something that took place during World War One.  Why?  Because very few movies have touched that conflict and it was fertile ground for new ideas, notable exceptions being the excellent Paths to Glory (1957) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).  Not exactly recent films.  I started thinking about this screenplay in 1998, so yes, I beat War Horse to the punch by about a decade.

Long March is the story of an American doctor, Noel Hobson, serving in the British Army in and around Belgium in 1917.  Hobson is renown for his skills, highly decorated, and selfless on the battlefield.  He is also a man on the edge of madness.  After too much time on the front, his fellows begin to suspect that he is near the breaking point.  Displaying an increasing paranoia, Hobson himself comes to believe that he has been cursed with a "touch of death," and that anyone he comes in contact with will die horribly.

Interlaced with Hobson's story is that of a fearsome and reticent German sniper, Ernst Wintersteiger.  Like Hobson, Wintersteiger is renown for his skill, though in his case it's his ability to take life.  Wintersteiger is so feared among his fellow soldiers that even officers tread lightly in his presence.  He is a sulky and dark brute with a mysterious past.  Lately, however, he's found that his skill for slaughter is slipping from him and he has been "cursed" with a touch of life, which not only prevents him from taking life, but gives him miraculous powers to heal.

Long March follows the story of these two men as they inevitably are drawn together across the bloody fields and trenches of Belgium during one of the bloodiest battles of World War One.  It's a story of two men's separate but linked quests to find truth amid chaos.

Long March takes places against the backdrop of actual events spanning the Summer and Fall of 1917 in what would become known as the Battle of Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres.  During this barely five month battle, it was estimated that British forces suffered almost 300,000 casualties, and the Germans some 400,000 (compare this to about 3500 US casualties over eight years in Iraq, or even 290,000 US casualties for all of World War Two).  This was a battle of incredible ferocity.

The story, though, isn't really about the battle.  It's a human story told from multiple viewpoints on both sides of the war.  Voiceover takes the form of letters written home from both British and German soldiers.  I did an enormous amount of research for this screenplay, researching everything from the geography and events of the time to the manner in which the trenches were dug, battlefield tactics, and the varied dialects of the soldiers.  I take great pride in it's accuracy.

Long March is not an anti-war film, or at least that isn't it's primary theme.  All war films are, to an extent, anti-war films.  But Long March doesn't pound the reader over the head with preachy anti-war themes (if this is what you want, I recommend the last few seasons of M*A*S*H).  I would not consider Long March a war film, but a dramatic story set against the war.   The theme of the story revolves around war's ability to change people into things they aren't (or may not want to be), and the struggle to find truth.  To that end, every character in the script is in some way putting up a facade.  Some of the best characters I've ever created are in the story, from brooding Wintersteiger to the erudite British lieutenant Jeffrey who battles his own heritage, from the quietly heroic nurse Cordelia to the boisterous  and barely literate Sergeant Shankland.  And I still believe the exchanges between Generals Stuart-Bailey and Dorrien, during which they debate not just the tactics, but the morality of the war, are some of the best I've ever put to paper.

So, if you've read this far maybe you'll read a bit farther.  Click the tab above and take a look at Long March.  It would be enough for me to know that just a few more people read the best thing I've ever written.

 

 

Well, the reviews of “Writers of the Future Vol. 27″ continue to trickle in.  Diabolical Plots gives a pretty thorough story-by-story analysis of the entire book and I was pleased to see I scored an “A-”

I find it continually satisfying and entertaining how many people tell me they start out hating Sgt. Thomas Silk, but by the end they for some reason really like him (Kevin J. Anderson told me this at the awards, and it made my day!) He’s a loveable a**hole and I’d love to revisit him some day and tell more of his story.

I also really like the comment about the story “feels like it was written in the 70′s,” which may seem odd, but the truth is that, time and time again, I find myself preferring older SF stories to the new ones.  To be honest, a lot of the stuff I read nowadays is just too bland, too mundane and tries to hard to be literary when you just want to read something that entertains you.  I really enjoy the “Golden Age” stories, even running up into the 70s and 80s (Haldeman is one of my favorites, and Orson Scott Card of course).  Maybe as I get older, I just get nostalgic.