Inspiration/Arrogance

Screenplay draft finished and sent out to be judged.
I have chosen my next goal: I would like to be published by December. This means I will have to be finished writing a book in November.

Robert Heinlein is heralded as one of the top American science fiction writers. After reading some Heinlein I decided that I am much better. Thus, I am America's top science fiction writer. This often happens with me. When I write stand-up I listen to professional stand up comics and think 'wow, I am funnier' and when I watch films I conclude 'this is crap compared to what I could make'. Then I turn this arrogance into the energy to make my own stuff.

I still have a respect for the effort that goes into producing books, stand up, and movies but I almost always feel that I could have created something funnier, more interesting, and more memorable. So I read Neuromancer (William Gibson) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) which are landmark novels in the Cyberpunk genre. I enjoyed Gibson's book because the depth at which the reader is plunged into the world. He certainly doesn't slow things down for exposition. I thought Snow Crash was mediocre but I connected to it because of my brother's enjoyment. Yet both books are not as good as mine.

I think the style of this piece will be a string of interesting ideas held together with a Hollywood heist movie plot. I don't really connect with the characters in sci fi (well, maybe Ender in Ender's Game because I wanted to be a precocious military prodigy). Kurt Vonnegut said something about making sure that your characters want something. -hilarious writing advice considering his characters were one dimensional vessels for his ideas. In my opinion, sci-fi is made great by it's memorable ideas. I've forgotten everything about Neuromancer except the amazing Dixie Flatline asking to be destroyed. A wonderful moment you can only find in fiction.

My story will explore identity in a world where you can routinely change your hair, clothes, skin colour, facial structure, and gender. The story follows an elite impostor (basically a thief who changes their appearance for each heist) who makes a lucrative living testing high end security systems. I've had to come up with a unisexual pronoun for my book (I'm using khee, kir, and kirs) to describe the people who change so much that their original gender is unclear.


Hope you're as excited as I am. It should be available for reading in mid-November. A realistic goal considering in the time you took reading this the extraordinarily prolific and deceased sci-fi author Isaac Asimov just wrote three books. All of them I consider to be crap.