Writing and Noah's Ark

With IMPLANT moving forward and DEAD RIGHT THERE out of my hands, I'm working on a treatment for the next action project, EXTRADITION. This one's very research-intensive, so it'll likely take me a week or two. That's fine -- with both IMPLANT and DRT, I found a lot of cool action/story/character things via research, so I don't rue the extra time it takes.

But as I've mentioned before, I like to work on smaller, weirder, more personal projects either between or concurrent with the action stuff. It keeps writing fun for me. (Not to say writing action specs isn't fun, but you know...)

When I was fifteen, my very first job was working in the Small Animals and Reptiles department of Noah's Ark, which billed itself as the "world's largest pet store." I was there for a year or so, and some truly bizarre shit went down at that place. Oddly, the experience gave me a real passion for working... I thought that, if every job was this fucking weird, I'd never get bored. (By the way: I was wrong, most jobs are dull). I walked out of Noah's Ark with a collection of stranger-than-fiction stories, which I've kept in the back of my head, waiting for a good opportunity to put them somewhere.

Yesterday, I put in some hours on scaffolding out the EXTRADITION story beats. When I started to run out of juice on that, I poured some red wine, flipped open a blank Final Draft doc and just started writing. Long/short - I cracked out fifteen pages without even thinking about it, feeling like I could have done another fifteen, but I wanted to get some sleep. And all of that was just set-up... the weird shit doesn't even kick into high gear until act two. I'm thinking I'll goose act one by opening on an animal attack, and cut back in time to the set-up.

But damn... there are so many stories to be told about Noah's Ark, I'm already suspecting this script'll turn out to be nothing but a treatment for a novel. The challenge will be in not falling into the episodic trap: this happened, then this happened, then this happened, the end.

But I think that'll be easy to solve by focusing on the crime ring aspect...