Ben Paddon

Category: Writing

  • Justin McElroy: Hero To All – Chapter 2: Panic! At The Deathspire

    Before you continue, consider reading the previous chapter so you’re all caught up.

    Justin McElroy, savior of Earth and hero to all humanity, hovered above the Largfnaac pit, his body cocooned in an energy field restricting his every movement.

    “I’m Justin McElroy,” he said. “Savior of the Earth and hero to all humanity. I bet you’re wondering how I got here.”

    “Not especially,” said Lord Haalblaine, drumming his clawed fingers against the smooth handle of his obsidian trident. “We found you floating aimlessly in space, so we picked you up.”

    “Ah!” smiled Justin. “And having heard of how I rescued the Earth from a celestial body by punching it square in the selfie surface, you’re hoping to enlist my aid in saving your own kind.”

    Lord Haalblaine began picking at his claws with the tip of his trident, trying to remove some dirt. “Not as such, no.”

    “No?”

    “No, mostly we were thinking, ‘Hey, I wonder what space meat tastes like?’”

    (more…)

  • Justin McElroy: Hero To All – Chapter 1: One of Our Asteroids is Missing

    Seven years ago, in a failed bid to generate a little income, I ran a small website called Five-Dollar Fiction. The premise was this: For $5, I would write a bespoke piece of microfiction just for you based on any prompt given. The story would be no more than 1,024 words in length.

    One of the few people who took me up on this venture was Justin McElroy of My Brother, My Brother and Me fame. The prompt he gave me was “Justin McElroy: Hero To All”. I wrote the story and sent it to Justin. He seemed to dig it.

    Earlier this year I spoke about the story on Twitter as part of a story about who Justin is to me, and the lessons he has taught me outside of just listening to his creative output. You can read the thread here. That got people interested in reading the story itself, and so with Justin’s permission, I published the story, unedited, to my Tumblr. Typos and all.

    Now, a month later, I am reposting it here. Why? Because earlier this week I put out a call to try and raise a little money, and in return for hitting my goal I would write and publish a follow-up. I hit my goal, and so the follow-up will be posted here too. It’s in the hands of a couple of beta readers, but once they’ve given it a onceover it’ll be going here, live.

    For now, though, here’s part one of the story. (more…)

  • The Writer’s Tale

    This bloody book.

    Once a year, every year, I re-read The Writer’s Tale. According to Russell T Davies’ foreword to the book, Steven Moffat said of this book, “If you still want to be a writer after reading this, you probably will be.” I always, without fail, finish my re-read creatively charged and itching, itching to write. No, not even when I’ve finished reading it. Before that. Long before that. Less than 100 pages into the book, and I’m yearning to be at my computer, tap-tap-tapping out a script, or a short story, or some other manner of thing.

    The Writer’s Tale is responsible for a good chunk of writing. It’s responsible for dozens of Ficlys, for huge swathes of Jump Leads story. The last time I re-read the book I knocked out two Jump Leads scripts that, owing to current artist-related circumstances (JjAR had to step away from the comic due to freelance commitments, leaving stand-in artist Mr Phillby to finish what will in all likelihood be the last Jump Leads comic story ever), will probably never be seen.

    This year, re-reading that book for, what, the fourth time?, I find myself wanting to return to those characters, to revisit them and give them new adventures. But I can’t. The comic is done. Jump Leads is no more.

    …Or is it?

    See, last year I wrote an audiplay adaptation of the first Jump Leads story, “Training Day”, with a few to recording it and using it as a jumping-off point for a series of brand spanking new audio-exclusive Jump Leads adventures. I talked to Dino about recording it, I spoke to Adam about playing Llewellyn. I spoke to rather a lot of very excited people about the prospect of giving Jump Leads a soft reboot and continuing the adventures as monthly audioplays… or maybe weekly serialized ones, like old-school Doctor Who.

    But those plans fell by the wayside. Whatever happened to them? It wasn’t so long ago – January, as I recall – that I was frantically emailing people about making those audio adventures. What happened in January that–

    Oh yes. I got a job. I got a job working for a wonderful company – Quantum Mechanix – working with people I loved spending time with, and serving as a cog in a machine that made the shiniest, most wonderful geek candy.

    Except this month – July, nearly three weeks ago now – I left QMx. Not by choice, mind, but a necessary decision. Since then I’ve been remarkably busy, launching and continually writing Deadlong, relaunching the PortsCenter Kickstarter (it’s at 22% right now, if you can believe it!), preparing for my appearance at GMX in Tennessee, and working on another incredibly secret but tremendously awesome project I can’t really talk about yet… and that’s all before the other two webseries I’d like to develop if PortsCenter gets funded.

    But there are still a few hours left in the day, and I really want to write for these characters again. Surely I can squeeze another project into my schedule. I can feel Jump Leads stories pressing at the temples of my head – stories I wanted to write, but didn’t, or couldn’t. Don’t they deserve a second chance? Don’t I owe it to myself to write them?

    Or am I just being self-indulgent? Should I take that creative energy and channel it instead into Deadlong, a project that deserves my full attention? It’s a dilemma.

    Perhaps this blog post is a load of old wank. I don’t know. It does feel good to get it out of my system, though. And I still have that itch…

  • Comic-Con Round-Up Exclamation Mark

    I almost never take photos these days. I don’t photograph my friends, because, y’know, they’re my friends. If I find myself wondering what my friends look like I can pick up a phone and say, “Hey, are you busy today?” If the answer is no, it’s usually less than an hour before we’re in each other’s company getting ready to go bowling or some shit. As the door opens and I see their grim visage, my concerns are abated. Yes, my mind says. He does still look like that.

    Most notably, taking photos cheapens a moment for me. It impinges on the memory of an event to have to stop, and pose, and contort my face into some grim position so as to make sure that my photo, or indeed someone else’s photo, doesn’t look like photographic evidence of some harrowing tea party populated by the damned.

    So it’s a little odd that I woke up this morning at just after 10am, having arrived back in Los Angeles from my single day in San Diego for their annual comic’d con, saddened by my lack of photographic evidence of the event. No photos of myself and Lar, talking and laughing about some manner of bullshit for upwards of thirty solid minutes. No pictures of my casually implying to the wonderful, wonderful people at the Blank Label Comics booth that Kris Straub may (or may not!) be offering blowjobs. No pictures of Kris Straub, for obvious reasons.

    I have no photos. Instead, all I have is memories. For the first time, that doesn’t quite feel like enough.

    I was only able to attend Comic-Con for one day this year, but I had the greatest convention experience of my life. Actually it may more accurately be described as the greatest convention experiences, being as it was made up of small (but important!) experiences that all add up to one whole.

    My personal favourite, though? My good friend Ray, who will be marrying his equally good girlfriend Michelle next year, asked me to be his Best Man. I have crippling self-esteem issues, and consider myself to be the worst man pretty much all year ’round, but I can tolerate being the best for a single day. My body can take it.

    What follows is five paragraphs about Penny Arcade. You may not like them. Or maybe you will! That’s not really my call.

    I spent rather a lot of time talking to the P’Arc’s Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (mostly to Jerry) about a number of subjects, to the extent that casual observers might have thought us close acquaintances. I spoke to Jerry about how his writing, both in the comic and elsewhere, fires me up. It does. It inspires me. Over the last thirteen-or-so years he’s found his voice, and it is enchanting. I hope some day to find mine, and I hope it’s even half as brilliant as his.

    Jerry and Mike get a second bullet-point, because we spoke briefly about the Discovery. I raised a question at their Q&A (which I did not attend on purpose, but whatevs) about how the gaming press and PR machines, which are often one in the same, bombard us with pre-release information, generating false hype for games that, really, don’t deserve them. It is the job of PR people to get us excited for the shit their clients excrete, and game journalists appear to have taken part of that responsibility on themselves. Consequently, as people constantly buy into the hype, that sense of Discovery that we have playing new games as kids – coming home to find our parents have bought us some new thing to try on our computer boxes – is gone. Even in my teens I bought games I thought looked cool, ignoring magazines entirely.

    I wondered if the Discovery had died, and I was very happy to learn that not only did Jerry and Mike share my thoughts on the Discovery, but that Mike has been actively trying to restore (or rediscover) it by ignoring pre-release materials and promotional bullshit. It was nice having my opinions vindicated and even shared by the guys who last year employed a man who disagrees with my stance on literally every goddamn thing relating to the gaming press to run their gaming news operation.

    On the subject of their Kickstarter… look, I was pissed off on Day One. I tweeted about it a lot from my GameJournos account. Day two, which I think was Thursday, I woke up and realized I didn’t actually give anything even vaguely resembling a shit. I’m excited about the new content that Jerry and Mike want to get (as a huge, huge fan of their prohibition-era scifi setting Automata, the idea of getting more of that is positively appetite-whetting) and their Strip Search webseries looks like it may not be terrible either.

    Some seem to believe that replacing a serviceable revenue stream that has a noted, diminished impact on their personal creative output with another that lets them run riot is, in some way, counter to the very purpose for which Kickstarter was intended. I propose that Kickstarter could not have been designed for anything else.

    A few other Comic-Con points of interest:

    • MC Frontalot is earnest, approachable, and will listen to his fans ramblings. Specifically my ramblings. He was very polite.
    • My friend Heather’s Post-Apocalyptic Snow White costume looked incredible. I’d seen it when she was working on it, but that’s rather like looking at a souffle before it’s had a chance to rise. It looked incredible. I realize I have already typed those exact words, but they remain relevant.
    • I bumped into a short, round Asian man dressed as Catwoman. I was dressed as a Gotham City Impostors Batman. We had an awkward moment, then spent two minutes talking about our secret love for each other. That, too, was awkward, but fun. So that’s something.
    • My dad charged me with a sacred purpose – procure one of the Comic-Con exclusive The Hobbit posters. I failed, mostly because The Hobbit had, I don’t know, sixteen bloody booths at the con. That’s an exaggeration obviously (even a blind moron with severe developmental issues could see that!!), but finding the location to procure such a poster, if they were even still available, was not a task I was able to complete. Sorry, dad.
    • QMx have some incredible stuff on display, and I feel very privileged to have been working in the office as much of this stuff was in development. Two of the things they have that I didn’t get to see before the show, though, are the 1:6 scale TARDIS replica, and the model of the Enterprise-D from TNG, which looked positively lickable. (Andy, if you’re reading this, I did not lick the Enterprise-D.)
    • I regret every decision I’ve ever made in my life that led me to the purchase of a $5 convention center hot dog.

    Thus concludes this. I’ll be back to regular blogging next week, because that’s a thing I do now.

  • Abe Lincoln Can Fight Vampires, But He’s Not Slaying the Box Office

    American President and noted stovepipe hat enthusiast Abraham Lincoln.

    Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter made $16.6 million over the weekend, placing third in the American box office behind Pixar’s latest offering, Brave, which made little over four times that amount. While some are decrying this as the death of the “vampire trend”, I see instead the death of another subgenre – the historical/horror mash-up.

    If Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had been released two years ago it would have been much more successful. Indeed, it was two years ago that the book this film is based upon was released and became a New York Times best-seller, and the year before that was when Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, also by the same author, sold phenomenally well.

    But the problem with this genre is it’s distinctly one-note, and the failure of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to make any headway in the box office is, to me, a sign that attempting to glue the historical and the supernatural in a tongue-in-cheek manner is no longer an immediate recipe for success.

    In many ways, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is the subgenre’s Snakes on a Plane moment. You may recall the buzz surrounding Snakes on a Plane during production, a buzz that actually caused the filmmakers to go back and reshoot scenes to cater to the online “fanbase” the film had amassed before even so much as a trailer had been released. Once the film itself was released, however, nobody went to see it. Like ALVH, Snakes on a Plane made significantly less money in its opening weekend than analysts predicted, and suffered a more than 50% drop-off in profits the following week.

    Like Snakes on a Plane, ALVH is a simple idea – Abe Lincoln, hunting vampires. Once you tell someone the core premise (something the title of the film does rather well), they don’t need to see it. They know what snakes on a plane look like, they can imagine how Samuel L. Jackson would react, they laugh, then they get back to whatever it was they were doing before. Similarly they can imagine what Abe Lincoln taking down vampires would look like. Why, then, would they need to go see the movie? Knowing that the concept exists is more than enough.

    So where does that leave writers eager to ride the historical/supernatural mash-up wave? Well, for a start, I would suggest taking off the wetsuit and staying at home – I’m more or less convinced that the genre is DOA in film. I think if there’s one lesson to be learned from Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter‘s opening weekend, it’s that making another film that fits in this mold is probably not going to be the success you expect it to be.

    There is, of course, still life in this concept in print. Sense & Sensibility & Seamonsters was well-reviewed, and other such books such as Night of the Living Trekkies and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After (which is exactly what you think it is) have all sold incredibly well and continue to do so. Quirk Books are continuing their “Quirk Classics” range with new titles including The Meowmorphosis, a fresh take on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” with the principal character transforming not into an insect but instead into, ahahaha, a kitten.

    Quirk can, and probably will, continue to knock out these mash-ups, but I think it’ll be a long time before we see another one make the jump to the silver screen.

  • ANNOUNCEMENTS!

    There are a few things I want to update you on, gentle reader, so here they are:

    • Five-Dollar Fiction is now on its own dedicated website and is picking up steam, which is pretty spiffy. Feel free to pop over and commission your own micro-story, if you dare!1
    • But, Sir… is back in full since since the British government relaunched their ePetition website. Andrew and I have been maeking poast for almost a week now. It’s good to be back.
    • Nothing is set in stone just yet, but it looks like I’ll be writing and appearing in a web video with a SPECIAL CELEBRITY GUEST. Is that not awesome? I think it’s awesome.
    • Jump Leads will be updating at some point in the near future. I’m sitting on the inks for not one but two pages, and politely waiting for Kris to finish colouring them. Both he and JjAR have a lot of paid work on their hands right now, which is why the comic has been delayed so much. My apologies to the six or seven hardcore Jump Leads fans out there.
    • Somehow my friend and writing collaborator (not to mention Amazon best-selling author) Adam Croft snuck out a second book while no one was looking. It’s called “Guilty as Sin”, and it’s available to buy from Amazon and SmashWords. The non-eBook print editiony thing will be out before the end of September, or so Adam tells me.

    That’s more or less it. I don’t know if I let the world at large know about my personal Tumblr, but there it is for thems what wants to know.

  • I Didn’t Make It

    I had hoped to have mailed off my application for the Disney Writing Fellowship yesterday, but over the weekend I came down with an absolutely murderous coldy-fluey bug thing that prevented me from finishing my script.

    Which, I’ve decided, is something of a blessing in disguise. If I’d tried to crank out a script in less than a week it wouldn’t have been indicative of my usual standards. And, as my friend Joe aptly pointed out, there are professional writers who wouldn’t take a gig with such a short deadline. It’s bad enough trying to mount a shoot on the beach when the tide’s coming in, but if it starts raining you can either soldier on and hope you’ve got something good, or you can cancel and remount when you’ve got more time and improved weather.

    So my goalposts have shifted – I’m going to spend the next few months working on my script, making it shine, making it work, making it brilliant, and I’m going to submit next year. Really it’s my only option.

    I think my dad was a little disappointed that I didn’t get my script finished and sent in for this year. He rather kindly went to a lot of trouble to get two recommendations from industry professionals for my application – two wonderful, glowing recommendations that I’ve had to pretend were written about someone else just to stop myself from collapsing in a heap on the floor, quaking with anxiety, a big nervous grin on my face – so I can understand why he’d feel that way, but it just wasn’t going to happen this year. I should be able to use these recommendations for next year, so that’s something.

    Still, I know what my script is about. I know what I’m writing for, I have an outline of the beats I want to hit, and while I’m a little disappointed that things didn’t quite work out this year I know I’m going to have something ready for the next application window.

  • Fellowship of the Thing

    That would have been funnier if Thing had been a thing.

    It occurred to me today that Disney have a Writing Fellowship. I’ve known about this for literally years, but it’s never occurred to me to apply for the damned thing. Looking into the application requirements, it seems the application window for the 2012 fellowship was May 1st to June 1st of this year, which means I’d have less than a week to pull together everything they need. While I don’t doubt I could pull this together, it’d be a rush job. I’d much rather take my time and get everything done in a neat and proper manner, so I’m going to hold up until next year’s application window.

    This means setting myself deadlines. Traditionally, deadlines are poison for me. I’m terrible with them. The further away the deadline is the harder it becomes for me to muster up the interest in fulfilling them, but if a deadline is close – within a handful of days, say – I’m more inclined to get it done.

    So… wait, does that mean I should apply this year? I may have just trapped myself up against a wall with my argument, here. Wow. I honestly didn’t expect that to happen. Maybe I should put together an application this year. I can at least try. If I don’t get accepted I can simply resubmit next year, right? Right.

    Blimey.

    Edit: Y’know what? Sod it, I’m going to have a go this year. Will I make it? Will my application be up to scratch? I don’t know, but it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.