HIGH CONCEPTS
My Lil’ Ol’ Area 51
Citizen Wayne | Scutum Crux | Exit Mile High | Time Vagabond | Sherlock Homeless | Femme Animated Musical
Citizen Wayne
Orson Welles is… Bat-Man!
Citizen Wayne Begins
In 2004, I had just wrapped FanzillaCon—America’s first fan film festival and convention—in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back at my desk and still decompressing, I kicked my legs up and began reading a funnybook: Mark Millar’s Wanted.
Tucked in the letter columns (which, let’s be honest, almost no one reads) was Millar’s hysterical internet prank, written like a found-footage conspiracy theory, claiming Orson Welles had once pitched Batman.
My FanzillaCon partner-in-crime did some digging and uncovered a fascinating truth: the Mercury Theatre actually held the property for a few weeks before passing on it. As it turns out, it wasn’t quite the practical joke everyone assumed. That discovery haunted me. It needed to be written like a counterfactual docudrama to maintain its uncanny verisimilitude, but it had to feel outrageous like a comedy, like Batman playing Orson instead of the reverse. Once I added an entirely fabricated plot involving Marlene Dietrich attempting to kill Hitler—based on her actual convictions at the time, which no one ever touches on—and made a few other discoveries, the die was cast. Citizen Wayne began to shine in the sky.
In 2014, I began writing Citizen Wayne as a stage play for the Cape Ann Community Cinema and Stage in Gloucester, Massachusetts. At the time I was living down the street on the upper floor of The Inn at Babson Court, a grand old building full of character and secrets of its own. The innkeepers were a ribald, quick-witted duo—very much like Orson Welles and John Houseman—with Harvard-educated laughs and a flair for the flamboyant. And the real-live secret doors to secret bedrooms hidden behind bookshelves only added to the atmosphere.
Living at the Inn was magic. I would work upstairs into the evening, then carry fresh pages down to the lobby for read-throughs. My actors gathered for free Chinese takeout in that old, dusty noir sitting room, scripts in hand, and brought the words to life. I always read the part of Orson in a gruff, orotund Orson voice that left me hoarse.
Citizen Wayne has since become a screenplay. Those Babson Court sessions writ large are everything I want the movie to be. Here’s hoping Hollywood will get it right.
Six-Minute Inbound Pitch Video will go HERE
Scutum Crux
A Tale of Orion’s Arm
In Scutum Crux, I crafted a tale drawn from my deep love of the Orion's Arm universe. For years I tried hard to publish there. Darren Ryding, known for the "Queen of Pain" stories, supported it, while Todd Drashner, known for creating the Black Angel, did not. Such is life.
The story follows a weary scientist, Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, who must abandon a dying Earth aboard the massive ark ship The Narwhal. This advanced vessel is guided by a mysterious transapient called MrHorse—an athletic stallion, but far more, who commands the ship's quantum impellers and nano-foam systems and is not really friendly.
My wife, who comes from Lebanon, has long wondered why her people produced no science fiction of their own, even as they inherited rich fairy tales from the Arabic world and the French. This story nods to that observation while exploring the clash between human tradition and the overwhelming anxiety of living beneath the thrall of superhuman artificial intelligence.
Haddad wrestles with technological anxiety and the ache of leaving his homeland, but more the ache of leaving his wife, his connection to reality, a thing that cannot be replicated, taking heart that she is dutiful to what they believe. I won’t say exactly what MrHorse does or is, except that I am not one for the gender debate. I intentionally wrote the story with the Orion’s Arm sci-fi genders in mind, not any political take of the current time.
Probably a little prolix for modern tastes. I will run it past an AI for wordiness, but I like words. If you will pardon, I will mend.
This begins something. A novel about change over centuries. An adventure.
EXIT MILE HIGH
“I always run.”
Watch this space! Exit Mile High, Book One of the Übernet Chronicles by Mark Volpe & David Mines, is dropping soon on Kindle. I’d love to tell you more about what happens once Justin and Nicholas jack into that legendary Vrride, but I can’t do it justice. Le Grande was right — some rides you just have to experience for yourself.
No spoilers here. You’ll have to strap in and find out.
“What to do, what to do, what to do…”
TIME VAGABOND
Time Vagabond is my first attempt at a brand-new genre for me: a sci-fi romantic time-traveling comedy.
The idea came from binge-reading S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket books, tearing through Leo Frankowski’s hilarious Conrad Stargard series (that Polish engineer who goes back in time and starts meddling like crazy), and re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I kept daydreaming about what it would look like to take on Napoleon with upstream tech… except this time it’s a broke, brilliant, take-no-prisoners girl doing it from a white Hyundai Sonata.
I began it for L. Jagi Lamplighter’s romance writing class. (Hilariously, a Korean drama called Bon Appétit Your Majesty dropped at almost the exact same time, and I was completely oblivious to it.) And I’ve walked off this book shaking my head thinking no one will like it, and I’ve never been more wrong in my life.
Because I like Brigitte Ducharme. She’s a UCLA chemistry grad student living out of her car, a modern girl with modern sensibilities that don’t lead to romance, running Amazon deliveries in Los Angeles to stay one step ahead of homelessness. One desperate bathroom break on the 101 North flips her entire world and drops her onto a cold primordial beach in France… and she finds a half-drowned, ridiculously hot aide-de-camp to Napoleon lying in the sand — and realizes she’s going to have to give him LOTS and LOTS of CPR.
Yet old-fashioned charm is back in fashion, as she’s about to find out. Hang onto your cells, folks. Brigitte is about to put the entire twenty-first century in her rear view mirror.
Dix-neuvième siècle, Siri, espèce d’idiote ! Napoléon, ça te dit quelque chose ?
