Dread O’Hare

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-Hi all Jack here- at Marscon Larry mentioned this and I realized it hadn’t made it over here. From the Book of Faces circa 2019…

American Airlines has destroyed society. It is chaos here. Not like the Before Times, when airlines didn’t sell 87 tickets for an airplane that only holds 70 passengers.

The demon lord, American Airlines, offered me a voucher. I declared, nay to your wickedness, foul beast! I bought a 1st class ticket three months ago, you already ruined one whole day of my book tour this week. I should not be cast out amongst the pathetic Bumped!  But American Airlines laughed, and said foolish mortal, if you don’t “volunteer” then you will be bumped anyway, and be banished to the outer darkness of Dread O’Hare for at least another day.

So I took my voucher of sadness, that I may book another flight so that they may torment me again in the future. When I asked if I could use the voucher at another airline that wasn’t a complete shit show, American Airlines was not amused.

Thus I was cast from the holy 1st class, and sent to live among the dregs.

I have joined a tribe to survive.

The Delayed live in fear of the roving gangs of the Bumped. We battle for the vital territory of O’Hare, like the six working power plugs in the entire airport. Or the one water fountain that actually squirts far enough you don’t have to wrap your lips around it.

Rations are running low. I went to Chili’s but Endless Chips is a lie. There is an end.

I bought a hot dog. It was $4000. It mocked me with its sadness.

I remember Valentines Day with my wife in the Before Times, but my only intimate alone time today was spent with a blue gloved TSA agent, because his machine thought my testicles looked suspicious.

Though I dwell in Dread O’Hare, my luggage has flown to Utah. Where they assure me it will be taken care of by competent, American Airlines employees who totally won’t laugh as it is looted off the baggage claim.

Deprived of luggage, I have hunted and killed a service animal, and fashioned from its hide a loin cloth.
The Bumped Tribe has started a bonfire in terminal H to stay warm. We plot our next move against the Delayed Tribe.

Larry in La La Land

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-Jack, here. Larry shared his Hollywood experience on TwitterX recently and I thought it should be preserved here.

There are thousands of books out there with original ideas that could be made into movies, but Hollywood is mostly illiterate.

Okay, I’m gonna expound on this with a thread about my experiences with Hollywood, as limited as those may be. As a working novelist and red state American I’m like an outsider barbarian there. 

First, I’m not exaggerating about them being illiterate, let me tell you a story-

Back when I was first getting started, Monster Hunter International had just blown up. I got contacted by my first movie producer. Nice guy. Had a made a bunch of movies I’d heard of in the 90s and early 2000s. 

This guy actually read books. Little did I know just how odd that was at the time. So this producer read MHI, loved it, showed it to his friend who was the #2 person at a major movie studio, who also read books. And he was literally like the only guy at the entire movie studio who actually READ BOOKS.

I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not.

The #2 guy at Major Studio you’ve all heard of reads MHI. Loves it. Even had an MHI patch on his desk. I flew out there to meet with these people, only to promptly discover that literally everybody else in Hollywood is functionally illiterate. I have a lunch meeting with these dudes, some Studio People, another novelist (way more famous than me), and a guy who has won an Academy Award for special effects. 

First time in my life I had mango chutney. Which is pretty awesome. Not so awesome was the rest of Hollywood. Studio guy starts pitching who should star in MHI, and this is when I learn Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck which actor actually fits the part, or who would do a good job, but who they have a deal with to give more work to. So they started casting- they start casting my 6’5″ 300 pound half Polynesian former illegal pit fighter main character. 

“Hey, what about Tobey Maguire?” 

“Oooh, I know, Jake Gyllenhall would like this part!” 

And I’m like… are you people high? WTF is wrong with you? Other writer leans over, whispers in my ear “Don’t say anything. They never give a fuck what us writers think.” Of course none of the studio people had read the book, nor did they care to. Their job is to be VISIONARY. 

As this went on, their vision got goofier and goofier, but I enjoyed my mango chutney quite a bit. It was an expensive place and the studio was paying for it.

Amusing side note- being a Hollywood restaurant, other patrons were wannabe actors, so when they heard us talking business, the actors realized these were actual studio people, so they started interrupting our lunch to introduce themselves and drop off glossy pictures and bios. 

“Oh hi I couldn’t help but overheard your conversation and I think I’d be perfect for blah blah blah” as they are handing out pics. 

When the first actor did this, all the other wannabes there saw this happen, so they all ran back to their cars and came back with pictures and bios to give us too. The studio people didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t know what to do with them so I started collecting them like trading cards.

So the Major Studio people loved MHI. They’re going to make me an offer. A week later the literate producer calls me and says the deal is dead. Why? Because Will Smith, who at the time was the biggest box office winner in the world, had just talked about doing a family comedy with Kevin James called “Monster Hunters” where a pair of child psychologists discover that the monsters under kids’ beds are real. (great pitch by the way)  Which meant instantaneous death for my project. They aren’t messing with Will Smith. 

And then Will Smith never made that movie anyway. 

(Keep in mind, this was way before most people in America had ever heard of the Japanese video game with that name too, which extra kicks me in the nuts 12 years later!)

A few years later I option MHI to Entertainment One for a TV show. I get paid money to just let somebody else hold the rights. And then nada… I don’t hear anything for years. Occasionally something changes and I get an update. They actually paid for a couple of screen plays to be made of it. But nobody tells me anything because I’m just the writer. 🙂

At one point I was told Dwayne Johnson tried to pick up MHI from E1, but that fell through (I have no idea if he read it because who knows, but I was told he wanted to be a bad ass and fight monsters).  But that fell through, and the Rock then bought the rights for Seal Team 666 from my friend Weston Ochse (good dude, RIP) where bad ass Navy SEALs fight monsters. I emailed Weston when that was announced and told him “congratulations, you bastard” 😀

Hard Magic got optioned by Radar Pictures, but same story. I haven’t heard anything new for a while (nobody tells the writer anything). Same thing. Occasionally a movie star I’ve heard of expresses interest, and then nada. A producer briefly shopped Tom Stranger for an adult cartoon, and Adam Baldwin said he’d love to play Tom again if it got picked up (he killed it on the audiobook) but Rick and Morty came along and anything “multidimensional” was seen as a rip off of that, so that project died too. 

Long story short, Hollywood options a lot of books, but they only go into production on a fraction of those. Most of them just hang out in limbo, with us authors getting paid option money to just not sell the rights to somebody else. Ender’s Game got optioned for like 30 years before they finally made a movie. 

So Hollywood has a ton of original unique properties available, but very few people who can actually make decisions actually read any of them. I’ve got a bunch of things which would make great TV shows or movies, and people ask me all the time who I’d like to see play whatever character, but I’m so jaded, I don’t care. I’m gonna cash that check and shut up because nobody gives a shit what the writer thinks. 

Seriously, if you aren’t JK Rowling, Hollywood doesn’t give a shit about us wanting to “maintain our creative vision”.

People always ask me, aren’t I worried that Hollywood will screw it up and make a bad movie? Oh hell no. First off, they have to pay me more if they actually go into production. I am a devout capitalist. Second, if it is actually good, I sell more books because they are now a successful media tie in, and if it is a shitty movie, I just got an hour long commercial with everybody who has read it telling everyone “the book is better”.

So that’s my experience with Hollywood. It is a bunch of people who don’t read books and who don’t really give a shit about the story doing whatever they feel like, while desperate beautiful strangers give them glossy head shots. 

Down These Mean Streets

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Available January 2nd, in hard cover, ebook, and audio, is the third anthology of noir sci-fi and fantasy stories edited by me and Kacey Ezell.

Down These Mean Streets

Honestly, these are just awesome. It’s a great bunch of stories.

Since the theme was “the city” for mine I went with a Lost Planet Homicide story, where the Mount Zenith maintenance AI tries to solve a murder. The city is the hard boiled detective. It’s called Low Mountain, and it came out really good. I really really enjoy writing in the Lost Planet Homicide setting.

Everybody picked different cities, some real, some fictional, and we’ve got a wild assortment of different kinds of stories out of them. In order:

Ophir Chasma by Kacey Ezell, takes us under the shadow of Olympus Mons, where a weary cop takes the murder of a joy girl personally, and hunts a killer through the slums of Mars.

Yokoburi by Hinkley Correia: People can’t give me crap about nepotism, since my daughter’s story in the first anthology earned the highest reviews! (She’s legit got skills) and she returns to the world she introduced in Kuro, this time from the perspective of the American branch of her family of Japanese ghost hunters, as a fish out of water in Tokyo.

Empire of Splinters by Mike Massa. Mike introduced his Genius Wars setting in the first anthology, where cities develop souls and turn sentient, and it turns out history has been these cities warring against each other, using humans as pawns.

The Streets of CircumFrisco by Robert E. Hampson, when the clients of Frisco Station hire a PI, they expect a classic gumshoe, so he leans into it hard.

He Who Dies With the Most Scars by Patrick M. Tracy – takes us back to the gigantic, rotting, fantasy mega-city of Remnar, where by day a friendly necromancer runs a coffee shop, and by night solves crimes.

Fool’s Gold by Dan Willis, this is from Dan’s Arcane Casebook series, about a wizard PI who handles problems for his clients in 1930s New York.

Central After Dark by Casey Moores. This one is bonkers. The city is Albuquerque, and no matter how weird you think Albuquerque is, this gets weirder!

Ghosts of Kaskata by Marisa Wolf. A war hero gets called back to duty to solve a murder in the sci-fi city of Kaskata, which is pretty on top, but ugly all the way down.

A Devil’s Bargain by Steve Diamond. If you’ve listened to WriterDojo you’ve heard Steve talk about WEREWOLF COP! The city is Sacramento, which if you’ve not been there, is a perfect place to have some occult murders.

Urban Renewal by Chris Kennedy, with a dark adventure on an alien planet where the city is just The City. And these aliens are mean, and can hold a grudge like you wouldn’t believe.

1957: The Dark Side of Paradise by Robert Buettner, who has been in all three of these anthologies, because he always kills it. This is a follow up to his story in No Game For Knights, in a gritty alternate history where Germany won WW2.

Breathe by Grffin Barber, who brings us another bad ass story with his same undying protagonist as in Noir Fatale, this time involving a killer in the scummy fantasy city of White Boar.

It’s Always Sunny in Key West by Laurell K. Hamilton. Vampires in Key West, from her mega-bestselling Anitaverse. Laurell is just so damned cool to work with and her story is just plain fun. Also, weaponized sea gulls!

It was an honor to be able to work on this project. What a great bunch of talented authors. I really hope you guys enjoy these.