Space-Aged Wishes

As opposed to killing myself for my total lack of preparedness leading to the complete lack of anything like a physical card being in the mail or received by my female parental unit, let alone any other female family units who have created offspring somewhere in their lives, I'm going to use this blog to cover my hiney.

Mom! Momarina! Mamma Mia! Mother Darling! Auntie! Other Auntie! Grandma! Nana! Cousins, one and all of you (however many that might be at this time)! Chicks! Gals! Girls! Ladies! Broads! (Trust me, that applies to several of my extended nearest and dearest.) Attention, all those of the female persuasion who might have expected to see something from me.

Here it is! YOUR OWN BLOG! Aren't you thrilled? Hey, not everyone gets their wishes broadcast over the World Wide Web! You're the Queen of the Internet! The LOLKitten of the Interwebs! The Girl Who's Got It All!

And, FYI, I'm officially off the hook. It's not my fault if you didn't check my blog on time. Besides, this way, your Official Mother's Day Love Note will be up for ages, for all the world to see. (Or, all 12 people who read this semi-regular blog semi-regularly to see...but it's a start.)

G.J. Koch

Dying is Easy

I had an interesting 'discussion' with a friend of mine this evening.

He's a budding filmmaker and since I write, we're doing the old collaboration cha-cha. Possibly.

The thing is, he wants to do a short film. I was excited until he stressed that he wanted me to script it in my own personal idiom, aka, sarcastically. In other words, he wants to make a funny short film. The word "Clerks" was bandied about. And I winced. Because I love that movie. I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. Dude's a genius. But...that's kind of the reason I winced.

Because comedy's hard, folks. It's hard to write (believe me!) but it's even harder to perform. And I'm not talking standup, which is incredibly hard, but rather making a funny movie. And a short one, at that. Humor has a build, so to do it short, you'd better have a killer of a set up and the best punchlines ever.

Drama is clear. Most people won't argue about something being dramatic unless it's unintentionally funny. "Bloodrayne" easily leaps to mind in this category, particularly since the only good performance in that great epic came from Billy Zane, who was clearly laughing at the entire thing just like the rest of us. (By 'us', of course, I mean those who just had to watch the thing in order to verify that Uwe Boll is indeed the worst director in the history of film. He is.) Comedy, however, requires expert timing, perfect delivery, and even more perfect reactions. Or it just ain't funny.

My friend, naturally, feels that the 'company' (as he's starting to refer to all of us he's roped into this grand scheme of working hard for no pay) is up to the challenge. And, of course, he also mentioned that it all starts with the script. Which, in between everything else I've got on that horrible to-do list of mine, I'm pondering. I have three pages as of tonight, and none of the lines are making me laugh. But maybe in the hands of a group of amateur actors, none of whom ever before expressed a desire to be an actor, they'll shine. And maybe the economy will right itself by the weekend.

Then again, maybe I should try something else, a different tack, so to speak. I'm sort of envisioning something kind of like Bloodrayne, only without Billy Zane. Though, one of the guys in the 'company' is a big, bald guy. Hey, maybe this thing has a shot! The heck with aiming us for a "Clerks"-level debut. If I set our bar at "Bloodrayne", we can only do better than that, right?

G.J. Koch

In Space, No One Can Hear You Blog

I'm an author and someone mentioned to me -- okay, a lot of someones mentioned to me -- that in order to grow my so-far-nonexistent fan-base, I should have a blog. Probably more than one. A plethora of blogs.

Now, I love writing, but I'm all about the idea of starting small and building up slowly. Mostly because I'm also a busy person who is, at the core, lazier than potentially anyone else in North America.

I mean, I write soft science fiction. Not the hard stuff, because that requires actual scientific knoweldge, or at least actual scientific research. I love my stuff, but I probably fall onto the side of 'softer than the Star Trek Tribbles episode'. We're talking -- I make it up and if I think "hey, it could happen" it's good enough for my form of government work. I'm not into the making it harder than it has to be idea.

So, the mere idea of a blog, let alone a plethora of blogs, daunts me. And the idea that I'm probably doing this for no one and to no one would depress me, if I actually thought about it. However, not thinking is, in reality, 'my thing', so I'm good.

So, here's to the beginning of a beautiful friendship between me and my blog and, one hopes in the deepest part of one's hoping place, some readers who may, one day, become so rabid for my work that they beat down the bookstore doors in order to get my latest brilliantly soft science fiction masterpiece before anyone else.

Hey, it's a dream, okay?

G.J. Koch