Liz is 15 and her boyfriend Justin has just moved to Australia. Her working class friends and bankrupt mom team up to buy her a mobile phone so she can keep in touch with him. Liz doesn’t waste their good will. She’s always on the phone, but at the same time she starts to get [...]

Quinzy crawls into his school backpack one day looking for some missing homework and emerges in a labyrinthine wonderland: the inside of his mind. There’s a library (his knowledge), a furnace (his temper), a game of chess in progress alone in an empty ballroom, and a locked door leading deeper. He spends more and more [...]

1836. Harland Shiels is the owner of a company that produces pantomime in Newcastle’s new Grainger Town. He runs comedy half the week, has a devout wife, and two children away at boarding school in London. But he’s been having bad dreams… One night, tossing and turning, he hears the clatter of horses’ hooves, trumpets, [...]

One character. One location. Five minutes. Click is a short film about a university student who gets locked in a basement bathroom while trying to find his Psych class. When you read the ending you’ll agree that it could just have easily been called Twist.

Exile is an epic fantasy about being outcast, and the part it plays in growing up. It’s about what people do when they’re taken from where they belong. It’s also a place, a land deep below the earth: a penal colony for the omnipotent Empire. This 13-part, 60-minute TV serial follows Erika (17) and Ferris [...]

“Shame and Sorcery” is the second hour of Exile, an epic fantasy series in 13 parts about being outcast, and the part it plays in growing up. In the first episode, “Crying Wolf,” Erika is cast into the underworld for using magic to murder another, and Ferris returns to his family’s court at Tenet with [...]

The Journeyman Project is about whether human beings can ever really improve, as individuals or as a people. At the beginning of the 23rd century, it appears that they may have. In one last, bloody world war, unified countries in the West annihilated those in the East with nuclear weapons. Sickened by the conditions of [...]

Sherlock Holmes (17) and James Moriarty (also 17) are best friends. They’re on the trail of a mysterious smuggler operating in the East India Company Docklands, a dangerous and forbidden part of London polluted by the refuse of the Victorian steampunk revolution. Together, nothing can stop Holmes and Moriarty, not even the fierce matron of [...]

In under five minutes, seven year-old James goes on a quest to find Jesus, discovers who his father really is, and pinches a biscuit. A short film about growing up before you were meant to, as we all do.

God, Valentine’s Day is stressful, especially when you’re thirteen years old and being chased all the way to your house by a bully that you just can’t shake. This short film comes in at well under five minutes and has no dialogue, just like a good Valentine’s Day gift should.

Doctor Who has not been so soapy in a while. The revelation that River is Amy’s daughter who is also “part time lord” and also his potential lover is an Emmerdale-class contortion, with time travel as the soap advert that makes it all possible. It’s cleverly done, but the hallmarks are there, in A Good [...]

My friend Brian Danin is a talented photographer, web designer, film director, editor and producer. His website, BZD Productions, is ripe with content and a media blog that he asks me to contribute to every once in a while. As long as I’ve known Brian he’s also been an entrepreneur, so these articles of mine [...]

Selection from a transposition of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle into modern Norfolk. One of the fun things about adaptation, especially of canonical literature or genre fiction, is reading all the criticism about a work. I picked up on one journal article’s thesis, which was that The Last Unicorn was about reasserting the [...]

The first poem in this set is the most “constrictive.” It uses a playful device that I don’t think has ever been used before: breaking up compound words into phonetic components that lend their own meaning to the sentence. It’s best read aloud for this reason. The remainder of the poems are not in any [...]

The key to actually completing these game project things is not to be too ambitious, I am told, a lesson that strikes fiction writers full of gall every time they learn it—at least once a month. By early 2007, my ambitious game designs had been trampled by reality frequently enough that I knew making a [...]

Clear as Day is one of my most traditional stories. Ironically, it is also one of my favorite. The style, which has a whiff of Flannery O’Connor about it (which is not to say, decay), is supposed to be clear and direct in its language, but still a little tough to catch at heart.

The Spider Web took me about four months to finish. It’s in the same class as The Best Way to Travel: it’s a long, somewhat experimental story that revels in rich language and grotesque characters. The idea of it comes from my last year in Vancouver. I was living in a basement suite that, especially [...]

I wasn’t sure about this story for a few months after I wrote it. It was a little too straightforward for my taste. About half way into the story, I discovered that I had no idea what was going to happen next, and about three-quarters of the way in, I then realized that I had [...]

Writing directly, even minimally, is very in vogue these days. There are lots of clear writers, including my favorite writer of all time, Flannery O’Connor, but I am not so sold on the philosophy. I have a fondness for complication and sophistocation. While I have avoided it in recent years (because it is very unpopular), [...]

Just before my 3rd year at University, I had made the first of several identical decisions over the years: I was going to put other things away and Become a Writer. I was waiting to hear from the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing department about my undergraduate application that summer, and I was determined [...]

This story itself keeps a short leash on its structure and theme. That luxury is afforded partly because of its length, but I’d like to take some credit and say that I quite like it. It’s “edgy” in the most literal sense: the subject of the story spends the whole time on the edge of [...]

This is a trivial piece, but it has a nice poetry to it. The shorter the writing the more crafted it seems to get, until finally some critical mass is reached and it implodes into poetry, like a black hole. This story is on the edge, since it’s really just an anecdote told in a [...]

One of the workshop stipulations in my last UBC fiction course was that there should be no genre fiction. This blanket statement was put out there I believe to staunch fan fiction, or anything crassly plagiaristic. This story tries to skirt around brands like that, but still be hyper-stylized fiction, filled with ingredients that approach, [...]

Handle With Care is a strange story, not least because it’s unfinished. It’s an interesting example of form-driven storytelling. I didn’t start this story, as I often do, with a scene or a theme or even a character. This story started with a rhythm. I let the language tell me where the story should go. [...]

“Jack of Diamonds” is an early screenplay, but it is one of my favorite. It has a richness beyond the noun-verb-direct object action text that is the paradigm du jour in scriptwriting classes. I think it’s important to be evocative in a script; the writer’s job, after all, is to inspire not only his audience [...]

This is a spec script for the critically-acclaimed Sci Fi television show Battlestar Galactica. It takes place in between episodes 14 and 15 in the second season of the show and ties up some loose ends in a fairly loose part of the season, to be honest. After review, I decided that I would make [...]

I don’t write lots of poetry. Most of it comes from high school, when in withdraw after a year with a great English teacher I would write on the lengthy bus ride home. I’ve included a few of those poems, perhaps incredibly, in this collection that is half meant for children and half about them. [...]

HWSTN started out primarily as a blog. My posts featured, more often than promised updates about my life for my family and friends, thoughts about this new show called Battlestar Galactica. Five years later, it’s finished its final season. Galactica has always been an inspiration, even in its shaky third season, because it never got [...]

“Ambient Darkness” is the second episode of an hour-long television series Serial that I helped create, pitch, and flesh out in my final year of undergraduate school under the tutelage of Canadian screenwriter Frank Borg. I worked with a fairly unlikely and diverse team that included two Film Production students and a friend of mine [...]

You’re a bastard. You’ve never known your father. Then one day, to your surprise, you’re summoned to his funeral. You decide to go, and after a lengthy journey find yourself at a mansion in the Scottish highlands, miles away from civilization, in the dead of winter. The house staff lead you to an awkward service [...]

In The Romantic Wrong, you can walk around as an animated orange humanoid and interact with the occasional thing.  The project brief is much more exciting than that—it was meant to be a role playing game that interrogated the functional cliches of the genre: a nameless and speechless protagonist, a player whose identity mixes with [...]