Okay, so the Silurian two-parter (Episode 8 and 9) is Inferno, not Frontios, I guess. It’s also shite. Truly, undebatably, drippingly shite.
Chris Chibnall’s episode was never going to be good. It was never going to be clever. It was never going to be deep. Nor was it ever going to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“Ambient Darkness” is the second episode of an hour-long television series that I created, pitched, and helped 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 [...]