Well, progress on H4CK3R5 is doing well. Last I talked about it, I had finished a new draft and was toying with the idea of creating a radio play and novella.
I am now well underway with yet another new draft, the necessity of which was based on the rather unengaging latter half of the original work. Then, about two weeks ago, I decided to mothball the idea of a film script altogether and instead create a novel.
Now this creates an interesting shift. The original script was grounded in the target budget of production for the subsequent film. Every single shot in there is pondered as something that can be achieved for free or at least for really cheap. Money was a limiting factor for my imagination with regards to the events that take place in H4CK3R5. But now being a novel, that ceiling is no longer present. But the shift extends to more than that – the film script is a visual medium, and to that extent can convey information in a certain way that a novel cannot. The reverse is just as true. So we’re dealing with a situation where I have to really reinvent the whole thing.
Purely presenting a screenplay as prose does not work. The differences are too significant, and I cannot ignore the new opportunities afforded to me by the removal of limits on my imagination.
I suspect that the book will end up being like a Michael Crichton work; in essence a novel that reads like a movie. That’s what I hope at least. I don’t fancy that the end novel will be all that long. Perhaps 200 pages.