Day 2 of my stay here went fairly well. We got up at some ungodly hour and went on a tour of the factory where they are printing Writers of the Future Vol XXVI. This was a little like a sci-fi movie in itself. There was a constant hum of machines and the smell of hot pulp was overwhelming. The reams of paper they load into the machines weigh 2900 lbs and can only be stacked so high because they’ve been known to fall and crush unlucky workers. Amongst the “webs” as they call these rolls of paper, we came to an area where there were tons of copies of Vol XXVI stacked haphazardly in some kind of pit–defective copies apparently.  Defective or not, the book was gorgeous and it was a great moment for the winners. Plans to slip a few copies into pockets or under shirts were discussed, but there was no need. A few minutes later we were able to see it whiz by on an assembly line.

At the end of the tour we were given some unbound pages and a cover as a memento. I remembered at the last minute to grab one for Jason Fischer, who was too sick to attend and dropped it off for him later.

I figure that part of the reason Author Services asked me back was to help this year’s winners enjoy the workshop, so I’ve made a point of introducing them to all of the judges. Some of them, like Mike Resnik, I’ve never met myself, but because I’m not in the workshop I’m able to meet them in off-hours, or I’m be introduced to them by the other judges. This allows me to get to know them enough so when the Thursday Mingler or the Locus party rolls around, I’m able to introduce them to the winners.

I remember was it was like to be a winner last year. You’re super nervous, and the temptation to cluster into “safe” groups with your workshop mates and not interact with the judges is huge. Whenever I saw one of these groups forming, I’d beeline over there, ask if they’d met so-and-so, and if the answer was “no”, introduce them. For the first time in my writing career, it really feels like I’m “paying it forward”.

Steve Savile and I spent much of the evening at the Locus Party gathered around Mike Resnick, who was telling funny stories from the old days–Harlan Ellison stories, DeCamp stories, you name it. At the end of the evening, Mike asked me which of the writers in my year were likely to make it. I gave him a few names, some who read this blog, some who don’t… it was an interesting exercise. The ones Steve and I thought of are the ones we know have been working on novels. Persistence is the safe bet of success.

Anyways, I’m nearly late for Ken Scholes and Steve Savile workshop speech, so I’ll make sure to update again later!

Well, I have arrived back at the Roosevelt Hotel exactly one year after I left it as a 1st place winner of the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. This time, I’m free of all the anxiety I felt last year, and I feel like I can just kick back and have some fun!

I was picked up at the airport by Mitch and Peter (Peter you might know as the admin of the WotF Forums) and had a great time chatting with them about fiction. Turns out they’ve both put the pen to paper themselves a few times, and Peter even admitted to completing an outline of his own SF story. Go Peter!

I was met at the Roosevelt Hotel by Joni LeBacqui, the contest administrator. Joni is the heart and soul of his contest (I thanked her specifically in my acceptance speech last year), and, as usual, she was run off her feet. On observing Joni’s hectic schedule last year, my wife Alicia asked, “When does she eat?”, so upon arrival I made sure to take her to lunch, where she caught me up on the state of the contest, the schedule, and how the winners were managing.

Everyone was in the middle of their 24 hour story, but I met Steve Saville and Eric James Stone in the lounge of the hotel where we shot the shit. Also present was Jason Fischer, who was both furiously trying to finish his story, and also doing his best to Be Australian (which is to say, friendly, funny, and generally good-natured).

Jason also gave me a copy of his novella, which I can’t wait to read!

Jason Fischer's Novella

The welcome party–where the winners get to mingle with the judges–is tonight, so I’m going to try and get a few hours of shut eye before then. I’ve been up since 3:30am this morning, and I want to be my best tonight to at least keep to a minimum how many times I put my foot in my mouth.

Tags: Writers of the Future

Writing this on Windows Live Writer. I’m pretty sceptical of Microsoft blogging software, but what the hell, I’m adventuresome.

Can’t say that I’m impressed so far… the formatting is brutal, and my cursor never quite goes where I want it to. Most likely I’ll just stick with the wordpress admin panel.

In other news, I’m also writing this on my new Dell 9100 XPS, a computer powerful enough to finally edit video. I shot a short film a while ago, and post production was incredibly frustrating. The most powerful PC I had at home was the laptop, and it wasn’t nearly powerful enough for video editing. My work PC, on the other hand, has enough horsepower (barely), but didn’t have the harddrive space (90 Gigs). Efforts to get them to work together were dismal failures.

This PC has an Intel i7 quad core with a 1 Terabyte harddrive. I think it’ll do nicely!

How can you not admire these guys and the movies they produce?

I’m a fan of excellence, and The Asylum is excellent at cleaving to their mission statement.

Tags: movies

Ha. Ha ha. Oooh, that title must be a typo. It should say, “Jordan Lapp is Watching Almost Famous”. Wish fulfilment much?

Anyways, “Almost Famous”, the movie by Cameron Crowe, is making me think of the state of movies today. I can’t mention this movie to friends without someone telling me how awesome it is. I suppose I was in a weird place the first time I watched it, but it really left an impression on me. Every time it’s playing anywhere, I just have to watch it.

It’s an amazing film, and even when it was released it got great reviews (it currently enjoys an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). I was going to write about how the studio system today wouldn’t know how to market this movie.  I was going to write about the fact that it had no A-list stars and no special effects, and wasn’t 3D, thus would fall between the cracks. Unfortunately, it turns out that it didn’t even break even at the time. The budget was a stunning 60 million dollars, and it made back 47 million, so maybe even the studio system back then had no idea what to do with it. Maybe the budget was way too high in the first place. Today, this movie would either star Justin Bieber or have a budget close to 4 million and be released direct to DVD.

It’s discouraging when movies like Almost Famous fail to break even while lesser offerings make back four times their budget. I was trying to figure out what this says about the mentality of the movie going public, but I suppose it says more about the state of marketing these days. Every movie has a few good lines of dialogue, and if you splice them in with enough shiny special effects you can fool anyone into paying to see a movie once. Every time I see this trailer I take three steps towards the video store, even though everyone on Earth thinks it’s like two and a half hours of flushing your head down the toilet.

So, moral of this post, for my movie, tentatively entitled “Deeper”, I’m going to try and cut a damn good trailer.