Danny Waugh, director of the Problem Project show reel.

Not the story of a journey.  Go read The Odyssey if that’s what you’re looking for.  (I’m doing that right now, it’s great!)

SR Camera mico-dolly — used for an establishing shot in PP show reel.

Last Saturday the talented people at The Film Coop (http://filmcoop.to/members) were shooting show reels and they were using something  of mine.– a scene based on my story Problem Project.  It was really fascinating watching them at work — and  wonderful and strange seeing my characters come to life.

  Jordon Kanner and Pip Dwyer in rehearsal as Hal and Megan.

It also made me think about how that particular story was born .  Way back in 1981, I had become quite nervous that the world could be coming to an end.  Partly because there was a serious escalation in the nuclear arms race and partly because of various intellectual, economic and emotional factors, it also felt like my personal world was coming to an end.  I think that’s why when I heard The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on CBC, the part when the Vogons blow up the Earth to make room for a hyper-space by-pass — it made a greater impression than Douglas Adams may have intended.

Dial ahead to 1984-85 — I’m getting to work with the really cool PCs and word processors that we had in Exhibit Design Services at the Royal Ontario Museum.  Crude by today’s standards but leading edge tech for the time.  It was there when I learned about the concept of programmes “crashing” and needing to “re-boot” to get back on track. 

Film Coop Co-Founder and Producer Emily Andrews checking sound levels.

For some reason I combined those concepts with my end of the world obsession and came up with a story idea:  The world keeps ending but like a system crash someone,(or something) keeps starting up the planet again — just at the point where it was last destroyed.

So I borrowed one of EDS’ extremely futuristic Tandy Model 100 laptops for the next few weekends and hammered away on a story.

 I even gave it a title: “Problem Project”.   It was at that point that I learned something very valuable when you are writing science fiction:  Having an interesting idea is not enough to create an interesting story.  I just couldn’t get the thing to work.

Over the next ten years I would pull out the dot-matrix print-out of that manuscript and poke away at it, hoping to get somewhere with it .

Nope. 

Now let’s go to 1998, I’m in Singapore (as I often was back then) and the city is completely enveloped in a massive cloud of smog — caused by Indonesian farmers burning off forest land to make room for cash crops. 

  

Planes are crashing, ships are colliding, you can’t see more than four feet in front of you and we’re all being warned to stay in doors so that the toxic atmosphere doesn’t kill us.  Sadly, it did kill some people

This crisis went on for more than 10 days and I wasn’t sure if the plane that was supposed to take me home was going to be able to take off.  

Wiring Jordon up for sound.

So thanks to those ambitious Indonesian farmers,  my end-of-the-world thinking had now become an immersive experience.  For some reason I had the original manuscript with me and while sat there in my room, trying not to inhale too deeply, I started work on the story again. 

Wiring Pip up for sound.

This time the results seemed much more satisfactory; it just hung together better.  This might have been the result of having spent the last 11 years in the Cecil Street Writers Group, slowly getting a sense of how stories can work and learning that you need things like characters and these character-thingies should represent people that you and your readers care about.  One of the characters in the new version of Problem Project  was Megan.   She was sort of a composite of some of the women in my life that I admired.

 
Well, as you probably noticed, the world did not end.  Furthermore, the smog cleared, I got to fly home and I had a story that I was relatively pleased with.  (In reverse order of importance)

Danny conferring  with Director of Photography Mickey Dutta.

Other people seemed to like the story too — I sold it to two anthologies and one magazine between 1999 to 2002.  Unfortunately all of these publications folded before they could print the thing — and more importantly — pay the author!  I began to wonder if Problem Project was the bringer of disaster, every time some editor read it, the organization she was working for would immediately go bankrupt.

That didn’t stop me and eventually I did place it with Interzone magazine in the UK. 

The editor didn’t like the title but ventually decided that we couldn’t come up with anything more suitable.  Either that or he just had better things to do.  The story came out, and got positive but maybe not rave reviews.  Here’s what Mammoth Books, Best SF had to say:

Hugh A.D. Spencer. Problem Project.

Spencer has fun with quantum realities, with technical memos from those working on scientific experiments which have gone wrong interspersed with the consequently quantum end of the world nightmares one unfortuante individual is having. Spencer’s ‘The Z-Burger Simulations’ in On-Spec 44 also entertained.

So job done, move on to the next project, right? 

Yes…but…

I am a thrifty writer and like to translate my work from one medium to the other whenever possible.  I wrote an audio version of Problem Project a year later which Shoestring Radio Theatre in San Francisco produced in 2006.  Here’s a link to it if you have 26 minutes available to listen:

http://chrono1957.xanga.com/audio/8a7841777669/

I like what Shoestring did with my script a lot.  The show has a BoHo Twilight Zone feel to it.

So now Project Project goes to the glowing screen.  At least one scene from it.  Who knows maybe I can use the show reel to pitch a film project to do the whole stor?. It’s been interesting to consider the time and distance its taken to create just one story.  It’s also exciting to wonder if it may have even further to go.