Then someone forced me to drink several cups of strong black coffee, put me in a warm bath, stroked my hair for a few minutes, and suggested perhaps they meant to reference good action movies. Something from the Bruce Willis oeuvre, perhaps. Or some classic Steve McQueen. I mean, if you’re trying to say that my books are like Steve McQueen jumping the fence on his motorcycle in The Great Escape, well, okay then. Tantrum regretted.

What’s interesting about living in the modern world is that we’re a bunch of people who have never lived without films, for the most part. You can no longer really write a novel without having movie conventions and styles in your head. I have no idea how people imagined things before movies. Even if you somehow avoid imagining things as movie scenes in your head as you write, your readers will no doubt do that heavy lifting for you, friend. You can’t win. All you can do is try to imagine a really good movie version of your story as you write. As opposed to, say, something by Uwe Boll. I know at least that for every line of the THE FINAL EVOLUTION I wrote, something like this was happening in my head:

The Avery Cates novels are set in an unspecified future that in my head isn’t too far off. Far enough for the entire world’s geopolitical face to change, but hey, let’s face it: We’re one oil shortage and famine away from that happening, so it might not be that far away. Heck, I think if the next iPhone is delayed a few months the Western world might be engulfed in riots and revolution. It’s that easy. That’s why I’ve built a huge bunker under my house and filled it with cans of tuna fish and plastic bottles of water.

But I digress.

There may, someday, be a film version of the Avery Cates books. I for one cannot wait, because of the immense bar debts and medical and legal bills my adventuresome boozing has generated. Aside from the riches, however, this makes me ponder the films with which the eventual Cates films will be compared to: Near-future Sci-Fi films. Most of these are rubbish, of course, and the Cates films will rise above them easily. The Cates novels rise above most of them despite a complete lack of special effects budget. There are, however, a few that will give us stiff competition:

Blade Runner: This is assumed, as one can imagine that I wrote the Cates novels after ingesting several bottles of whiskey and watching Blade Runner about 50 times. The way Earth is portrayed wordlessly conveys hundreds of pages of exposition in a few tight shots, and every misery inflicted upon the inhabitants seems like an organic outgrowth of seeds planted in the 20th century. Although it also an abject lesson in how slowly the world actually changes: No flying cars yet.

Children of Men: Aside from the fact that I want to hire Clive Owen to read me stories every night before bed, this film is one of the best visions of a near-future dystopia ever conceived and filmed. Instead of indicating Future!Future!Future! via horrifying fashion and architecture that could never happen, it simply sets up a horrific scenario and then imagines the fallout of that scenario with intricate, consistent detail. And, epic tracking shots. Epic, epic tracking shots. There’s more back story and exposition in the background images of these shots than in the dialogue.

A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick messed with my brain several times in my life. After watching A Clockwork Orange when I was a teenager I lost the ability to speak for several weeks. This movie always finds me and pins me down because it’s really not about technology or any fundamental change: People are already brutal and horrifying, which is why I never leave my house. You could remove every single SFnal detail in the movie (and the book, actually) and the story would be as insanely terrifying as it is today. Because we are one Milk Bar away from this actually happening.

Sleeper: Woody Allen is going to be one mysterious bastard to the Alien Archaeologists who come to pick over the charred remains of this planet someday. When he released Sleeper he was still mainly known as a comedian, and was years away from the Oscar-tinged perch he resides in nowadays, casually casting every working actor in Hollywood as his avatar and then writing scripts in which they have sex with the most beautiful actresses of the moment. Sleeper is hilarious because instead of taking every thread of misery and extrapolating it into a horrifying future, he takes every thread of the ridiculous and extrapolates into a horrifying future. The topical references are a bit stale these days, especially a sequence in which Woody, as an “expert” from the past, glibly fabricates explanations for random television clips Future Scientists have been puzzling over, but it remains more incisive and interesting than most “serious” takes on the near-future.

Strange Days: This is a Movie that Time Forgot. A great movie that time forgot. Although it’s not explicit in the film, I always imagined that the horrific dystopia shown in the movie is actually the result of the illegal technology that allows people to record their own experiences and let others play them back, so you can experience exactly what they did from a perfect first-person POV. The implications of such technology are only hinted at — the pornography produced in such a world would have the potential to end human society entirely — but even the small amount demonstrated is powerfully attractive and repulsive at the same time. Imagine being able to re-live moments from your own life, perfectly, whenever you wanted. Imagine being able to live moments from someone else’s life, any time you wanted. This is also perhaps the last time I actually enjoyed Ralph Fiennes on screen, but that’s a whole other matter.

As for what to do about my competitors, I’m not sure. Certainly, I can simply wait for the inevitable collapse of civilization and assume that post-apocalypse there won’t be any way for folks to watch these films. But that will also mean no one can watch the eventual Cates films either, unless I dedicate a portion of my bunker to a screening room, which would naturally become the basis of a new post-apocalyptic religion. Since any other option sounds like an awful lot of work, I think I’ll go this route, which allows me to sit here and drink, waiting for the end. And in preparation for my novels’ new status as religious texts, I’ve prepared the following to be played endlessly in the bunker:

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Anyway, while my Handler—we’ll call him Jimmy for the purposes of this entry—searches my bathroom for bottles duct-taped to the back of the toilet tank, I’m taking a moment to think about writing, and this leads me to contemplate Ghost Novels. These are not unpublished novels, or novels I wrote for someone else, nor, strictly speaking, novels never written. A Ghost Novel is the novel your finished novel might have been, if you didn’t revise as you go.

I don’t know how other writers work; frankly, writers are an alarming group of people who overestimate their cool factor while underestimating the amount of time anybody, including other writers, wish to spend discussing the craft of writing, so I don’t talk much with the other writers. We stare at each other balefully like Maggie Simpson and the unibrow baby on The Simpsons when we meet in public, and rarely speak. When I’m working on a novel, I often realize at certain points that I’ve taken a wrong turn. It’s difficult to explain the feeling: The work you’ve just done is not bad, per se, it just suddenly doesn’t feel right. Sometimes this goes only a few paragraphs back. Sometimes it goes several chapters, and every now and then in a life-threatening moment of despair the feeling can encompass an entire, nearly-finished novel. What I usually do in these moments is simply delete what I had already written and start over.

So that’s what I ponder: When I select six pages of work and delete it, there’s a Ghost Novel: In some alternate universe split off from that moment, I didn’t delete that portion of the work and go down another route, and thus a different novel gets written. Since I do this fairly often as I write (being an inveterate Pantser), there must be thousands of Ghost Novels out there in the multiverse.

Believe it or not, up until a few years ago I wrote everything on a typewriter, so there were physical leavings of Ghost Novels – most of which I still have, mouldering away in files. In the digital age I don’t keep everything I delete, on the not-unreasonable assumption that no one is ever going to care about the six pages I deleted from chapter 23 or the two-hundred words I deleted from the epilogue. Except me. And not always me, either, believe me. Are any of these Ghost Novels better than my ultimate results? We’ll never know, unless someday someone invents a way to see alternate universes and we find one where I have several Nobel Prizes and busts of me adorn every university and library; woo, you think I drink too much now, if I ever find out my Ghost Novels could have gotten me there I will set world records for literary despair. When I read my Tarot Cards and see my future, I also see a moment of desperation where I owe Orbit one more novel, and I find 500 deleted scenes from various projects, stitch them together into a FrankenNovel, and mail it off, immediately departing for a secret location for my own safety.

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Obviously, I could also have begun this essay with the sentence, Back when I was a wee lad and just starting to write, I had few friends other people could see, but let’s not go down that road.

For an example of my childhood obsession with backstory, here’s a map I drew by hand for an epic fantasy novel called Cravenhold:

Do not mock me

This book will never see the light of day because a) its hero had the inexplicable name “Kyle Hudson” and upon reflection I appeared to have inserted the character of Saltheart Foamfollower from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant into it wholly and without alteration. Let us not speak of it again.

As I’ve aged, however, yellowing like a fine cheese, I have done less and less backstory for my books. With the Avery Cates series of books, in fact, I not only did not prepare any formal backstory, I purposefully did not even think too hard about the previous history of the universe it’s set in or the character. I did this to accomplish two things: One, I wanted to get into the character’s head, and the character simply doesn’t know much about the history that precedes his existence—as a matter of fact, very few characters in the book do—and I wanted to keep my options open in case I decided to alter some history along the way.

This isn’t to say that I have no idea what the history of my universe is, I do, I just choose to skip the detailed and labored creation of backstory documents. Not having a codified history, either of the world or of the characters, achieves a real sense of immediacy and being present in the moment for me as I write, which I think is conveyed nicely into the work itself. It also makes me hesitate any time I have a desire to have a character spend 15 pages making a speech that clarifies the Events That Led Us Here, which I think we can all agree is a Good Thing, especially since I don’t think people sit around pondering recent world events, even if they aren’t being shot at by brain-hungry cyborgs.

On the other hand, in preparation for being a world-famous author, I have prepared a detailed backstory for myself, which includes Ninja training, the CIA, plastic surgery, and multiple cats. This epic backstory is neatly arranged onto flash cards so I can keep my story straight when being interviewed, and, yes, I have drawn a map for it as well. And no, you cannot see it.

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