I decided to take The Motherlode, my post-apocalyptic comedy SF novel(la) and put it in what I think is more or less proper manuscript format and print it out. I was feeling sort of vengeful against a particular tree. Anyways, this is what it looks like. Kind of cool. I wonder what it would be like to try and publish it?

Posted: August 14th, 2008 under Projects, Writing.
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Ben Joseph and I submitted a film proposal to the First Cut Film Series and just got notified that it has been advanced to the second round. The prize, which will be awarded to the top five feature film scripts submitted, is a million dollar budget and an experienced executive producer. Ben and I would be cowriters, he’d be the producer and I’d be the director!

This stage in the competition involves submitting the full length screenplay. There will be ten scripts selected from that pool, at which point I believe there will be some voting open to the public. Obviously this isn’t a sure shot, but I’ll post updates if news warrants them.

Posted: March 12th, 2008 under Film and Video, Projects, Writing.
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Here’s the first episode from my project The Further Adventures of Fats Planet.

Click To Play

Posted: October 7th, 2007 under Film and Video, Internet Video, Projects, Writing.
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As people who come to this site might know, I am currently writing a novella. I’m not sure if it will ever hit the printed page (ther than the reams of paper my father prints out at the office so that he can read the story on the train), but one path I’m considering, and that I thought might be interest others, is self-publishing through a company called Spire Publishing.

I know next to nothing about publishing, so a company like this could be really cool. They would sort of hold my hand through the whole process and doing the parts the I can’t do. Sweet!

Posted: October 2nd, 2007 under Projects, Writing.
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I’ve just completed the first draft of my second ever feature film script. This one is a post-apocalyptic comedy called “The Motherlode”. The plot is loosely inspired by the Steinbeck novel “The Pearl,” which I last read in middle school intentionally so that by the time I wrote this I would have forgotten how that story went for the most part.

Gettim Mud is the main character. He’s a sort of dim-witted miner in a coal mine in the middle of a wasteland. He makes his living scraping miniscule flecks of coal out of the rocks. Due to inflation, even a teaspoonful of coal dust at the end of every day is enough to keep Gettim fed…barely. The rest of the people that live in his mining camp seem to hate him universally, but he’s forced to team up with one of them, a man named Jesus, to escape the camp when he excavates a lump of coal the size of a bowling ball—more wealth than he has ever seen concentrated in one place in his entire life. They trek across the barren world with the coal, hoping to sell it if they can avoid being caught and robbed by his nemesis Harold, mutilated by rampaging robots or devoured by hyperintelligent ostriches.

If you or your company have some money and think you might want to buy it from me and would like to look at a copy you should email me.

benjamin.harrison (at) gmail (dot) com

Posted: February 2nd, 2007 under Writing.
Comments: 1

Days after the initial Pluto decision came down I saw a photo of a London billboard, possibly photoshopped, that read, “If you start to treat Pluto like an asteroid, it starts to act like one,” and depicted the beleaguered heavenly body crashing into the Earth in a ball of hellfire. The decision was quickly retracted, though how much said billboard had to do with the retraction, remains unknown to me.

The decision seems to have oscillated quite a bit over the past few weeks. I have read several news items about the Pluto decision, but have remained surprised when decisions are announced and then retracted and put up for discussion again. I had the impression that the initial decision was final—I wasn’t going to live by it, obviously, but that was the decision. But every time I loaded the CNN Science page there was news on just what sort of a thing Pluto currently was. Asteroid? Planetoid? Binary planet? Full fledged planet along with the Moon and dozens of other, lesser hunks of rock screaming around the sun? Maybe the confusion surrounding the Pluto decision could be enough to send it into a suicidal rage, making one last arc toward Earth to punish us for our insolence. The Pluto Decision sounds like a mid-nineties action-sci-fi film anyways.

But the more I think about Pluto being un-planeted in connection with my own impressions of Pluto I begin to think that maybe its response would be quite to the contrary of that violent image. Maybe Pluto, on receiving word that it had been rejected from the nine by a small group of members of one smug species living on the third, would pack up its satellites, giving up on its aeons-long trek around the sun. The vigil it had kept since before our species was aware of its own planet, much less Pluto. The object, now going not by Pluto, but by 134340, would wave its eccentric orbit farewell and drift off into the cosmos, never looking back at our cold, uncaring solar system.

Posted: September 12th, 2006 under Writing.
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I’m bout to hop on an aeroplaine back to the United States of America where I’ll be apartment hunting the second I get my feet on the ground. Good luck to me.

In the meantime, I’ve finished the first draft of my hotly anticipated sci-fi/noir movie script. It weighs in at an astonishing 118 pages, and is probably going to serve as the game plan for a novelization I am sort of in the process of writing. Should that materialize in a more tangible way than the 30 pages I currently have written I’ll keep your ass up to date, but I ain’t promising anything. I’m making a movie and running a magazine next semester. Motherfuckers is busy.

Posted: May 5th, 2006 under Europe, Writing.
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I’ve started writing a short story that may or may not become a film script. Please read the first couple of pages and tell me what you think in the comments section. More to come on this.

Part One – Part Two

Brian is the Barista. He’s the submissive employee of Monseigneur Saché, the owner of the coffee shop. He can’t seem to please his imperious superior, though he tries very hard to be good at his job.

Every morning at 6:30 he arrives at the shop and starts getting things ready. Brewing the iced coffee, cleaning and prepping the La Marzocco, getting all the baked goods arranged so people will want to eat them. Then the shop opens at 7 and people come in and order their coffee to go. Around 8 they stick around a while.

The coffee shop caters to a certain kind of person who is a little upset that gourmet coffee is a run-of-the-mill experience these days. M. Saché, who claims he’s a direct descendent of French nobility, knows these people, and is the apotheosis of their kind, at least when it comes to coffee. He hates Brian because Brian has a stupid name that isn’t eldritch or peculiar at all, and he doesn’t know these people that come into the coffee shop.

“I ask you to wear all black, for a reason,” Saché tells Brian. Brian just bent over to pick up a pain au chocolat that one of the customers knocked on the floor while gesticulating with his umbrella. When Brian bent over the hems of his pants raised up a little bit to reveal that he is wearing argyll socks and not black ones. “It is your uniform. You ruin the coffee shop with socks like that!”

Brian is sorry and promises not to bend over at all for the rest of the day.

The girl, whose name Brian hasn’t asked, who is sitting up in the window gives Brian a look that he thinks might be sympathetic, but he’s too afraid to be totally sure. She is intimidating. He is intimidated. She comes from the building across the street. He’s seen her.

“We only use the finest beans here, Brian.” Saché says Brian’s name like turned milk tastes. “We only serve the finest clientele the finest beans, because that is our business. If you do not grind them at the proper coarseness, you destroy their flavor. And you destroy my business.”

Brian promises that he will be more vigilant in making sure he grinds the beans at the proper coarseness. Saché elbows him out of the way as one of the regular customers comes in. He always does this. When certain people come in Brian is not allowed to make their coffee.

“Monseigneur Saché, always a pleasure,” the man says. He is very tall and his turtleneck makes him seem skinny. He gives Brian a look that makes no sense. Brian demurs and goes back to grinding and trying not to accidentally bend over for anything. “Is the house blend this week any good?”

“Fabulous.”

“I’ll have a tall black cup of it.” He looks through an art book on one of the tables for a second.

“Monsieur Conduire, how was your journey to Europe?”

“To be honest, I discovered something there that you might take an interest in. A variety of coffee that I wasn’t familiar with until now. It’s called Mongolian Red.”

“You can’t grow beans at that latitude.”

“On the contrary, there is an isolated micro-climate in Mongolia that produces the finest beans on the planet. It’s the hottest thing in the finest cafes in Milan and Paris.”

“Why red?”

“Something about the climate up there. They are quite beautiful to look at, and their taste is so refined that only your most select patrons will appreciate its complexity.” Monseigneur Saché is smitten. There is one thing that he hates more than regular people’s coffee, and that is regular people who come in and buy his coffee. He has a very specific clientele, and wants nothing to do with the kind of people who come in off the street. “I have a business contact that wants to begin exporting Mongolian Red to the states. I can get some for you if you would like,” says Monsieur Conduire. Saché grins and nods. He has a great admiration for this customer.

Posted: August 15th, 2005 under Writing.
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