This script was written on the given theme of 'twenty minutes into the future'. While I tackled the actual plot, my partner Simon worked through the storyboard of the film. In the end, he came to me envisioning a short that could easily insert itself between the humanistic technology of Bladerunner and the architectural impersonality of Metropolis. It seemed a simple enough concept at the time, so I convinced Simon to let me take home the idea.

Late one night while mulling over the film's design, it occurred to me that I was less interested in the portrayal of a visual future than in the social implications of being 'twenty minutes' ahead of now - wherever that now might be. As draft after draft pummeled forth from my computer, this compromise in ideology eventually found its way into the final version of the script. Without giving away anything, the film takes a very aberrant premise and wraps it around a good old-fashioned framework of murder, courtroom drama, investigative journalism and psychology.

Note - 'Thirsty World' needs to be downloaded as a zipped file. I made this decision in order to preserve the very specific format in which it was written (authentic, I might add, down to the very last stylistic note).

The name for this story was half-stolen from a science fiction novella by Timothy Zahn. I say half-stolen because I couldn't even get that right; the title for the original story is 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'. Nevertheless, the story germ and prose writing is 100% that of my own. It's a monologue by - well, a very disturbed individual, as you'll come to see.

The more astute of you might also realize that, since I just graduated from high school, I probably didn't live through the Vietnam War. The references I used in this story are all taken from the first-hand experiences of Joe Haldeman. In particular, his books None So Blind and 1968 provided some helpful source material.

When I showed my friend Carmen the previous version of this little tale, she looked through it very carefully, looked back at me, looked back at the writing, and then uttered perhaps the single most important critical praise I've had in a long time: 'This is sick.' She was right. More than that, I felt heartened because it meant that I had come eerily close to capturing the true human tragedy of my protagonist. So I went back to the proverbial drawing board. This time, I ironed out the few flaws I found, and added in a lot more of my own personal idiosyncracies. The metaphors of the man-as-god, religion vs. war, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, and death-as-release-from-life are some of my favorite themes, and things that I've dealt with in other texts. I think it turned out to be a much more effective modern horror story, the second time around. What do you think?

I recently substituted the original header of this piece with this much more appropriate title. Throughout the whole story, it is the nameless speaker who, by once again delving into the core of his hollow past, tantalizes and intrigues the reader. I felt the story was reasonably successful because of the 'nested narrative' technique I used. We learn almost nothing about the speaker through the first section of the story, other than his life has taken him down a bitter road. We do not even know his name (one of the key elements in raising the tension of the story as it progresses). But by the time he has finished speaking of his childhood and returned to the present, we understand the truth of his existence much more clearly. I've never used flashback with quite the same emotional impact either before or since I wrote this story. 'For the Man Who has Everything' is - above all things - a story of coming-of-age, of the relationships forged between a family in the wake of tragedy.