On August 17th I’m going to be in Austin, Texas so that I can see the premier of a short film called Terms & Conditions. Normally I wouldn’t share this kind of menial life update. Except, in this case… it’s because the film is based on a story I wrote.
The film is called Terms & Conditions
Kev Dooley and I often try as hard as we can to make each other laugh with exceedingly ridiculous hypothetical situations. In one of our riffing sessions about how we’d implement 2-factor authentication to prevent a mutual friend from having any fun I said, “this should be a short story,” and went off to write it. Kev read the story and said, “I know some guys who could actually shoot this as a short,” and then proceeded to make all of that happen, starting with a script.
I didn’t write the script, produce, direct, edit — any of that. That was all Kev. Kev set up the website and did the fundraising.
Kev also came up with the much better title for the story. My short story was called “The Devil’s Code” and that was because I couldn’t come up with anything. Which is unusual for me because naming things is usually one of my hidden talents.
Kev also did exactly what I wanted with the story: interpreted it in all the ways it could be interpreted.
The Devil’s Code is a story about a guy who wants to do something evil and conjures a demon to do it. Of course there will be a catch beforehand. And the catch is that demons think scrolling through terms and conditions, and completing a captcha, are a great catch. It’s a fun short story about evil and tech.
I wrote this story with tons of intentional ambiguity because for me the story was about technology as torture. The guy doesn’t matter, and neither do his motivations. You decide that.
And that’s what makes the short film so cool: Kev fills in meaningful blanks to make one story into another by making the guy a douchey tech-bro with some serious misogyny to sort out.
I guess this makes me a writer?
I suppose that’s a silly thing to say because, after all, this is my blog and I am the only one who’s been writing on it since 2009. But I’ve never really considered blogging to be quite the same as writing. My goal for this blog has always been to share knowledge. I share that knowledge without an editor, researcher, or even a schedule. Since no one is telling me what to write — let alone paying me to write it — I’ve never really considered myself a writer because of what I’ve done here.
But I guess if you write something that someone else uses to write something, that kinda has to make you a writer, right?
Or was I a writer the whole time?
I started writing songs and poetry in high school. I wrote short stories in college just for funsies (one of which still gives my wife nightmares).
I tried my first novel in 2014 and only made it about 40% through it. I got so consumed with research that I spent more time reading books and interviewing people than I ever did on the book. It’s a complex story about violence, trauma, and PTSD that just so happens to be a Jack Reacher + Tom Clancy mashup with a narcoterrorist and Middle East backdrop.
I tried my second longer-form approach in 2017 when I got an idea about an elf getting laid-off from his job because he got replaced by newer tech — the printing press. I’m a character in that story, and my role is “bad translator”. I got so consumed with how I’d be a bad translator that I ended up inventing a language, and to do that… well… somehow I ended up in grad school for linguistics.
After two failed attempts at long stories, I decided short stories would be better — and I was right. Only about half of my short stories go unfinished due to crippling amounts of research.
Are you a writer because you write, or because you finish what you write? Or because you publish what you write?
I’m going to keep writing
I’ll continue to publish short stories (and maybe longer ones) on stories.frankmtaylor.com. And if you like those stories, maybe buy me a cup of coffee or a beer. Not so much to make me rich, but so that I know if I’m writing something that resonates with you. Because unless you’re a best-friend script writer with a can-do attitude, I really won’t know.