I was recently contacted by an Australian film producer, Simon Smithers, who heard my story “The Disciple” on Pseudopod and is interested in turning it into a feature film. Simon has already done some work with Matt Wallace, who was able to confirm for me that Simon is legit. (Matt recently had a very cool story, “Akropolis,” on Pseudopod.) As with any film project, it’s all very tentative. Simon has to pitch the story to his financiers, and if they don’t go for it then that’ll be the end of it, but Simon sounded optimistic. Apparently horror is hot in Australia right now after the success of Wolf Creek. I figure that if I wait until things are more definite before announcing anything then there might not be anything to announce, so I should enjoy myself while I can. If I don’t mention it again, that means it didn’t go anywhere.
I’m glad now that I went ahead and got “The Disciple” up on Pseudopod. I’d been thinking about doing this for a while, but when I looked back at the story, which I wrote when I was about 22 (and which originally appeared in Weird Tales back in 2002), I decided that the story needed a lot of polishing. I ended up spending an insane amount of time polishing it, I think about 80 hours, and about halfway through that process I started thinking, “This is insane, to spend so much time on this. Pseudopod could very well reject the story, and even if they don’t it’s only 50 bucks.” But I couldn’t stand to send out something that I wasn’t satisfied with, so I kept at it. Like I said, I’m glad now that I did.
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