Dan Smith's Blog, page 3

Surviving The Thing

So I’ve been considering my favourite survival stories and I was thinking that, as it’s Friday 13th, maybe it’s time for a survival horror story? After all, I do have something of a soft spot for a good horror story, and there’s one that really stands out for me.

The Thing is based on a short story by John W Campbell, entitled ‘Who Goes There?’ and was first filmed as The Thing From Another World (1951) but was adapted once more in 1982 by John Carpenter. The 1982 film was adapted into a novel by Alan Dean Foster – which I read many years ago. The idea of the film being adapted into a novel is interesting to me because I have recently adapted a screenplay into a novel, so maybe it’s time for me to go back and re-read the novelisation of The Thing . . .

Anyway, I’ve seen the film more times than I can remember and it has undoubtedly been an influence on my own story telling. Those of you who know my writing will know that I’m drawn to distant and isolated settings, and that’s where we find ourselves in The Thing. Outpost 31 is a small research base in the Antarctic where the researchers come under threat from a shape-shifting alien that assumes the guise of the people it kills. Realising their predicament, one of the researchers even takes measures to isolate them further. All communications are cut-off, and all means of escaping the base are destroyed, leaving them totally alone as their paranoia increases and they struggle to identify which of them is the threat.

Kurt Russel, as R J MacReady proves to be a resourceful and resilient protagonist – the kind of protagonist I love to root for. He doesn’t have any specialist training, unique abilities or powers. In fact, he’s fallible and afraid. He feels like a real person, not a pumped up Hollywood Hero, but he’s smart and he doesn’t give up – he keeps on pushing and he keeps on fighting despite the odds. Ultimately his only goal is to prevent the horror from escaping the base and finding its way to civilisation, but this is a survival story in which, perhaps, it is best if no one survives.

Oh, and on top of all that, there are some amazing squishy (pre-CGI days) effects by Rob Bottin, a perfectly stark soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter, a brilliant and under-stated performance from Kurt Russell, miles and miles of icy wastes, an overwhelming sense of isolation, and a long, hard fight to survive.

It’s not for the faint-hearted.

The Thing . . . Man is the warmest place to hide . . .

That’s all.

More Votes Needed!

My Brother’s Secret has made it to the final three of the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards! There are no more evictions now, but voting has re-opened and will continue until 4th March, and whichever book has the most votes will win!

Thanks to everyone who has voted so far, but those votes have all now been reset to zero, so I need some more! If you think My Brother’s Secret deserves to win, all you have to do is click the image below, and it will take you to straight to the voting screen.

 

 

That’s all

Big Game Movie Stuff!

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you will already have seen these, but if not . . . well, a few Big Game goodies have been coming in over the past few days.

Entertainment One (the distribution company bringing the film to UK screens) has finalised their artwork for the poster. It’s very different from the poster developed for the Finnish release . . . and it looks great!

 

There’s also a brand new UK trailer . . .

And . . . Chicken House has finalised the movie tie-in cover, which uses the imagery from the poster . . .

They Drew First Blood

With the publication of my most recent book, the adventure/survival story BIG GAME, and the imminent release of the film, I’ve been looking back at books, films, and real life stories that have influenced my writing. In my last post, I talked about Deliverance, but the film in this post is one that you might not consider as seriously. Bear with me though, because although the sequels were over-the-top, and turned the main character into a violent cartoon, the first film to feature John J Rambo is a different thing altogether.

In FIRST BLOOD, Rambo is an emotionally wounded Vietnam veteran who wanders into a small Oregon town to find an old friend. But his war buddy has succumbed to cancer, brought on by the effects of defoliants used in the jungle, so the despondent Rambo decides to have a bite to eat and move on. The local police don’t much like the look of him, though, and arrest him for vagrancy. They taunt and abuse him until he snaps and escapes into the nearby wilderness – which is where he is most at home – and he is forced to use all of his skills to evade the National Guardsmen sent in to find him. And he has considerable skills. He fashions make-shift clothes, becomes invisible among the trees, he hunts, makes fire, builds traps, climbs sheer rock faces, improvises, adapts and . . . and he even sews his wounds using thread from his survival knife.

And EVERY boy who saw First Blood wanted their own survival knife, complete with hollow handle containing fishing hooks, thread, needles, matches and compass.

I watched First Blood numerous times, all the boys crowded around the small screen in the tv room at boarding school. We watched until the VHS tape became worn, and messing about with the tracking no longer made any difference so, yeah, I’d say this film has had some influence on me. But not just on me. First Blood was a hugely influential action film, and was both a critical and a commercial success. I’m not making this up. Despite the reputation of subsequent films featuring the character, First Blood is a surprisingly good film.

There’s something else you need to know if you haven’t seen it. Only one person dies in First Blood. And their death is an accident. The point here is that Rambo does everything he can to avoid killing people. He is a war hero, shunned and betrayed by his own country, abused and let down, dragged into a fight he doesn’t want, and yet he holds back. When he could kill, he does not. This gives the film a special quality, and it gives the character a nobility that has been long forgotten, lost beneath the body count of its sequels. We see that Rambo could rain hell on those who would maltreat him, but all he wants to do is have something to eat and move on . . .

The film was based on the 1972 novel by David Morrell and was heavily influenced by Geoffrey Household’s classic survival story, Rogue Male.

 

That’s all.

Isolation, Survival, and Deliverance

Isolation and survival are two themes that crop up in my writing time and time again. I am drawn to the idea of leaving my characters in difficult and remote locations, then watching how they cope. This couldn’t be more true of my latest novels,  The Darkest Heart and Big Game (for younger readers).

So, over the next few blog posts, I thought I’d have a quick look at some of the survival stories that have influenced me.

I’m going to start with a true classic. To my shame, I haven’t yet read the novel, but I saw the film at an inappropriately young age and it has stuck with me ever since.

In Deliverance, four city friends go canoeing on a remote river which is soon to be flooded by a dam, but fall foul of some particularly unsavoury locals. It’s a deeply frightening film full of contrasts – beautifully filmed, but with a brutal plot – and I didn’t fully understand it when I saw it as a twelve year old. I understood the boat trip, the draw of the wilderness, the macho Lewis (Burt Reynolds) contrasting with other more sensitive characters. I sensed the strangeness of the locals, the almost alien atmosphere of the location, and I felt the danger of the mountain men. What I didn’t understand was THAT scene, and the deeper themes of the story. I have revisited Deliverance once or twice more recently, and find it to be a fascinating, haunting, nightmarish, and almost mythical film.

There are moments that have worked their way into popular culture. The opening riff of Duelling Banjos is another way of saying ‘hillbilly’, and who can’t forget the infamous ‘I wanna hear you squeal like a pig’? For me, though, there are two stand-out, contrasting scenes. The first is when Ed (Jon Voight) wakes early in the morning and takes Lewis’s bow. In the peaceful quiet of the wilderness, he spots a deer, raises the bow and takes aim only to find that he is unable to loose the arrow. Later, towards the end of that harrowing rape scene, Ed catches sight of Lewis standing in the trees, bow drawn, arrow aimed at Ed’s attacker. But Lewis doesn’t have the shakes. His intent is rock-solid, and he is prepared to kill.

In those two scenes we see the real difference between Ed and Lewis and, for me, that’s what lies at the heart of Deliverance. It’s about how different people deal with adversity. It’s about how far we are prepared to go, and it makes you ask yourself, ‘What would I do?’

‘What could I do to survive?’

That’s all.

 

Book Award! Votes Needed!

Wow! My second novel for younger readers – My Brother’s Secret – has been nominated for the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards in the ‘Hooked on Books’ category! It’s always exciting to be nominated for an award – and this is an award with a difference . . . eight books have been nominated and, every week, the book with the least votes is eliminated. That means I need everyone’s votes so . . . if you think my book deserves to win, you can visit the website and click ‘vote for this book’ right under the picture of My Brother’s Secret.

http://www.coventry.gov.uk/hob

 

Thanks everyone!

That’s all.

Win a Signed Copy of Big Game

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I’m running a competition to win a SIGNED (and dedicated) copy of BIG GAME! You have until Tuesday 20th Jan to enter. All you need to do is check my twitter timeline, then follow and retweet this tweet . . .

Big Bad Mother . . .

So BIG GAME is now out there, in the wild, published by the brilliant Chicken House, waiting for readers to pick it up and enjoy it. It’s had a great reception so far and everyone seems so excited about it being linked to the film. And not just any film – this film has Samuel L Jackson in it!

The funny thing is, though, lots of people have read about it and then said to me, ‘I can’t wait to see the film.’ Of course, I hope people do go and see the film, and I hope they enjoy it, but I also hope they read the book! The novel is out now and costs less than the price of a cinema ticket so . . .

Anyway. Enough about that.

This week has, for me, seen a flurry of BIG GAME related stuff. I was interviewed on the radio  – which you can listen to here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ft6yl) If you want to hear my dulcet tones, I’m on from about the 01:08:45 mark.

I was also interviewed for the paper, and you can read that here (http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/culture-news/newcastle-author-writes-book-go-8393562) Beware, though, there are photos of me trying to grin a cheesy grin.

There is also now an official trailer for the film, which you can see here:

I’m sure you’ll agree, it looks like great fun. It’s interesting that they’ve chosen to use what is almost the only bit of Finnish language in the film, but the words are important and set the stage for what is to come.

With a little bit of luck, I might be able to see the final cut in the near future. But no, before you ask, I don’t think Sam Jackson will be there.

It would be cool, though, eh? You know, to actually meet the Bad Mother . . . well, you know the rest.

That’s all.

A Minor Nuisance

For some time now, Amazon has been linking my soon-to-be published book BIG GAME to a Deep Space Nine novel with a similar title – The Big Game.

Anybody wishing to ‘look inside’ my book would have been, in fact, looking inside a totally different book – one that was published 14 years ago and retails on Amazon for the low price of 1 penny.

My BIG GAME is about a young Finnish boy who undergoes a rite of passage in which he is sent into the wilderness to hunt and prove himself to be a man. Things don’t go as planned for him, and he winds up in the middle of a terrorist plot to hunt and kill the President of the USA. The book is based on the upcoming film starring Samuel L Jackson.

The Deep Space Nine book, The Big Game, is not about this. In fact, there are no Finnish boys in it at all as far as I know. Not even a President of the USA. No, no. According to the blurb it is about something completely different; a poker game at Quark’s. I can’t tell you what ‘Quark’s’ is, though. I can only guess that it’s a place where people can play poker. A bar, perhaps. And when I say ‘people’ I use the term in a loose manner. Apparently, Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Ferengi and Cardassians are involved. No Kardashians, though, as far as I can make out.

I can confirm, however, that none of these races appear in my novel BIG GAME. All of the characters are plain old human beings. Which is no bad thing, seeing as it’s set right here on earth.

Finland, to be exact.

This trifling business has been something of a minor nuisance, and if I had to speak about it on Samuel L Jackson’s behalf, I feel sure I know the two words he would have used. Or is that just one word? Well, it’s two words joined to make one, so . . .

Anyway, all this has now changed. After months of pestering, the fantastic people at Chicken House have managed to persuade Amazon to detach whatever data has been linking the two books.

Quark’s poker game has been jettisoned into deep space, and BIG GAME is now BIG GAME. All is as it should be.

Apologies for any confusion caused by this rather unfortunate series of events.

So, for now, I will leave you with this demanding ‘spot the difference’ puzzle for you to enjoy over the Christmas break.

 

Spot the difference . . .

 

That’s all.

 

What I Actually Mean . . .

I have just come to the end of another novel. Well, I say ‘the end’ but there’s still a long way to go. What I actually mean is that I’ve written it, edited it three times and have at last reached the stage where I’m ready for my agent to read it.

Oh, and when I say ‘ready for my agent to read it’, what I actually mean is that I’ve done as much as I can without seeking another opinion. To say I’m ‘ready’ to let my agent see it would be flippant because it’s at this stage when I hunch my shoulders, grit my teeth and prepare for the worst. Y’see, my agent can be brutal.

And when I say ‘brutal’, what I actually mean is BRUTAL!

So there you have it. The next book – this one is for younger readers – has now left my protection and has exposed itself to other eyes. I am hoping those eyes like what they see.

I don’t know how other writers feel at this stage. I sometimes wonder if they finish their book with a flourish, thinking ‘They’re gonna love this; it’s bloody brilliant!’ . . . or do they inwardly cringe? Does the final piece of work truly reflect the vision they had when starting it? Is it ever finished? Does it ever exceed expectation? Is it ever good enough?

I’m willing to bet that most of them cringe.

 

It’s the judgement.

 

We all fear the judgement.

 

That’s all.