Michael Coorlim's Blog, page 48

Hey, remember Reading Rainbow?

Of course you do. Everyone does.

I was a voracious reader as a kid. All the time. Anything I could get my hands on. I was the kid who’d sneak books off of the classroom cart to read during class, hidden under the lip of my desk. I’d spend hours at the library after school, working my way through the genre fiction section, seasoned with interesting bits of nonfiction.

Once on vacation my mom made sure the only book in the car was War and Peace, just because she wanted to see if I’d read it.

At twelve I didn’t like it, but what was I going to do? Not read?

I also watched a lot of PBS. I have vague memories of the Electric Company, Fawlty Towers, and literally sneaking out after my bed-time to watch Doctor Who with my parents from behind the couch.

Reading-frickin’-Rainbow

I also watched a ton of Reading Rainbow. A show about books, right?

LeVar Burton wasn’t the reason I read, but he gave me the positive reinforcement to continue. And the theme song – who doesn’t remember the theme song? An ode to escapism for a kid with a maybe not-so-always-great life. Books kept me going all the way through high-school, and they’re still the entertainment option I reach for when I have the time for leisure.

More importantly, for an author, they’re a recharge of our word-banks. They get us outside our own creative schema, so we don’t forget to innovate our use of language.

Reading Rainbow was canceled in 2006

Yeah, I didn’t know it was still on either, still hosted by LeVar Burton, but there you have it. Has anything taken up the mantle of championing child literacy? I don’t know. I hope so. Books are constantly facing competition from other entertainment sources, and since I’m a writer, that means a shrinking market. More importantly, I don’t want to live in a world without readers.

In 2012 Burton released a Reading Rainbow iPod app. It’s apparently the most popular educational app, which is good news.

Support the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter

Today, March 28, 2014, LeVar Burton set up a kickstarter campaign to fund a new version of the show, a web-series that would also “bring Reading Rainbow’s unlimited library of interactive books and video field trips to kids everywhere and help classrooms most in need.” Free materials for classrooms, and accessibility for any child with internet access – which in the industrialized world is pretty much all of them.

I support this endeavor. So should you.

Kids need Reading Rainbow.

The kickstarter was at $35k when I noticed it, and in the hour since has almost doubled. It’s popular. But the funding goal is a cool million, so they could use your support. I’ll kick them what I can, and urge you to do the same, if you’re invested in the slightest in a future literate population.

 

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About Burning Brigid

A few weeks ago I wrote about representation and fiction, and last week I recalled my experiences casting a web-series pilot gender-blind. Both of those posts touch upon the same issues that I have with a lot of entertainment media: women, minorities, and LGBT characters are not given a fair representation.

For years this has been due to economic misconceptions held by the business interests that control creative production. The producers, the publishers, the old predominantly-white men in boardrooms perpetuated the myth that the vast majority of paying audiences weren’t interested in well-written women or protagonists of color.

That’s been changing, though, slowly but surely. The internet and social media have given a powerful voice to the previously disenfranchized, and as they make their opinions known, it’s been harder and harder to ignore the simple truths that these markets are hungry for diversity in the media they consume.

Hence, Burning Brigid

For almost two years actor Kat O’Connor and I have been shopping our Sleep Study pilot around to different production companies, trying to find a new home for the series to get it produced, without much luck. We’d get offers from companies willing to make it if we financed it, but nobody wanted to take it on as an in-house project.

So we decided to do it ourselves. I took some classes in production, and we’re going to form our own production company.

But we just don’t want to make films. We want to make the world a better place. Here’s our mission statement:

We seek to contribute to a cultural shift through narratives that normalize stories about the traditionally marginalized: women, minority, and LGBT characters presented as people rather than genres.

That last is important. I don’t want to make “Black film” or “LGBT movies” or “Chick Flicks”, I want to make movies that include people of diverse race, gender, and sexual orientation and identity without making a big deal out of it. Characters who happen to be gay or Asian or transsexual without making them stereotypes, or without those identities being the movie’s crux.

I want my characters to represent the world’s natural diversity, because that’s the nature of the world, and the nature of the characters.

Why? Because it’s honest, and it’s real, and it’s the world we live in.

Back To Sleep Study

Our first project is going to be the first season of Sleep Study. It’s already written, so the script break-down went quickly, and we’re looking at six days of shooting. We’re in talks with different industry professionals and entertainment lawyers so we can finalize it, but after that we’ll do some crowdsourced fundraising.

We have a few more ideas in development after that. If you’re a fan of my fiction, you know what sort of stories I like to tell.

If you’re interested in following Burning Brigid and want to be kept up to date with what we’re doing, you can check out our Facebook page and give us a Like, or subscribe to our mailing list. I recommend both; Facebook isn’t so great about showing everyone a page’s content, but it’s a public way to show your support.

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Casting Sleep-Study gender-blind

When I was writing the pilot for the atmospheric supernatural horror web-series Sleep Study, I didn’t specify race, gender, or sexual orientation for most of the characters. Casting packets were produced with either gender-neutral names (Alex, Charlie, Chris) or with dual gendered names (Maria/Mark, David/Dana). Race wasn’t specified either, but we weren’t assuming “white” as a default; we were just leaving it open.

This was back in 2012, and the primary reason was because we didn’t want to artificially limit the actors we auditioned for any given part. It wasn’t that the characters’ natures were undefined – they all had personalities, problems, conflicts, and character arcs plotted. We left them all flexible enough to allow the actors to bring their own interpretations to the roles, and that included any sexual or racial traits.

We weren’t interested in “black characters” or “white characters” or “women characters” or “gay characters.” We wanted characters that happened to be black or white or women or gay or whatever they turned out to be, however they wanted to play it.

The one exception was a character intended to play a closeted homosexual, as his particular arc involved a threatened outing.

That was then, this is now

I’d like to say that these choices were made for enlightened social-justice reasons, but really we just didn’t want to artificially limit our casting pool. The director and I didn’t have any hang-ups about race, gender, or sexual orientation, but we didn’t really consider issues of representation.  We just wanted to cast the most capable actors we could.

Two years later, and I’ve learned a lot about filmmaking, producing, screenwriting, and marginalization. This is echoed in my fiction writing. When I started writing the Galvanic Century steampunk mystery series, it was exceedingly Anglo-centric, stories about British characters set in the city of London.

I began to range further afield with the latter novelettes in the series, first with a female protagonist, and then focusing on class-conflict and imperialism, and setting stories in Mexico and the Ottoman Empire. The upcoming series releases will be set in China and India, and deal with Edwardian racial politics.

It was only with my latest title, Infernal Revelation, set in contemporary small-town America, that I’ve consciously sought to address a more diverse demographic in my fiction. I’m not talking about including people of color for the sake of including people of color, but because in the real world not everyone is white, straight, and cisgendered.

I may write stories that slip into the fantastic, but only intentionally. I still want that sense of the genuine.  I crave it. And readers need to read stories with diverse dramatic personae that map to the diversity of the real world. It shouldn’t be special to include a racially or sexually diverse cast. It should be normal, because it is normal.

What can I possibly have to say about the marginalized?

I say this as  a straight white cis male, and it’s a reflection of my privilege that I didn’t need to consider these issues when I started writing. It didn’t occur to me – I could safely be preoccupied with the rest of life’s troubles, focusing that energy elsewhere. Poverty, chronic depression, non-standard spirituality – I was preoccupied with my own issues,  as people tend to be, and it takes a measure of compassion to step outside your own schema and gain a greater awareness of the plights of others.

Telling stories that normalize the marginalized and brings attention to their issues is the best I can do with what I have and who I am. Someday I hope that this isn’t just the function of being an ally, but rather just the way all good fiction is created.

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Michael Coorlim now on Google play

Spent the weekend uploading my work to Google Play. Not much more to say about it, but if that’s how you buy your ebooks, now’s your chance.

 

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Hero Historia: historical superhero web serial

About a month ago I started writing Hero Historia, a freely-available alternate-history superhero web serial. New episodes are released every Monday, and every twelve episodes makes a single season or story-arc. Each season covers a different historical era, researched and extrapolated to account for the existence of superhuman individuals.

Fun fact: I was going to call the serial Historia Transhumanis but couldn’t get the domain. I wanted the name to evoke images of a 19th, early 20th century academic history text focused on the stories of those who were more (or less) human than human.

I couldn’t get a good form of Transhuman for the title, and I wanted something analogous to the German ubermensch. I drew back to the Greek origins of “Hero”, not in the sense of a story’s protagonist, but as one who stands well above the common by ability and deed.

And that’s what Hero Historia is about. Not so much “heroic” characters – some of the protagonists may be anti-heroes or downright villainous – but those who are so much more than human.

Jericho Rising

The first season brings us to the dawn of the Holocene with Jericho Rising. Clay is a member of the Bear clan, a nomadic hunter-gatherer band whose way of life ends when a foreign tribe brings a new warfare that cannot be resisted. He and his brother head to Jericho, the first city, to find a new Way.

Since so little is known about the people who lived in Jericho at this time (including what they called the city), I have a pretty free reign to make details up as the story demands. One of the major themes in Jericho Rising is that of the conflict between civilization and the wild, and the choice to leave the freedom of  the nomadic lifestyle for the settled lifestyle of the agricultural revolution.

History marches on

After Jericho Rising wraps up, we’ll leave Clay and the city behind and ride the wave of years to the city states of Sumer. This doesn’t mean we’re done with them – it’s always possible to revisit popular characters and eras for one more story – but that’s the general structure the serial takes.

We keep moving, on towards the present, era to era.

Donations, extras, and ebooks

The serial is free, but I’ll be accepting donations from readers interested in supporting the project, both through paypal and Patreon. Donations will serve to “unlock” extras – commissioned art, extra episodes, faux-academic articles, and the like.

In addition, every arc will be packaged, re-edited, and released as an ebook and paperback with additional supplementary otherwise unreleased material. This gives readers an additional means of support, as well as providing a copy to keep if the website goes down or the serial ends.

Go on. Read Hero Historia. Go.

Hero Historia has been a blast to write, and I hope that you’ll get a kick out of reading it. Go on over, check out the site, and if you like what you see sign up for the serial’s mailing list. I’ll give you a nudge when new episodes go live, and when new content has been unlocked, and when new collected seasons go on sale.

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Infernal Revelation episode 1 free through Amazon

The first episode of Infernal Revelation, the first season in the Profane Apotheosis paranormal thriller serial, is now available free through Amazon. Grab it, read it, and if you like it, the rest of the season is available at a 50% discount in Infernal Revelation: Collected Episodes.

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Representation and fiction

When I started writing professionally, I wanted to tell compelling stories about interesting and unfortunate things happening to interesting and unfortunate people. Like many beginning authors, my fiction was more informed by prior art than by the world around me – I wrote stories that looked and sounded like the genre stories I’d grown up with. My characters, as a result, were overwhelmingly white, male, and when their sexual identities were considered at all, straight and cis-gendered.

The lack of female, person of color, and LGBT representation – in my own work, and in the media I consumed – didn’t occur to me. That was the luxury that my privilege afforded me. I know that some people feel a sense of social fatigue with that word – privilege – but it’s a simple word for a complicated concept. And it fits. I was privileged enough to not even realize how sheltered I was.

The Mission

As I developed as an author and aged as a human being, nuance crept both into my work and into my perception of reality.  When I branched off into screenwriting I learned how reluctant the established creative structure was to branch off away from what society has designated to be the ‘default’ or ‘mainstream’ demographic. When I began to look into forming my own production company, my partner and I saw the opportunity to address these problems of representation.

The woman I was forming the company with, actor and artist Kat O’Connor, shared an anecdote with me. When she was ten, she would write stories featuring boys her age, as self-insert protagonists despite the fact that she was a girl. She literally could not see someone like her performing in a heroic role.

I find that incredibly sad.

Inspiration Strikes

We knew we wanted to address the issue with the art we created, but weren’t really able to articulate it until we saw a couple of panels at C2E2: Opening the Clubhouse Doors: Creating More Inclusive Geek Communities and Glass Ceilings, Missing Stairs, and Gatekeepers, presented by the Chicago Nerd Social Club, and the Gay Character and Creators Panel, presented by Geeks OUT.

This coincided with the production class I’d been taking’s assignment to come up with a company mission statement. Inspired by the panels I’d sat through and encouraged by my partner, I composed the following:

Burning Brigid is a Chicago-based production company that aims to contribute to a cultural shift through narratives that normalize stories about the traditionally marginalized, presenting them as people, rather than genres.

The key is normalization. We feel that women, minorities, and LGBT people aren’t just under-represented, they’re poorly represented. Issues of identity and self are reduced to character ticks. Entire demographics are reduced to a handful of tropes and pushed together into a genre.

I don’t want that. I don’t want to write “Hispanic Characters” or “The Gay Guy” or “LGBT Fiction.” I want to write stories about believable people, some of whom happen to be gay, or black, or transgendered, or women, or men, or white. I want to write these characters as if they’re normal. Because they are, and their stories are normal, even if they may face unique struggles.

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New Enochian Thriller Release: Infernal Revelation Collected Episodes 1-4

The jock with survivor’s guilt, the young prodigy, the punk, the Nietzschean bully, and the minister’s daughter discover that they have more in common than their adoption records. A supernatural mystery links them together even as it sets them apart. If they can’t overcome their mutual distrust and work together, the secret that binds them will end up consuming them – and they’ll never even know why.

Infernal Revelation is the first story arc, or “season”, in the Profane Apotheosis serial. It’s presented in four episodes, and can be read as a stand-alone story in its own right.

The serial’s premise began as a postmodern pagan approach to Christian mythology, particularly the more esoteric apocrypha, including Goetic and Enochian mysticism. Featuring in the Infernal Revelation arc is the idea of Nephilim, the half-human, half-angelic giants from the Old Testament.

This is expressed through elements of ontological and personal horror.

A second core element to the premise is that of the outsider, and how clumsy attempts at inclusion can serve to push people further away. Each of the main characters in Infernal Revelation is “othered” by their small town, in some cases overtly and in some cases overtly, but by the end of the arc the divisions that were once so cloying now seem distant and superficial.

Episode 1 is free

I hope you enjoy reading Infernal Revelation. I’ve made the first episode free through Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, and Smashwords. It’s currently 99-cents through Amazon, though they may eventually get around to price-matching it to free as well. I can’t put a ballpark on when that might be, so if paying a dollar for a book doesn’t break your bank, I wouldn’t recommend waiting.

If you do get a kick out of what I’m doing here, the next arc, Dark Genesis, should be available at the end of 2014 or early 2015.

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Free Fiction Release: Infernal Revelation episode 1

High School track star Lily Baker’s life is shattered when a horrific accident puts her in a coma and kills her best friends. When she wakes a week later, she can’t get a straight answer about what happened – just the cold hard accusatory stares of her classmates. Who was driving? Was it her fault? Had they been drinking?

Lily’s quest for the truth uncovers far more than she bargained for in this first episode of the YA paranormal suspense serial, Infernal Revelation.

Free eBook

Infernal Revelation, episode 1, is currently free through Barns & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, and the Apple iBookstore. Amazon has it listed at 99 cents until they get around to price-matching it with the others; if you want it free through Amazon you can hasten the process by reporting the lower prices to them on the sales page.

Episodes 2-4

Episodes 2-4 will be published in early May as soon as the final edits are complete. They will be published in a 4-part bundle containing the entire Infernal Revelation story arc at a significant saving over the cost of purchasing them individually.

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C2E2 Reminder

Just a general reminder that while I’ll be at C2E2 this weekend, it won’t be in any official capacity. I’d thought about doing a panel, but couldn’t find enough people to participate on any of the topics I came up with.

That said, if you spot me I’ll be more than happy to sign any books of mine you happen to have, or give you a bookmark, or something. I always enjoy meeting people who’ve read my work.

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