Part 32
Another week of lockdown. The coronavirus is claiming an alarming number of lives and the predictions are scary. However, I am now beginning to sense a resurgence of hope from the people I have some contact with. Most of these are on the Internet but I do have to go shopping every few days. People are beginning to respect the six-foot distance rule. Large plastic screens have gone up around the supermarket tellers and people are joining together, not in the spatial sense but rather in a spirit of camaraderie that reminds me of WWII.
It terms of the future of economies around the world, there is massive speculation with very little certainty, but what I do find encouraging is that everyone I’m dealing with is not sitting on their thumbs but rather looking forward to see what can be done when this terrible full stop on all activity has run its course.
All my movie projects are on hold but we are still mindful of the fact that whenever there has been a serious economic crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the movie houses were filled by people trying to escape from the grim day-to-day realities and enjoying escapist entertainment. Those of us involved in specific movie projects continue to plan and polish our presentations in anticipation of the time when the demand for new pictures will again be a prime commodity in short supply.
For me personally another project I have been working on for some years has suddenly been offered a lifeline. It has an unusual history.
In 2001, I was going through a tough time in the movie industry in South Africa. We were five years into the new “Democratic” nation. Television work for people like me who were described as “Too male, too pale and too old” had virtually dried up, despite any previous successes.
I sat down and thought about how I could do something on the still fairly new Internet using my writing skills, as an alternative to movies and TV series. I came up with an idea and gave it the name, “cyber soapies.” I set about finding a client who would be willing to pay for me to write a weekly four- to six-page serial story on their website. The idea was to create something that would make reading the client’s website enjoyable. The word “soapie” was a slight misnomer as I planned to write something better than that, but the name stuck.
My first client was a very popular country hotel called Sparkling Waters, a hotel about 60 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, in the Magaliesberg Mountains. They had created a website but had little or no idea of social media, which was in its infancy at the time. They were lucky if they had 400 visitors to their site in a month. The hotel, and in particular their conference facilities, was doing very well and they pretty much ignored the lack of response on the website. However, when I suggested that I write an action-adventure romance centered around the hotel, it sparked their interest.
In brief, I wrote two cyber soapies over two years. Within three months, the 400 visitors to their website had risen to 8,000, with not only prospective visitors to the hotel enjoying the weekly episodes with a cliffhanger at the end of each week, but also the local community in the rural region around the hotel. I used the names of real people where possible with one cast iron rule – those that I named were the good guys. The baddies, as well as a couple of lead characters, were fictional!
What I also discovered was that the 52 episodes a year amounted to over 200 pages of text and, in book form, over 300. As a result, I realized that these stories could later be published as novels.
I’ve tried unsuccessfully over the years since I’ve been here in the UK to acquire a literary agent. There are plenty of them but, as a successful writer friend told me, they are almost harder to sell your writing to than the publisher. This is because their reputation depends upon only submitting really good works to publishers in order to maintain that reputation. As a result, only the most persevering authors with real talent acquire a reputable agent. Frankly I’ve always been torn between my novel writing and my major desire to get a movie production underway with one of my screenplays. Movies have always won out, so my attempts to sell myself to an agent have been sporadic at best.
Now, in the midst of this corona full stop, I’ve just had an offer to publish the two novels I’ve adapted from my cyber soapies on condition that I write a third novel to form a trilogy of related stories. These will be published as e-books.
This has been a real tonic for me. I would have loved to have had the books published in hard copy. This can still happen in the future, but the point is that something is actually happening at this difficult time.
The first two novels were written in 2001 but the third will be set in 2019, before the virus, and will feature the daughter of the original couple featured in the first novel entitled Pursuit of Treachery.
What this has taught me is that by remaining positive looking to the future, opportunities arise. These opportunities quite often come from unexpected sources.
We don’t know at this point where the breakthrough will come for ExoBrain but I am supremely confident that it will. The technology is simply too brilliant to be wasted and we have a team of extremely positive-thinking individuals who are driving this work of genius forward. Although the virus has temporarily stopped things, this doesn’t prevent us from planning how to get going again.
Nobody really knows what the world of post-virus will look like. But one thing is sure, if ExoTech was badly needed before the virus, it will be even more vital for the task ahead. Simple affordable technology with a high degree of security that will be able to minimize fake news and maximize direct communication to all corners of the globe is a goal worth striving for, which is why the ExoBrain team is dedicating hundreds of hours in the pursuit of ExoLence!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.