Background:  I live in Canada. As I understand it, we have a moderately flourishing film industry, and a slightly healthier publishing industry since most of our publishers have ties to larger US companies.

Conundrum:  I am halfway through my feature film script that I began as part of my film studies.The locations I see in my brain are the Canadian prairies--the farmlands, forests, and mountains, but it is still an alien world. It is a big budget, epic, hero's tale with space ships crashing, and alien creatures attacking, and alter-tech vehicles and equipment. My instructors estimate a budget $100-200 million.

This will never be filmed as a Canadian movie.

Unfortunately, getting a spec script to the right hands in Hollywood is getting harder and harder unless you are A) Persistent, B) Lucky, C) Connected, and D) All of the above.

Question:  Should I continue writing it as a script and worry about that later? Or should I switch it over to prose and market it as a novel? If the latter option, do I need to set it up to be a trilogy? That seems to be the standard in genre publishing.

To anyone who answers, I will read and think about everything, but I may ignore it all. Just so you know.

A long time ago, when I created this list of recs, I included access to download a PDF I created for A Farmer and His Cows, which is an awesomely complex examination of slavery, and how society can/has subvert itself to make it accepted when it's for "The Greater Good". It's very dark, and very long, but highly recommended. (And has been claimed by lileath who has posted it on A03)!

Anyway, I logged into mediafire to find this notice awaiting me:

( Dear MediaFire User:Collapse )

[26 Sep] ETA: AO3 is looking for people who have received one of these notices, so I've volunteered my story. In writing it up, I noticed a couple interesting things about it. Mainly, this sentence:

The claim is, in fact, not against me or this story, but against Mediafire as a propagator of piracy.

They also incorrectly identify the file as a video. ("NBC Universal demands that mediafire.comimmediately remove or otherwise disable access to the video files identified in thisletter ...")

It's obvious that no human examined the file before submitting the claim. Basic formatting errors in the letter also support the idea that a bot, or some kind of automated program, sent it.