About Mario

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Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mario Piumetti is a freelance writer of science fiction, horror, screenplays, and nonfiction. He has a bachelor's degree in English from California Lutheran University and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University. An avid music lover, his work is heavily influenced by rock, punk, and metal. You can contact him at mario.piumetti.writer@gmail.com.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Edge of Failure

Right now, I am so pissed off at myself that I'm literally sick to my stomach.  I physically feel disgusted with myself because Undead and Inhuman is hanging on the edge of failure.  It's not a confidence issue.  It's a pure plot problem that slapped me like a sledgehammer.

Let me back up a bit.

Undead and Inhuman was supposed to be about vampires in the future going to the Moon to stop an alien enemy from bombing Earth.  It sounded cool and whenever I talked to people about the concept, even they couldn't help but get caught up in the enthusiasm of it.  I did the research as best as I could.  I had a production schedule for the damn thing!  The deadline was supposed to be July 2015, no later.  I swear to God I had this figured out!

Here's where things slipped, and it all happened tonight.

There were going to be just a few hundred vampires going to the Moon to stop the aliens.  The reasoning behind this was that it costs a lot to send even a few people to the Moon.  A few thousand is out of the question, and even a few hundred is pushing it.

I was brainstorming some dialog for an upcoming scene and I had one character telling his commanding officer: "This mission is going to cost billions of dollars in resources, all of our lives, and it'll accomplish nothing."  They're wildly outnumbered against an enemy with technology that's beyond them, and they'd be fighting in an environment that's practically engineered by nature to kill any living thing.  I can't just magically up the number of vampires going to the Moon because then that's jumping the shark.  Then it's, like, "Oh, really?  You're going to send tens of thousands of people to the Moon all at once?  Are you fucking joking?"

Jesus!  I could have sworn that this would have been the bookAt times, I could almost see a finished copy sitting on my desk.  Instead, all I'm seeing now is junk hastily stitched together.

I feel like all of this is going to make me throw up.

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