Twitter has been ablaze for the last couple of days with references to an off-hand comment made by former Firefly star Nathan Fillion that if he had the cash he would buy the rights to the show, then make more of it on the Internet. Being the rabid group that they are, many Browncoats have been swarming to HelpNathanBuyFirefly.com in a new wave of activity to bring back the cancelled show.

I would go with them if I thought the idea was a viable one. However, I do not. Allow me to tell you why.

First of all, I will say right now that I love Firefly. The space western setting is one that really appeals to me, as will become increasingly obvious in my Ink Proof Cannon story Bounty Bunny when it comes back from its househunting-enforced hiatus next month. I often view the colonisation of space as mimicking the frontier nature of the American Old West so for me, Firefly was simply bang on target.

Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, the story in Firefly ended. Serenity was a lovely send-off for the show and while many of the cast members walked away from that film, not all did. This hits right at the crux of the problem with bringing the show back. Do you carry on from where the film ended and therefore cause half the former cast to be left out of the revival? That doesn’t seem fair to me. Not only that but it was the interplay with the characters that made a lot of the series as good as it was. Cutting the crew down by half would cut the interactions by half. Not a good move, I feel.

That leaves only one option if Firefly is to come back: setting the new series between the original and the film. Again, this raises problems. First and foremost, all the tension is gone. We cannot possibly get into a crisis situation with a cliffhanger ending now because we know the cast will survive any encounter they come across. Why do we know this? Because they all have to be alive for the film. There goes a lot of the drama and also much of the sense of adventure. If there is no danger, all we have is “how will Mal and friends get out of this, dear viewers? Tune in next week for another thrilling instalment!” No thanks.

They could, of course, go the Star Trek route and ignore everything that doesn’t fit the new vision, casting Serenity aside in favour of an effective reboot but that in itself causes problems. I can’t be the only person who heard all that wailing and gnashing of teeth when Abrams et al swept aside the whole Star Trek franchise in order to start with a clean slate and I’d hate to hear all that again. Nevertheless, if a web version of Firefly is going to take off, that is probably the only viable option.

If it happens, that is. Right now the target is $300,000, 000 to get this thing going. That’s a lot of spare change to find down the back of the sofa.

Sometimes we come to the unfortunate realization that what we are writing really doesn’t work. It can happen to all of us and chances are it will happen more than once. With me, it happened a while back but I’ve only just worked out how to fix the problem. It will be nice to finally get through this story.

Anyone who has been reading the stories section of this website (or who was following the Building Tales blog before I incorporated it into this site during the last redesign) will have probably come across The Curse of the Other World. It is designed as a supernatural horror but it really wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t get a grip on the characters and I didn’t feel they fit the way the story needed to play out. In short, the story was not working for me and that’s why it ground to a halt.

It struck me yesterday while I was reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that what I needed to be writing was more akin to detective fiction than supernatural horror. The storyline fits better into that genre than what I was trying to do with it. That’s not to say there will be no horror in the new version because there will, but now I think I’ve got the angle I need to see the story through to its conclusion.

As for the characters, I’ve been reading a lot of Poe, Conan Doyle and Lovecraft recently and each of them has shown me one thing: if you are going to unravel a supernatural mystery, you need a character that will keep ploughing on regardless of the danger to themselves or others. Poe and Conan Doyle have that in abundance because of how their Dupin and Holmes characters act. With Lovecraft, he has characters who invariably should have given up and run away quickly before going insane or being killed horribly (or both) but don’t because of a singular thirst for knowledge that borders on insanity.

The character of Sarah Barclay was designed to be a knowledge-seeker in the Lovecraftian style but with a personal need to see the storyline through to its conclusion because of events in her past; hence why the storyline was running in two time lines simultaneously (and I don’t think I’m really giving anything away by saying that here). I’ve decided to ramp up her drive in the new version; and also change her name. I’ve been working on this storyline since before I met my partner’s family and writing about someone with the same name as my sister-in-law seems a bit odd now, so I’ve gone with the alternative name I had considered for the character when I started out. It’s not a problem to change names of fictional people but I thought any of you who read this might be interested to know why I made the switch.

I’m going to start posting the first draft of this new version once I’ve finished chapter one, because that way I’ll have a bit of a buffer for those times when I run out of steam or just can’t make the time to write on a particular day. Expect to be able to read something new soon.

So lately I’ve been mostly away from the Internet, enjoying the sights and splendours of north Wales. It has been great to get away for a while and recharge my batteries because the number of projects I’ve been working on of late has taken its toll on my energy reserves.

Inside the walls of Caernarfon castle

Jenny and I took a lot of photos while we were away, all of which are now available on Flickr if you’re so inclined. Conwy castle and Caernarfon castle are amazing sights that I would recommend to anyone.

We took a few videos on my Blackberry while exploring Conwy castle; with Jenny and I giving a running commentary on what we thought of the place, and what we thought the rooms we explored were actually used for. It would probably have helped if we were actually looking at the guide book we bought on the way in and had with us while filming but then that would have been too professional. We were just larking about really and if I’d wanted to be professional I’d have used a real video camera instead of my mobile phone. Still, once the videos are edited up, I’ll put the results on YouTube for you all to enjoy.

Now that I’m back, I’m expecting to be able to get a load of work done over the coming weeks. The web serial project will move onto the scriptwriting stage soon, so expect more news on that as it comes in. For those of you who are interested at this point, the series is based around the exploits of a small ground of Live Action Role Players and will be a comedy along the theme of affectionate parody. Because I’m unable to get in contact with a couple of the co-holders of the copyright on Dudes with swords, I can’t use those characters or that storyline as a basis for the series (which is a massive shame since the script I wrote with Paul O’Malley is brilliant even if I do say so myself) but this new group and new story will be built from the ground up with the purpose of working as a web serial, so maybe all this is for the best anyway.

Now I’d best get on with building up a buffer on the webcomics again. I had one for while we were away on holiday but that’s burned through now and I need to get to work. Webcomics are like hungry, hungry babies: you can feed them strips all day long but they’ll always hunger for more. Hmm. I think there’s a story in that…