Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It!

Truncated is a darkly hilarious look into the apocalypse... and us.

Bill is a small fish in the big ocean that is Orange County, California. He just can't reach the top, and he just can't let that fact go. He's miserable and miserably bored.

But when a series of natural and man-induced calamities brings the apocalypse into high gear, and war to his doorstep, Bill's life finally gets interesting.

Now a lone gunman in a world absent of rules or morals, without the shackles of comparison, or the weight of anxiety, it's kill or be killed.

Life is finally simple, and Bill is finally happy.

That is, until he becomes the reluctant leader of a band of misfit survivors who are putting a damper on his newfound coolness. With any luck, they'll make it to his mom's in NorCal without getting shot.

Writing Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It! was a really fun experience. I'd been writing screenplays and had just directed A Resurrection, my first film. And, as my first taste in completing something so huge, I thought it was going to be this life altering--earth shattering--moment. When it was finished and all the hoopla and pats on the back had ended, I noticed that I was still just me. Some surf dork from Huntington Beach who liked to write movies and watch The Simpsons. I'd discovered that there is no arrival. No becoming. There's just the work. That's it. So, I started writing this book. And instantly I found there was something cathartic about writing a story that fit into a novel better than on the screenplay page. It was freeing. I could finally say what people were thinking, and not just show through action. And in truth, the story just flowed out even though it was initially outlined on a napkin. I'm not kidding. And I had done it using the same beats used for screenwriting, just more loosely.

I've always found apocalyptic movies and dystopian books to be really interesting, but the themes of scavenging for food and being hungry all the time, along with some sort of almost-explained super-catastrophe, began to wear on me. I thought we were plenty capable of destroying ourselves with a simple formula of discomfort and scarcity. I don't think it will take much. And, as I wrote the book, I saw my own personal themes being played out. Ones that reflected an end that was soon nearing and compared it to what I thought was important now. They don't exist well together.

As you read Truncated, I want you to realize that The Apocalypse is in fact coming. It's a real thing. At some point or another for all of us. So... you know... live accordingly.

“I wasn’t Ken. But more like Ken’s decent looking friend, Bill.”

“The cops were all gone. As a protective force, anyhow. That was both good and bad for the gangs, because now everyone was a target, even them.“

“But I felt an ache standing there. It [the house] was the feeling of nothing. And nobody. Of permanent change. A skeleton-strip-mall, empty of its treasure, its character, and all of the spirit we gave it, with its broken-out windows and looted innards left to look like the empty sockets of a grinning skull.“

“The plague that visited us wasn’t really a plague, but more of a sever and sometimes deadly flu and it had ravaged mostly the East Coast after some monkey in Southeast Asia fucked a mango or something and created a flu unlike witnessed since the Dark ages. The spectrum of antibiotics and antiviral medications was dwindling like the ice flows due to global warming.“

“And let’s face it, we were a global economy, and by that I mean America supported the globe on its purchasing power.”

“She carefully slid her body of me. Straddling, lying with her chest to my chest, and kissing me again. Kissing me as though it was the end of the world.”