Mike Palleschi - A Land Grab, An Unholy Alliance

Mike Palleschi is a television writer who has won two Emmy awards for his work on "Bill Nye the Science Guy." He performed standup comedy and sketch comedy and has worked as a comedy writer for almost 30 years and had a few shows he created that almost got made. He decided to transition out of TV to write novels so he could write whatever he wanted and not worry about what 'sells.' "Falling into Shadow" is his debut novel.  As our Author of the Day, he tells us all about his book, "Falling into Shadow."Please give us a short introduction to what "Falling into Shadow" is about.“Falling into Shadow” is about a country thrown into chaos when a land grab during a climate disaster forces people to have to fight over diminishing resources, but it’s really about the darkness that lurks inside all of us. Carl Jung called it “The Shadow.” It’s that part of us no one wants to admit is there."Falling into Shadow" feels like Star Wars got dropped into the moral ambiguity of Game of Thrones. What was the seed idea that kicked this story into motion for you?I saw the original Star Wars in 1977 when I was 7 years old, and sitting in the theater watching Luke blow up the Death Star was when I realized I wanted to be a writer. When Empire Strikes Back came out 3 years later, it was a little darker, which was perfect for me because I was 3 years older. But Return of the Jedi came out 3 years after that, and was less mature than its predecessor. I thought some of it was a little childish, in fact. I understand George Lucas wanted to keep the franchise kid-friendly and when he did the prequels years later, he made them for the new batch of 8-year-olds and not the 30-year-olds who grew up with the originals. Understandable. But I always wondered what the franchise would have been like if it aged with its audience. I think a lot of my novel came from daydreams I had as a kid that simmered in my subconscious for a few decades. Of course by then I was reading much darker stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire so it seemed like a natural melding.The setting of Novena—with its shifting habitable zones—feels like climate migration turned up to 11. Was this world inspired by our real-world ecological crises?The climate element of Falling into Shadow is what I like to call a very happy accident. I was fleshing out a story and it was very loose at the time and I thought, “What if it was set on a moon of a ringed planet like Saturn.” I just thought it would be cool to have a night sky with a ringed planet going through phases. Then I thought about it logically, “How long would a planet like Saturn take to orbit the sun? About a hundred years? Hmm. That would mean… if the moon was tilted on its axis like Earth is… seasons would last 25 years.” That was a lightbulb turning on moment. Having these drastic changes in seasons would be an added layer of conflict. Once I zeroed in on the element of encroaching doom brought on by the shifting weather, all the storylines came into focus. I didn’t set out to write a story about climate, the climate aspect just took over. I studied improv and comedy at a place called the Groundlings. If you’re doing improv and you have an idea where the scene is going but you or your scene partners stumble across something better in the moment, you have to drop whatever ideas you had before and go with the better idea.Stem Shifters are fascinating—people who can alter Space, Time, Energy, and Matter. How did you develop this idea, and what limits (if any) did you intentionally build in?A lot of fantasy novels have magic systems. Stem Shifters to me are a science fiction take on a magic system. I like to apply logic to things, Einstein’s theory of relativity proved that space and time are one thing called ‘spacetime’ and that energy and matter are the same thing in different forms. I thought it would be cool if the human mind could bridge these things together. I approached it almost like music: Anyone can bang on a piano, very few can learn to play, and only a select few can make beautiful music. I see Stem Shifting as a skill that few can do at all, and the ones who have any skill will have to work very hard to do it well. And even then, there are limitations. I made it that Time manipulation is the hardest skill to master. Part of that is for story reasons. It would be too easy to “Go back in time and fix the problem.” I have a character that can peek into the future, but any future that is seen, can be altered. Otherwise that character would have too much power. I like having stories that have possibilities, but not easy outs.How much of this world did you build before you started writing, and how much revealed itself as you went?Some writers are plotters, and some are ‘pantsers’ in that they ‘fly by the seat of their pants.’ I’m a plotter, but up until this point I had mostly written television scripts or screenplays which have a time limit. I plotted out the novel but I got so excited building this world I had ‘scope creep,’ where things just kept getting bigger. So, even though I plotted out the first draft, very little of that first draft made it to the final novel. Some of that was thanks to some great editors I worked with, some of it was me realizing what was working and what wasn’t, so you could say I built a lot of this world before I started writing but then much more revealed itself during each draft.The pace is breakneck. Did you ever feel tempted to slow down and "let the characters breathe," or was that urgency part of the plan from day one?I think it might be the TV writer in me that wanted to keep the pace up. Also, the draft was rather long before I did the final edit and I trimmed a lot of fat. There’s one chapter in particular that I knew could have been cut but I kept it even though it’s not action-packed because it reveals something interesting about a character I love, and we see a glimpse into the lives of some of the everyday people that aren’t directly involved in the major conflict. You can’t do too many of those or the story lags, but you need some to add depth and complexity.You’ve had a long career in comedy writing. How did it feel to dive into something this intense and serious?I think after writing comedy so long I just wanted to flex a different muscle and it felt great to be able to go nuts! When I first moved to Hollywood, I had written a science fiction screenplay and a few comedy specs. People told me the sci fi script would cost a trillion dollars to make, but they sparked to the comedies which ultimately led to jobs. So, diving into sci fi wasn’t so much changing gears as going back to something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid.Most people know you from your Emmy-winning work on Bill Nye the Science Guy. What’s something about writing science comedy that helped (or hindered) writing science fiction?Writing comedy definitely helps with writing drama. I mentioned the Groundlings before and one of the things they teach you is to not go for the joke, which sounds counterintuitive to someone who’s never written comedy, but the best comedy comes from character. How does that particular person react in that particular situation? What’s interesting about their reaction and how is it different from what most people would have done? Drama follows the same rules. The interesting thing is seeing how a particular character reacts in that particular situation. What flaws in their character led them to this? Bad comedy writers would have a string of jokes with no regard to character. Bad drama, or sci fi, or fantasy writers would have a string of conflicts and action without regard to the character.Working for Bill Nye the Science Guy gave me a deep appreciation for science. I think for that reason I try to apply logic to what I write and make it stand up to scrutiny. I break from the tired sci fi trope of “One world, one climate” and I think it adds so much to the story. I also made the space travel somewhat realistic (you can’t just hit a button and go ‘faster than light.’) Even the Stem Shifters, which have a fantasy element, are rooted in relativity.When I started working on Bill Nye the Science Guy, Bill told me (and I’m paraphrasing because this was a long time ago) “we’re an educational show and an entertainment show, but we have to be an entertainment show first because if we don’t entertain, no one will watch, and then we won’t educate anybody.” I think about that a lot. Talking about climate before, I’m very aware of the problem climate change is posing right now but if I wrote a heavy-handed message-pushing story about the climate crisis, no one would find it entertaining, so no one would read it. Instead, I wrote an action adventure that entertains, whichever side of the political aisle you’re on. It has climate as an element, but I’m not preaching about it. It may make people think, but I’m not telling them what to think.You mention some shows you created almost got made—did those near-misses fuel the decision to strike out as a novelist?Working in TV can be frustrating. I had a pilot my agent shopped around. UPN, which had just had a hit with Chris Rock’s show “Everybody Hates Chris”, loved it and made me an offer. CBS also liked it and wanted to buy it. Normally this could have meant a bidding war, but both CBS and UPN were owned by Viacom and the president of UPN had just stepped down, so this was the brief window in time where the president of CBS was also temporarily running UPN! He didn’t want to bid against his other network, so he let UPN keep it. That wasn’t so bad. Being at a smaller network had its upsides. They would be less likely to bring in bigger guns to replace me. Then the news broke that UPN and the WB were going to combine to form the CW. Suddenly they had too many shows to fit in their schedule and certainly didn’t need more. My show was dead, but legally, they owned it. I got the rights back but it took years of legal limbo and by then it was cold product. I had another script people liked, but then Modern Family became a break out hit and everyone wanted the next Modern Family. My show that people loved one minute, was dead the next. I had another show that I completely rewrote when we got an actor attached because we were told a specific network loved him. Then the network told us they didn’t think the actor I rewrote it for could carry a show.This is the kind of stuff that happens. I also knew people who created shows and then were replaced. Imagine that. You jump through all the hoops, you catch lightning in a bottle, you make a show that goes to pilot, the pilot gets picked up, the show’s a hit, and then they replace you for a more experienced show runner.But for me the kicker was the 2007-2008 WGA strike. I realized how bad things were getting for writers. The companies wanted to cut us out as much as they could. I was working at America’s Funniest Videos, which I originally saw as a stepping stone towards bigger and better things but after seeing what the industry was like, (and was becoming) I realized I had a great job working with nice people and it was as steady as steady could be. Even though it wasn’t as challenging as what I would have liked to be doing, I did fun stuff, like creating the bit ‘Versus’ which has been a staple of the show for decades now. I thought I would be a fool to leave, so I decided to keep my ‘day job’ and write whatever I wanted without worrying about what I could sell. I wrote a novel that was ‘okay.’ Not worth going all-in on. But it proved to myself that I could write a novel. It's a whole different animal than TV or screenplays but I loved the freedom. I spent the next few years working on different things but Falling into Shadow came to dominate my imagination. By the time the next WGA strike came along, I saw that things had only gotten worse for writers (and everyone in the industry.) I consider myself very lucky to have made a living writing and getting to write the book I wanted.This is Book One of a trilogy. How far ahead have you plotted? Is the ending already locked in?I have the next two books plotted out, but who knows, I may sit down to write something that’s been in my head for years and say, “Hold on a second! What if I did this instead!”