- March 29, 2024
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An earthquake cracks through the ground. It’s “The Big One,” a 9.7 that has roads disintegrating underfoot, ruining cities. Skyscrapers sway and crumble from the force. But that’s not what truly rocks the world — it’s only the beginning. As the surface cracks, so does the earth deep underground. A fissure opens up, releasing creatures that had been trapped for millennia. Sea serpents emerge, and they’ve got a hunger that can’t be satisfied.
“They’re the ultimate invasive species,” said “Serpentine Fire” author Stephen DeWoody.
Winter Park resident DeWoody and longtime friend and professional collaborator Jon Binkowski spent the last two and a half years crafting the sci-fi thriller novel “Serpentine Fire.” The story takes readers on a ride after the earthquake and the release of the hungry, green-eyed serpents, which take over the ocean eating everything in sight, including — when they get big enough — the easy pickings of the humans bobbing in boats on the water’s surface.
The novel looks at the impact the creatures make on the ecosystem and how different groups react to their appearance. Scientists want to understand them, militaries want to weaponize them, businessmen want to exploit them and animal lovers want to find their place in the world. But they’re getting too big and way too dangerous.
For more information about “Serpentine Fire” and links to purchase online, visit serpentinefirenovel.com. Stephen DeWoody will be at Writer’s Block Bookstore in Winter Park selling and signing the book on Friday, Dec. 12, from 4 to 7 p.m. DeWoody’s next project is a feature film called “Characterz,” about the theme park world from the perspective of the actors who play the characters. Learn more at characterzmovie.com
“The idea is that we were trying to take that humans-versus-monsters concept and, as much as it’s possible, try to keep all of our ducks in a row, all of our facts straight, making it seem possible,” DeWoody said. “We refer to it ourselves sometimes as ‘Jaws’ for the 21st century, bigger, badder, meaner, worse.”
The authors, who met more than 30 years ago producing shows and exhibits for SeaWorld, wanted to write a novel that had readers believing the very strange, the almost unbelievable.
“We like the plausibility, the possibility of it actually happening,” Binkowski said. “We’re doing something goofy, but it’s just enough that somebody goes, ‘You know, that might happen.’”
“You have to come back to Earth, you have to keep double checking yourself, you’re not going so far that you’ve left credibility behind, you don’t want the ‘not-uh’ factor,” DeWoody said.
They did that with the help of a scientific expert and friend who let them know if their sea creature and its qualities could happen in real life. It could. Rapid growth, armor plating and invading and destroying an ecosystem all are qualities that exist in nature.
The concept of the serpents came to Binkowski 15 years ago, but hadn’t been able to escape the pair’s giant file drawer of ideas until recently. When the authors decided to write “Serpentine Fire” they called upon the same unconventional methods they’d used writing shows and screenplays together.
Binkowski likes to act shows out when he brainstorms, and when he writes, it’s in what they call a “Jon stew” of stream-of-consciousness. Ideas, scenes and dialog flood the page, and it’s not neat and orderly. DeWoody fleshes scenes out, takes a page of stew and turns it into a chapter, creates characters to make events make sense. Although they both wrote the novel together, for “Serpentine Fire” Binkowski was essentially the ideas guy and DeWoody was the wordsmith.
“I relinquished control of the crafting of this and the feel for this as far as the writing style, where he kind of relinquished control of the big ideas,” Binkowski said.
They can do that because they trust and admire each other.
“He’s one of those true Renaissance men in that he can paint, he can draw, he can write, he can act, he can direct,” Binkowski said of DeWoody. “He happens to be a ridiculously avid reader, an English teacher, a linguist, someone who prides himself on being a walking dictionary, so he’s a nerd, so I try to tap into that for sure.”
You can find the team signing books at Writer’s Block Bookstore in Winter Park on Friday, Dec. 12, from 4 to 7 p.m. And maybe one day on the big screen.
“We would like nothing more than somehow for a copy of it to land on Steven Spielberg’s desk,” DeWoody said.