The Red Planet: A Literary Cinema Experience

There's a girl floating in a metal room, further from home than anyone she loves has ever been. Her crewmates are asleep. She's not. She's staring out a window at something she hasn't looked at yet tonight, something she's not ready to see.

That's the first page of The Red Planet. And Act One is free to read right now.

You don't get told what's happening or why she's there. You get dropped straight into it, and the story cuts around you the way a memory actually would, no warning, no explanation, just somewhere else entirely before you've caught your breath.

People don't finish Act One and think "that was a good chapter." They finish it and go find whoever's in the room and go "okay you need to read this right now."

What a Literary Cinema Experience Actually Means

Most fiction asks you to imagine a scene. The Red Planet is written to show you one, the way a camera would, cut by cut. Scene headings mark every shift in place and time. Match cuts carry you from one memory to the next through a single shared image, stars on a spaceship window dissolving into stars on a childhood ceiling, a bulb's hum bending into the flicker of a television years later. Nothing is explained after it happens. It's simply shown, the way a film trusts an audience to feel a cut instead of being told what it means.

That's the whole idea behind calling this a literary cinema experience. It borrows the grammar of film, scene structure, sound bridges, visual match cuts, and applies it to prose, so reading it feels less like being told a story and more like watching one unfold in front of you.

Why I Wrote It This Way

Film has it easy, in a way. You watch a cut happen, and your eyes just do the rest, no effort required. I don't have that option here. All I have is words on a page. So I had to find another way to get you there.

The idea actually came to me in a dream, the shape of it, the feeling of it, all at once. And the only way I could think to actually carry that feeling onto a page was to stop describing it and start making you live it instead.

That's the real reason this book reads the way it does. If you just read a story and nothing about it touches you, what was the point of reading it at all? You'd be better off closing your eyes and building your own world in your head, which is honestly what most traditional books ask of you anyway. I wanted something different. I wanted you to feel it the way you'd feel a scene in a film, immediate, physical, no distance between you and the moment. If it doesn't move something in you, it hasn't done its job.

What Act One Covers

Act One, titled The Blue Hour, is entirely Ira's childhood, free to read in full right now. It follows her from a father who sneaks her out of school to watch a real rocket launch, through a house divided by two very different responses to dreaming big, into her own slow, specific fascination with scale, silence, and distance, and finally into the decision that sends her toward a life neither of her parents fully expected.

It's a story about wonder before it becomes a story about survival. Read it first, and the rest of the book arrives already carrying its weight.

The full play coming this winter, till then
Act One of The Red Planet is available to read now.