Awesome Sauce

Awesome Sauce is a novelette in a story world I call the Avatar Academy universe.

Logline: When their planet faces an energy crisis, a team of flamboyant Venusians use avatar technology to infiltrate Earth and steal our trash, leading to hilarious encounters with Baltimore mobsters and a surprising family reunion.

This image was generated by Gemini (google's AI).

Summary: The Venusians, a secretive underground alien race with a love for spandex, face an energy crisis that threatens their luxurious lifestyle. Their solution? Earth's abundant plastic trash. They launch the audacious "Venusian Environmental Avatar Teleportation Trash 2.0" (VEATT 2.0) plan, using avatar technology to infiltrate Earth and steal plastic. Bevers Sonnof, a hapless but enthusiastic Venusian, takes control of the fearsome El Toro, an enforcer for Victor the Vicious, a Baltimore mob boss. As Bevers searches for plastic and his long-lost father, chaos ensues, involving wood-chippers, surprise parties, and a healthy dose of "awesome sauce." Meanwhile, a team of Venusian trainees uncovers a massive plastic-tracking network called P.L.A.S.T.I.C., leading to a daring heist with interplanetary implications.

Here's an image of what the underground Observation Facility on Venus might look:

I managed to get it onto amazon using publishdrive, so it's now available at amazon as a kindle ebook. (But you can also email me for a free copy:-) Here's the book cover:

The process for writing this was different. I had already written a feature length screenplay version of this, one that had been out for reader's notes and had been revised many times. Now I want a prose version (a detailed "screenplay treatment" as the terminology goes). I should point out that I've done this process many times for many other screenplays I've written. I find it hlpes me "see" the overall plot better than a detailed outline.

This time, I tried something different. This time, to convert to the story form, I used chatGPT, Gemini, and claude to help "translate" the screenplay one scene at a time into prose. (This topic has been discussed before on the internet and this process seems to be best at the current state of AI models.) Building a good prompt for this is a whole blog post in itself, but in each case I told the AI to not change any of the dialogue used in the screenplay. Not surprisingly, the response from these AI models was "off" in many cases (that it, the story line was modified somehow, even if the dialogue did stay the same). This required a lot of proofreading and rewriting on my part, probably more work than simply "translating" the screenplay into prose by myself. More work, true, but I enjoyed the interactive process. These AI models are very polite, even when they aren't doing exactly what you want them to! I also enjoyed the fresh perspective and often the terminology it used was better than my own. It's hard for me to regard this as a collaboration, as opposed to asking a very smart screenwriting expert a large number of questions about my screenplay and then compiling and using the "notes" in my next version. That's the story of how Awesome sauce arose!

I have other screenplays in the VEATT universe and so hopefully there will be more stories like this soon.