Fiber Burn

When I sat down to write Fiber Burn, I knew I wanted to write a sci-fi horror film steeped in the grime of turn-of-the-millennium counter-culture cinema awash with vivid splashes of giallo-esque color. I knew that I wanted to couple an intimate rumination on depression and the personal and collateral damage it can cause, with the confrontational body horror of the new French extremity movement of the early aughts. Heavy stuff.

Especially, one would think, for the woman whose last film was a pop-horror monster movie with the heart of 90’s teen cinema beating in its chest. A quirky werewolf film with snappy dialogue, fast-paced set pieces, punk rock street spirit, and a killer soundtrack. It’s so many parts of me wrapped into one package. Decidedly unheavy stuff right? Amidst all the Scream era shenanigans, that film was born of my own concern of how we isolate our impoverished population, and that pesky werewolf was a metaphor after all. And thus, Fiber Burn would be a decidedly darker affair and pull from some very personal places. Some lived. Some seen.

So I started writing. And the more I wrote, the deeper I dug into my fears over the loss of autonomy of one’s own body and the loss of rights to one’s own gender and identity. By then something else happened. I’d met my cast of characters.

The troubled addict Becca. Rachel the robot and her turf-from-hell creator, Anne. The war vet turned drug dealer Benny and Becca’s jilted lover Charlie. All lonely and excised from the world in their own way. Through them, I was able to flesh out new themes and ask new questions.

Why does society force those damaged by it into isolation on the fringes? How do those that need our help the most end up so ignored?

How does that isolation grow when the information age leads to such conflict, such social unrest, that it ultimately becomes the disinformation age; controlled for passivity over truth?

What does humanity mean in the age of AI and what of the consciousness that will inevitably spring from it?

The robotic brain, modeled after the principles of a biological brain, firing synapses, sentience, the capacity for love and hate, will eventually become cognizant of its own inherent humanity before choosing to be human and face all these same questions. I circled around this idea as the pages rolled by and they always came back to the same conclusion. Why shouldn’t this new-wave human have the choice to be just that? Human.

I had become empathetic to the challenges these new voices would face. Ones made of bigotry, fear, misinformation, and blind hate. As a trans woman, an autistic woman, and someone who’s grappled with depression and the isolation it can bring. These challenges looked just like mine.

All of this mixed into one hell of a volatile concoction. Yet, at its center, through the fear, anger, rage and ruminations, beats the huge heart of Becca Turzo and her desire to be loved. To connect. To not feel broken. To exist in a world she always feels so outside of, despite her resolute sense of self. Becca is flawed, struggling with grief, trauma, depression, and addiction. Yet her humanity, humor, profound ability to love so deeply, and unwavering ability to be her autistic little gay self at all times, keeps the story from crushing under the weight of the darkness.

It was through Becca that I realized that Fiber Burn may be a darker excursion into genre storytelling, but it still had my voice, my energy, my style, and my heart. Even my love of pop culture and the cinema of my youth found a way amongst it all, and somehow this story too became so many different parts of me wrapped in a package, some the same as before, and some different.

In over 20 years of writing, Becca Turzo has become my favorite character I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting and I sincerely hope you enjoy meeting her too. She has so many stories before and after this one, and I sincerely hope she gets to share them with you all. Most of all, I hope you enjoy this first glimpse into her world and ultimately, her humanity.