I saw the movie Iron Lung with my brother this weekend. And wowee, what a movie.
It's funny, whenever I heard anybody talk about the movie, it was always a vague "a YouTuber made it, this is a movie by a YouTuber, blah blah blah." Of course, hearing it framed like that, my interest was low. 'A YouTuber' could mean anybody. I eventually stumbled upon an article by pure chance, which informed me that this was done by Mark Fischbach, one of the most influential YouTubers on the platform: Markiplier.
Markiplier!! 'A YouTuber did this?' Come on! A YouTuber could be anybody. But Markiplier is THE YouTuber! He's got 38 million subscribers! He's been there since the beginning of the platform! As soon as I learned that, I dropped everything and went to see it ASAP.
Some interesting tidbits about Iron Lung:
This movie broke the world record for the most fake blood used in a movie. 80,000 gallons of it.
Mark had to go to the hospital because he got fake blood in his eyes. After seeing the movie...I'm not surprised.
The movie is 127 minutes long (some sources say 125, but the two-minutes difference is negligible), and Mark carries this entire movie on his shoulders ALONE. There are a few other actors in it, but this movie is 99% him, confined in a tiny little box of a room. Which is everything my filmmaking and creative writing professors advised NOT to do. Which just goes to show: any rule can be broken.
Here's a fun shred of personal lore.
The year is 2017. It's the spring semester of my Freshman year at art school. My school had a mandatory foundational program that taught a wide variety of art types before any student was allowed to choose their specific major. Up until that point, I was CERTAIN I was going to major in illustration. That was what called my heart the most.
But at some point along the way, I started to hyperfixate on YouTubers. I was really into watching Markiplier's videos. I was inspired by him. I looked at his stuff, and I said, I want to do this. So in my art foundation program, I took a video production course. And at the end of the year, when students applied for their majors, I put filmmaking as my top choice.
It was completely out of left field, because I just happened to have the right hyperfixation at the right time, and it nudged me toward video production. Funny how the autistic brain works, ain't it?
I told people things like, "I think video production will lend to a more productive career" (probably true) and "I just didn't like being told WHAT to draw, I'd rather draw on my own terms" (I was still getting out of my stubborn teenager era). I kept the hyperfixation to myself, but deep down I knew that was the largest contributor.
So, yeah. I work a video production day job right now because of Markiplier.
Imagine my surprise when I'd learned HE had made the movie that's smashing the charts right now! Of course I had to go see it!
I think the existence of an independently produced movie bodes well for the future of just about any form of media. Now, it helps him substantially that he's already got this huge audience eager to see what he makes. It helps that he's built a career out of media creation and has the money to spend on a production like this. But he's still an independent creator, and he smeared Hollywood studios on the pavement.
And if an indie product of any media can be a hit like Iron Lung was, that's a good thing.
People tend to frown upon indie media because it's "not as good," and "anyone can publish a book, anyone can film a movie on their iPhone these days, etc." But that's a generalization that is largely untrue. Are there rough pieces of indie media out there? Absolutely. But there's also some pretty rough non-indie media, too (sometimes I read a book and think, this got traditionally published? That bodes well for me).
And there are tons of gems in the indie market.
Being an independently published author isn't because I'm "not good enough to get published." If I wasn't good enough, I wouldn't have 690,000+ hits on my fanfiction profile (ah, fanfiction, a discussion point for some other day, but another thing that's largely frowned upon). If I wasn't good enough, I wouldn't have graduated magna cum laude from creative writing school (which I studied in tandem with filmmaking), wouldn't have won first place in short story competitions, wouldn't have had my screenplay chosen for a short film production.
Here's exactly why I decided to go independent with The Divine Archive.
1) I didn't want publishers to erase the queer identities of my characters.
Things are bad in queer spheres right now. Publishers aren't taking on nearly as many queer books because they're afraid of public perception. But now more than ever is the time to tell queer stories.
So, yes, Miri Chase has two dads in Floodwaters, and it's treated as completely normal. And yes, the main character of Blood of the Gods is nonbinary and asexual. The secondary main character is an autistic gay man. The third main character is a fat bisexual woman. And the rest of the Vengeance's crew: a Black lesbian woman. A Brown lesbian woman. A Deaf teenager. Going traditional would risk erasing a lot of those. All for the sake of making it more "palatable" for audiences.
If my books ever get banned for being too "woke," I'll know I've made it as an author.
2) I didn't want any publisher to even THINK about touching my writing with AI.
It is important to me that my work remains 100% human. Now, I do acknowledge an unavoidable fact: my writing has definitely been fed into AI for training. With my long history of posting my writing online, I would be genuinely shocked if I'd somehow managed to avoid that. Still, I wouldn't let any publisher edit or alter my writing with AI. Not now, and not ever.
I do intend to eventually try to get into the tradpub scene, and I intend to put my foot down from the very start: no AI writing. No AI cover. And I can only hope I'll find an agent and a publisher who will listen. But that's a distant future thing, and for now, I'm staying indie.
In other news:
I'm launching my editorial business this year! So far I've got two manuscripts booked and potential for one more. I figure it'll be slow at first. But hopefully people will continue to put their trust in me as their editor!
Blood of the Gods is on track for publication, though I'm a bit split about what my next step should be. Call for ARC readers, or a cover reveal? Amazing how such a tiny detail in the grand scheme of things is completely halting my progress, haha.
I'm hand-writing my zero draft for The Divine Archive #2.
Fun fact: This book does indeed have a working title, and no, I'm not sharing it anywhere. Its acronym is DoD, which I was using for a while, until one of my friends said, "are you talking about the Department of Defense?" No, by book is not titled Department of Defense, though I have started jokingly calling it that in my head. Since then, I've been abstaining on using its acronym. "TDA #2" is fine enough for now. Anyways, I've been struggling a lot with the plot of this book, and I'm hoping that hand-writing the draft will help me break out of my norm and spur my brain in a different direction. We'll see.
Until next time!
Wren L. Rivers
@corvidarcana [Bluesky, Tumblr]
@corvid.arcana [Instagram, TikTok]
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