If you’ve followed the blog long enough, you know about my sex tape—that shameful, humiliating experience I was subjected to about seven years ago now, that left me raw, exposed, and kind of sticky.

It was a gangbang, if I’m being perfectly honest. One of those screenwriter gangbangs I’d heard about in the film industry, where a single hapless hack is subjected to the wishes of a plethora of producers, each determined to have their way with an innocent, virginal script in whatever sick, perverted way they want.

There is, ironically, no filmed evidence of my sex tape. To my knowledge, there’s not so much as a single photograph of my participation in the gangbang. And yet it happened. I remember every excruciating moment well. And there was no happy ending—not for anyone, me least of all. A long week of living in various Delta Hotel conference rooms, fuelled by bad hotel food and thin, dishwater coffee, with a lanyard around my neck that ended in a laminated card reading, “Shane Simmons: Sex Tape” ultimately came to nothing.

Sex Tape was the name of my feature-film pitch; a detective-fiction mystery about a hotshot Hollywood publicist pursuing a stolen celebrity sex tape to the porno-distribution underbelly of Montreal, determined to stop it from going public, and discovering some people were willing to kill for it.

Shortly after I cashed my cheque for a development deal and finished a first draft, I was informed that no one was likely to touch my funny-sleazy-mystery movie in the current political climate. The sitting government had recently lost their shit about tax dollars backing a feature film called Young People Fucking, even though the dirtiest thing about it was the title. Common wisdom suggested that no movie called Sex Tape, involving the porn-and-sex industry in Montreal, was ever ever EVER going to get produced under a Stephen Harper mandate. And that mandate lasted nearly a whole damn decade. Stuck in a film industry so beholden to government backing, the movie had hit a wall, and my Sex Tape had, indeed, left me thoroughly fucked.

Years passed.

But Sex Tape continued to weigh on my mind. I thought often of Alexandra Middleton, the plucky L.A. publicist given an impossible task to accomplish in a completely alien city during the madness of the Christmas holiday season. I retained much love and affection for Sid Volke, the burnt-out ex-paparazzo slob, bottom-feeding his way through life as a cheap private snoop. And I still wanted to tell their story of trying to stop a scandal that would do damage to the career of America’s bitch-queen sweetheart Helen St. Simone and, more importantly, put her used and abused staff on the unemployment line come the New Year. My tale, which specifically took place somewhere in the first decade of the new century, wasn’t getting any younger. And even with a new non-Harper government in place, my hopes of getting it made by the dysfunctional Canadian film industry (or any other dysfunctional film industry) seemed remote. There was only one solution—a novel solution.

Sex Tape is the new novel I’m coming out with later this month. Once again, I’m looking to recruit readers so I can get some reviews up early on Amazon.com. If you’d like me to send you an eBook version of the book for free in the next few days, visit the contact page and drop me a note. You’ll get it a couple of weeks before anyone else.

And remember, if you’d like to keep up to date on what I’m putting out next, or be the first to hear news and special offers from Eyestrain Productions, FOLLOW the blog by hitting that button on the right-hand side of this very page.