Scott Lawrence Alexander has been writing since he was nine years old. His teacher remarked to his parents how unusual it was for someone that young to be writing short stories. They were usually about ten sentences long, but they were stories!
He kept this up throughout his adolescence and into young adulthood, authoring short stories and essays. And then, in his late twenties, the BIG IDEA struck!
The result of this was a film script. It went nowhere. But, the desire to go further, to write and direct, inspired him to make a big change in his life and at age 34, he sought employment in the motion picture industry.
His first job was building miniatures for visual effects and he regarded that as being a good way to find his way through various jobs and wind up as a writer/director. That turned out to be partially true. In 1988, he co-authored a script with a visual effects supervisor, Patrick Read Johnson. The script was actually made into a film that was finally released in 1990 by Disney, under their Touchstone banner. That film was called SPACED INVADERS. It had problems due to an extremely limited budget ($1.75M) and ambitions by the creators that went beyond the abilities such a budget. Johnson was the director with Alexander serving as the art-director. Johnson went on to direct other motion pictures and Alexander continued to write other projects that were more sophisticated than the first effort.
One of these later efforts was a script called SCIENCE FICTION, written in 1995. This project, along with two others, were shopped around for a long time, but lacking an agent, this went nowhere.
Using SCIENCE FICTION as his starting point, EINSTEIN’S GATE has now become Alexander’s first novel. And, who knows– he may rewrite the other two projects as novels soon!
