When the Catalyst Workshop was first offered in 2004, I had been accumulating written material with a fuzzy story structure, having begun work on the Hard Thrust manuscript a few years earlier. Martin Gundersen, the USC physics professor who was one of the brains behind the Catalyst initiative, explained to me the idea behind it and encouraged me to apply. The 2004 Catalyst was, before anything else, an emotional experience. I had evaded the gray concrete world of the hard core missile industry described in Hard Thrust and found myself at the core of the industry where ideas and stories were brewed into films, the very films which had enchanted my youth and had, in part, formed my mind. The experience was fascinating: in a few days, I began thinking in images, streamlining my story under the guidance of Hollywood veterans. Nevertheless, I left the workshop with the feeling that I wanted more of it. Thus, I repeated the experience with the 2005 Catalyst session, which had added course material and training into the economics side of the scriptwriting business. Graduating my second session, I felt I had obtained the right amount of knowledge the Catalyst has the objective to offer, which, in the end, is a gateway into the special world of storytelling known as scriptwriting. I keep in mind Syd Field's words: you will never watch a movie as you did before, instead, you'll search and recognize the critical points of the story, and its flow on the screen.

Guided and inspired by the Catalyst sessions, I organized the Hard Thrust manuscript into a film script structure. Nevertheless, I chose to finalize the project as initially intended, as a fiction book, a thriller, simply because there was more material accumulated into this work than I was able to distill into a good script. For this reason, I pursued a publishing path for the manuscript, under the pen name of Mark Valah--Valahia is the medieval name for one of the Romanian kingdoms--for distinguishing this work from the scientific reports I publish professionally. I wrote and published Hard Thrust with the same belief as the fundamental idea of the Catalyst: that a "page-turner", a thriller you don't want to let down is also a perfect vehicle for learning, inspiring and enticing the reader's curiosity about what happens next, how does one reach outer-space, what is nuclear fusion, and where on the world map is Xi'an, with its Chinese Missile Research Base 64.

I invite you to enjoy my debut novel, Hard Thrust.
Please leave feedback, I'm excited to know what you think.

—Bogdan Marcu, PhD
2004/2005 AFI Catalyst Workshop Participant