Bam!

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I finished the Gonzo Futurism story today. It took a few interesting twists. It started from a simple tagline "Drugs are Legal, People Ain't", acquired an interesting reversal (back alley maternity wards?) and proceeded to then write itself with only a little bit of extra research from me. The setting itself is highly unlikely, but in a way that makes for a good story, with a surprising amount of human emotion. Still: it's gonzo, it's supposed to be absurd.

This is what I had in mind as the church in the story. Nothing fancy, just folk.

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3000 words? Yes
Short Story "Drugs are Legal, People Ain't" - finished, submitted

Righting vs. writing

Leave aside the question of what I want to write and consider how I want to write. I don't want to be an Indistinguishable Writer. That is to say, I want people to be able to point to something I wrote and be able to say: "That sounds like David Barron."

I think too many people-of the ones who bother to care whether they're writing well at all, that is (let's call them the "Spellcheckers")-are trapped in what they learnt in English class from prescriptivists. Well, I'm a descriptivist and do you even remember that horrible essay format they tried to push on you? Just saying, with that in mind, reevaluate every other rule. I call this method Righting, as opposed to writing (which is what good writers do).

I will determine my own punctuation, thanks. When somebody reads my story aloud following my punctuation, it'll sound like how I would say it. I know, I've checked. That's called writing. Don't tell me I use commas wrong unless, I'm, doing, this. And even so: the comma was made for man, not man for the comma.

Even writing non-fiction, I will go for writing (i.e. Readable) over Righting. Try rewriting something you were forced to Right in high school, something you were forced to Right in your freshman year of university, and then compare it to something you wrote in your senior year when professors were interested in your ideas not your formatting. Rewrite the whole lot of them, as if you expected somebody to actually read them instead of checking for spelling errors.

In short, and to the point, and superfluity aside: Right is Wrong, and read is write.

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Adieu, steam-punk. We had a good time together, but now it's time to move on to a different project. I ran across the term "gonzo futurism" and was immediately intrigued. Can it be that in the Future, drugs are legal but people aren't? Let's find out together, Mr. Journalist.

The "fallen woman": another relic of yore.

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2000 words? Yes
Short Story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" - finished, submitted.

The Only Villain

Most people don't get a villain.

Without a villain, you don't know if you're a hero. A hero doesn't appear ex nihilo, he appears in response to something, be it Mr. Injustice, Lord Tyranny, Ms. Jerk. But what a hero does not respond to is the mundane worries of regular people, be it hunger, sickness, death. Something that isn't necessarily anybody's direct, active fault. If you can't personify the problem, there's nothing for the hero to do except help out. And somebody who helps out is not a Hero, they're just a Nice Person.    

That's why people read stories with villains. The Hero has something to attack. He can punch Lord Tyranny in the face, sue Mr. Injustice until he cries, and he can remonstrate Ms. Jerk until she sees the error of her ways. Nobody wants to read about a Nice Person. There's no conflict. You can't yell at hunger until it stops making people hungry, you can't shoot at sickness until there's no germs left, you can't argue with Death.

Most people's only villain is Time, and time's only evil scheme is to go on until you run out.

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This steam-punk project is wrapping up. For my next project I had a vision of a "generation ship", i.e. a colony spaceship in which the children of the initial passengers are intended to be the primary colonists. Then I ran across an image of a colony ship in an asteroid. And that reminded me of one of my gateway books to Science Fiction: "Earthseed" by Pamela Sargent.

Read it!

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2000 words? Yes
Short Story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" - in progress (~4/5)