And in honor of yesterday, happy birthday you poor, deluded, doomed nation.

Thanks to some forgetfulness and a minor communications snafu, we’re actually starting today instead of yesterday like we’d originally intended. But no biggie. So I’ll be trying to post excerpts of my attempts each day.

This is a little of what I wrote last night at the write-in to kick things off. I thought this might serve as a good companion piece to a story I’ll have appearing in A Thousand Faces later this year.

Untitled

Every afternoon at two, after a meeting with the district supervisor down the hall, she rolled past my desk. Her name was Stacey Park, and wheelchair almost swallowed her slight frame. She dressed business casual, usually a long skirt with a neutral blouse. She kept her hair in a simple ponytail, probably preferring not to deal with the hassle of something more complicated. But it just accented the faint Asian features around her eyes and mouth. Black horn-rimmed glasses completed the look, though sometimes, if the meeting went badly, she had them in her lap as her face crinkled in rage. Even in anger, she was gorgeous. I fell in love a little more every afternoon at two.

She worked in R&D, though. Months ago Jones, my former cubicle mate, had made a pass at Yaleena in R&D, and he had vanished the next day. I heard he’d been pressed into service in one of the Cybermen brigades. I know there’s a give and take with that position, but personally I’m not ready to trade my emotions and pain sensitivity for a miniaturized fusion reactor installed in place of my heart, and I say no thanks to chaingun-arms.

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Sherlock enjoyed chewing me out a little for writing a story with such difficult names, and deservedly so. I can check “get called a git by a real Briton” off my bucket list. Next: Piss off Alan Moore with a film adaptation of Captain Britain.

Anyway, you should go give it a listen, even if maybe you read the story back in the day. Audio podcast markets are something I’d like to penetrate more, when I get around to it. I never seem to have something that’s the right length.

That’s part of the danger of writing genre I suppose, especially these days. We often rely heavily on what’s been written before, and simply stand on previous writers’ shoulders.

You can see that flaw really well in Cameron’s Avatar. All the characters and even the technology are derived from archetypes that are used all the time in science fiction. One glance at Sigourney Weaver’s character will tell you she’s the Compassionate But Stubborn Scientist that we’ve seen so many times before. Five seconds after he appears on screen, we understand that Giovanni Ribisi is the Greedy Corporate Guy. Then meet Hardass Military Dude. He’s got scars. Trust me when I say they do deep!

Similarly, most of the technology in the film we’ve seen in dozens of video games and even Cameron’s old movies. Those dropships and armored exoskeletons all look awfully familiar!

It’s all shorthand. The writer doesn’t have to spend much any time developing these personalities because we immediately know who they are, how they’re going to act, what their motivations are, etc. It’s just unfortunate when the writer doesn’t bother to take them further than the attributes and stats on the pre-generated character sheet (which Cameron, unfortunately, doesn’t do).

It is handy for some situations, though. In flash, for example, you don’t necessarily have space to do more with a character. So you can reassure the reader that this is Standard Security Guard Sleeping At His Post or Pseudo-Lesbian Who Doesn’t Shave And Wants To Save The Whales and move on. Nothing particularly lost. In parody and satire, you’re relying on those sorts of archetypes, even if it’s your job to show how they’re silly or shatter them. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was based purely on reversing the Blond Running From a Monster Does Something Stupid and Dies archetype.

Either way, if the audience doesn’t know the archetype, the effect is lost. So do I try to shop the story elsewhere, where the editors and audience will immediately recognize the genre parody, or do I try to expand the story and try to net a larger audience? Hurm.

(You can do it in comedy, too – one of my favorite running gags in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was that any time someone started to tell a “If I could walk that way…” joke they would be interrupted. We all know how that would have ended, so there’s no need to finish it – you can basically get two jokes with one stroke by interrupting them.)

And now I’m off to work for another 11-hour day. Guh.

Update – I immensely enjoy that Jim Hartley left a curmudgeonly “get off my lawn, damn kids!”-style comment. It fits the story perfectly.

In case you are interested, there really was a train called the Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr, it was the overnight return trip from Nebraska to Chicago. They just reversed Nebraska. I suppose they should have also reversed Zephyr, just for consistency, but wants to try and explain how to pronounce Ryhpez? This, of course, was all back in the first half of the 20th century, when trains still had personality.

At any rate, let me know what you think! These are characters I wouldn’t mind returning to. I love the scientist-adventurer archetype.

Make sure you check out the other stories as well. There are some great authors featured there.

Speaking of KC, she’s got an awesome piece of crime fiction of her own up today over at Every Day Fiction.

I’ll see what I can get written up!

Most annoying, I missed out on seeing Moon this past weekend. Since Fort Worth is a cinematic wasteland, I’ll have to either drive to Dallas to see it or wait for the DVD.

At any rate, I’ve been kind plucking away at this zombie flash piece, but I’m not very happy with it. It needs to be more immediate and immerse the reader in what’s going on. It feels too much like a big info dump in these first few paragraphs, which in my opinion doesn’t work well for flash.

It’s going to be a very depressing story. My stuff is usually pretty light and fluffy. I almost feel bad for how dark this story will be. This is what happens when you write about zombies and it’s not a comedy, I suppose.

So here’s the first few paragraphs. I’ll be keeping some of this, but likely reworking it heavily to make it feel more like the reader is there in the house with them, rather than reading some account of it later.

Untitled Zombie Piece

Colton and Becci cowered in the bedroom when they heard the pounding and screaming at the front door, as though they were hiding from a traveling financial advisor and not a neighbor desperate to escape the living dead. The pounding ceased when the neighbor fled to the next house. Colton squeezed their pistol, never fired more than a handful of times at the range. Becci clutched Colton’s arm and wept.

They had not been outside since…whatever had happened had happened. Colton at one point started to say “apocalypse” but Becci hushed him with a glare. The news agencies had reported similar events all over the world – the dead rising from graves and morgues. Particularly disturbing footage, shot by a tourist with a hand-held camera, featured decaying corpses dragging themselves up the beaches of Maui. The dead were slow, moving slow enough for anyone even remotely fit to outrun them, but they never stopped.

Becci had spotted one first, shuffling down the sidewalk in front of their home. It had been a man once, and still wore the suit some loved one had buried him in. Most of the skin was gone. They watched it stagger past the house and decided it was time to go.

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There are some other awesome writers featured there as well, including Jordan, Gay, and Erin, so you should find something you like. I need to check them all out myself.