I wrote a story last Friday called Bump. It was one of those ideas that I had when I was half-asleep, and I got up and jotted it down and then didn't work on it for a couple of weeks. I was certain at the time that it was a sure-fire story idea with a killer punch line -- but when I got around to actually writing it, it seemed very weak. Still, I hadn't written anything in more than a week so I was glad to get something written at least, even if it's probably not publishable in its current form.
Two weeks ago I had a nice backlog of four stories, and I thought I was getting ahead of the game here. Then I got lazy and as of this morning I had a backlog of just one story and the thing I wrote on Friday that isn't publishable. So I wrote another story this morning, and I like that one so I've got a backlog of at least 2 stories now, and one that maybe I can fix. But I really need to write one or two more of my ideas into actual stories this week.
The story I wrote this morning needed a sidekick, and I went looking in my story ideas folder, which I haven't visited in more than a year I think, thanks to having worked on an entire book of linked stories. What I'm writing now for the web site are mostly random stories (after the first six, which wound up being kind of linked). My story ideas folder is crammed full of random story ideas from the past several years, and in most cases I don't remember what those ideas were, so opening them up is kind of fun. I was looking for a sidekick idea for my story, and I found a story idea about a sidekick named Capsaicin Kid, and that fit perfectly with what I was writing, so I kind of combined two ideas into one story. I renamed the story Code Habanero.
My goal for the rest of the week is to write at least one or two more stories. I have a lot of ideas to work with, but turning them into actual stories is always the tricky part. ^_^
Right now I'm trying to figure out a story for a bug-related supergroup, and I have another story idea about a cockroach-based sidekick and that's another situation where two different but related ideas can probably dovetail into one single story -- if I can just figure out the setting/plot and punch line.
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Writer's Night September 2016
So this month's writer's night was at my place -- and it could possibly be the last time I host writer's night in this apartment since my rent is up in December and I have yet to know by how much they want to raise the rent. On the other hand, I don't want to move and rent is going up everywhere so the odds that I could find a cheaper place may be slim and none. I'll stay put another year if I can possibly afford to.
Anyway Jeff showed up a bit early and we talked while I straightened up the room. I bought pizza at Papa John's, and I bought way more than was needed but I never know what people are going to want, so I end up getting one of what I want (gourmet vegetarian) and one or two others. This time around I knew at least that Chuck likes basic cheese with pepperoni, and as it happens Papa Johns has a deal for a $5.00 cheese and pepperoni pizza, so that was easy. Chuck and Quinn showed up right at 7 PM, so we had four people total... and 3 pizzas. Like I said, way too much.
Chuck didn't have anything new but he read several sections of his current Felicia story that Jeff and I hadn't heard yet -- he read them two months ago at Sheryl's place but I forgot about writer's night in July, so I missed that one. he has some really interesting characters in this story and it's moving along very nicely -- I'd heard the opening scenes several times before, so it was nice to hear some of the newer stuff.
I read The Eagle Has Landed, one of my older Grandpa Anarchy stories (#107 out of at least 220) . This one introduces the Russian Eagle, a hero who is possibly related to Grandpa Anarchy. It's a fun story that back in July I said I needed to read at a writer's night at some point, and people liked it.
As I might have suspected, Jeff and Chuck didn't know about my Grandpa Anarchy Tales site that I started three weeks ago. That's a disadvantage of me only being on Twitter... probably other people like Keith & Juli also don't know about it, since they also mostly do Facebook instead. I suppose I could get a Facebook account just to announce when I've put a new story up but... nah. I'm never going to have a Facebook account.
Things broke up right after that, so it was a surprisingly short meeting, but a good one I think. ^_^
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
The Excitement Ebb and Flow
This time last week I was super excited about my new project: the Grandpa Anarchy website, where I proposed to publish one new Grandpa Anarchy story online each week. I had published a new story on Sunday and then written two more stories in the next two days. In the back of my mind I knew I needed a good backlog of stories -- despite my best efforts I don't actually write a story every week, and sometimes I've gone for months without writing anything -- but I really wanted to publish another story right away. Having just one story up on the site was bugging me -- I was impatient to reach the point where the blog had a good backlog of stories.
I convinced myself that I could publish one "classic" Grandpa Anarchy story a month. I didn't want to burn through my backlog of stories -- I want to publish most of those in actual books rather than online, and force myself to write new stories for the blog -- but one story a month seemed fair enough. I published a second story on Thursday, taken from my earliest collection of stories, and that satisfied my urge to publish more.
And then... I got stuck on my fourth story, and didn't write on the weekend. Sunday came before I knew it and I wasn't ready to even think about what to put up on the blog. By Monday I'd written next to nothing, just a few extra lines on the story I was in theory working on, and I was having doubts about the two stories I'd actually written. I mean, I wrote them a week ago, nobody else had seen them, were they even worth putting up? One in particular called Write Your Way Out seemed very weak. Eventually I published the other one late Monday -- after reading through it again and editing slightly, I decided I liked it fairly well -- but I was worried again that I could really manage to do this, and feeling like I had no backlog.
I don't really get depressed as a rule. But I was certainly feeling a lot less excited about my new blog, and worried that I might eventually stop working on it. That had always been a concern and that's what I initially wasn't going to launch it until I had an already-written backlog of stories.
Today I finally broke through on Presentation, the story I'd been trying to write for a week. I think it works pretty well. Of course, I usually think stories I've just finished writing work pretty well, but I may have also thought of a better way to go back and fix Write Your Way Out, and I have more ideas for stories. If I can get one or two more written before Sunday, I'll be in a pretty good position, with almost a month's worth of stories waiting for the site.
It's amazing how much finishing a story improves my mood. ^_^
I think ultimately I should try to maintain a backlog of about a dozen stories -- three months worth. But if I can manage two more stories this week, that'll be a start. In the meantime I'm feeling much more optimistic about getting more writing done.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Excited
I'm really excited about my new project -- my plan to publish a new Grandpa Anarchy story online each week at Grandpa Anarchy Tales. I've thought about doing this for a couple of years at least, and then I just took the jump over the weekend, before I'd really even finished a new story to put up on the site. I was excited about it on Monday and reworked the story I'd published on Sunday a bit, and then I wrote a new second story called Teddy's Bear. I think I like that story a lot, it delves into an event that happened when Grandpa Anarchy was really young. I started some other story ideas -- going back to Saturday when I jotted down a funny riff on the Magnificent Seven that I think I can turn into a fun tale, and continuing with story ideas titled Bump and Presentation and Bug's Life, and a completely content-free story title: My Gun Is Sharp, which if I manage to develop it into something will likely be a kind of Mike Hammer riff, maybe.
Today I finished a third story for the week, Write Your Way Out. These first three stories involve a sidekick I named the Princess of Purple Prose, and from the start I wasn't sure about the name and I hadn't figured out exactly what she was like, how she looked, how she talked. I think now that I'm getting a better handle on that I may go back and rework the first story again. I can see how publishing online has that as a downside (or upside?) -- I can go back and change things if I want. Quite possibly this means nothing is ever set in stone, but we'll see. Clearly I can't revise every story constantly. After you've been doing this a few years that would become really difficult to manage. ^_^ But I reworked Just A Story slightly, and even added a new line to the end, changing the ending a bit. Usually that means I don't have a really solid ending in place, which I guess I probably don't. But eh.
The plan is to write at least a couple more stories with the Princess of Purple Prose as a sidekick, before branching out a bit. She's also supposed to be crafting stories based on Grandpa's past history, and I find that part very interesting and so the more I can work stories from that angle, the better.
I've been very tempted to publish more stories this week on the site. It seems lonely with just the one story there. Maybe I can justify publishing one extra story a month pulled from my 200+ completed Grandpa Anarchy stories -- on the first of the month or the first Thursday of the new month, for example (which conveniently is tomorrow in both cases this month). ^_^ I just feel that not all of my stories are perfect, but there's something to be said for what I've accomplished on the whole, and I can't wait for my Grandpa Anarchy Tales website to start to develop that same kind of -- whatever you call it -- by building up a backlog of published stories.
So anyway. Three stories written, one published, and the plan is to try and write another tomorrow! ^_^ I think I should plan on a Halloween story and a Christmas Ghost story -- and not the one I'll be writing for our Tai-Pan Christmas writer's night. I'd like to push myself and write a separate Christmas Ghost story for the web site. Anyway, that's the plan for now.
Of course, in all of this I've forgotten to rewrite Gutbucket Blues even though I had this brilliant new idea on how to do it. In fact on Saturday when I went to the board meeting and was a bit early, my plan was to work on that rewrite. That didn't happen, and I've been busy with this new project since. I need to go back and do that rewrite while the ideas are still somewhat fresh in my mind.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Grandpa Anarchy Tales
Saturday night was an editorial board night for our Tales of the Taipan project. We've just published our last new issue, and when I found out that we actually have stories left in the editing file, Ed made a joke about, "We have to publish a new issue!" Of course, we haven't ruled out any more publishing -- I know we're still working on the second Omnibus, and Gene has talked about another adult supplement -- but for the most part we're done with publishing zines that you can hold in your hand. Gene said we'd be publishing stuff online instead.
This made me immediately think: why can't I publish Grandpa Anarchy stories online? I mean, I've thought about it before, of course, but the stories I've written so far were intended to be published in a book (well... as many as seven books and counting, if I ever get around to it). Publishing those stories online as well seemed kind of counterproductive to me and kind of a betrayal of the idea of putting them into a book.
A second consideration has always been: should I publish prose online, or try to do a comic? If I do a comic, could I possibly get someone else to draw it? Personally I wouldn't want to draw someone else's project, and it always seemed like a big and complicated task to find someone willing to put that much time and effort into a project that wasn't really theirs. On top of which, the stories work really well as prose stories, it would be difficult to adapt them to a comics medium. But I do think an online comic would get more attention than prose stories published online.
Still. The idea was there to just publish some stories online. At this point I've written more than 200 Grandpa Anarchy short stories, and I'm confident I can keep writing them. It may seem difficult to keep coming up with story ideas and jokes that work, but then again, anyone that does a newspaper strip has to come up with a new joke every day. It can be done. I've written enough of them to know I can keep doing it.
So I thought: why not? I could maybe work up a backlog of new stories written just for the purpose of placing them online. I don't have to put any of the old stories online if I don't want to -- but surely one or two out of every ten or twenty wouldn't hurt -- select stories from each book, assuming I fall behind my schedule at any point.
As for a schedule -- many online comics update once a week. Surely one short story a week is something I can manage. That's four a month, and I've pretty much been writing more than that for the last three years. When I'm really going at it I can manage one story every day and sometimes 3 or even 4 stories in a single day. Four a month is a cinch, and I do have an emergency backlog of over 200 stories to pull from, as I said.
So I thought about it the rest of the evening and driving home I figured my plan was to A) write 4-8 stories as a starting backlog before I did anything else, and B) research into getting a website set up. Should I got with one of those easy-to-build sites like Squarespace? I checked them out, but you know, the more I looked at their template websites, the more I thought: I can do this on blogger right now, without paying for a URL or anything. A real web site with a real URL would be somewhat fancier but right now I'm not actually sure what more it would get me. On the other hand, I don't even have to think to set up a blogger blog.
Before I even knew what I was doing I'd already set up a web site and written a short piece as a kind of holding story. It went nowhere and wasn't meant to actually be seen -- although I got 17 visits before I went back the next day to update it. By the end of Sunday I'd not only turned it into a pretty decent opening story (so I think anyway), but I'd also come up with about six other story ideas to work on.
So, you know, I guess I'm not waiting until I have any backlog... but maybe I can work up that backlog the rest of this week. ^_^
http://grandpaanarchy.blogspot.com/
This made me immediately think: why can't I publish Grandpa Anarchy stories online? I mean, I've thought about it before, of course, but the stories I've written so far were intended to be published in a book (well... as many as seven books and counting, if I ever get around to it). Publishing those stories online as well seemed kind of counterproductive to me and kind of a betrayal of the idea of putting them into a book.
A second consideration has always been: should I publish prose online, or try to do a comic? If I do a comic, could I possibly get someone else to draw it? Personally I wouldn't want to draw someone else's project, and it always seemed like a big and complicated task to find someone willing to put that much time and effort into a project that wasn't really theirs. On top of which, the stories work really well as prose stories, it would be difficult to adapt them to a comics medium. But I do think an online comic would get more attention than prose stories published online.
Still. The idea was there to just publish some stories online. At this point I've written more than 200 Grandpa Anarchy short stories, and I'm confident I can keep writing them. It may seem difficult to keep coming up with story ideas and jokes that work, but then again, anyone that does a newspaper strip has to come up with a new joke every day. It can be done. I've written enough of them to know I can keep doing it.
So I thought: why not? I could maybe work up a backlog of new stories written just for the purpose of placing them online. I don't have to put any of the old stories online if I don't want to -- but surely one or two out of every ten or twenty wouldn't hurt -- select stories from each book, assuming I fall behind my schedule at any point.
As for a schedule -- many online comics update once a week. Surely one short story a week is something I can manage. That's four a month, and I've pretty much been writing more than that for the last three years. When I'm really going at it I can manage one story every day and sometimes 3 or even 4 stories in a single day. Four a month is a cinch, and I do have an emergency backlog of over 200 stories to pull from, as I said.
So I thought about it the rest of the evening and driving home I figured my plan was to A) write 4-8 stories as a starting backlog before I did anything else, and B) research into getting a website set up. Should I got with one of those easy-to-build sites like Squarespace? I checked them out, but you know, the more I looked at their template websites, the more I thought: I can do this on blogger right now, without paying for a URL or anything. A real web site with a real URL would be somewhat fancier but right now I'm not actually sure what more it would get me. On the other hand, I don't even have to think to set up a blogger blog.
Before I even knew what I was doing I'd already set up a web site and written a short piece as a kind of holding story. It went nowhere and wasn't meant to actually be seen -- although I got 17 visits before I went back the next day to update it. By the end of Sunday I'd not only turned it into a pretty decent opening story (so I think anyway), but I'd also come up with about six other story ideas to work on.
So, you know, I guess I'm not waiting until I have any backlog... but maybe I can work up that backlog the rest of this week. ^_^
http://grandpaanarchy.blogspot.com/
Friday, August 26, 2016
The Mind Works In Wonderful Ways
As part of my project to update my Anarchy World Background files, I've been rereading old stories in order, and I've come across several problems.
The first one is a story order/continuity problem. We have the story Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom, story# 42, in which our sidekick is Fire Maiden. Then we have story #43, Idiot Ball, in which our sidekick is Most Common Girl. Then we have story #44, Oceans of the Void, in which our sidekick is once again Fire Maiden.
This is easily fixed, just swap two stories around. However, this is only the beginning of our continuity problems. I removed a scene from Oceans of the Void in which Fire Maiden, Lady Lune, and Black Dahlia decide to form their own supergroup, and instead I wrote a new story called Black Moon Rising that covered this subject. But this is story #65. I left it in book 3 because other stories in that volume are concerned with the Black Moon Maidens, but when the story starts, Fire Maiden is Grandpa's sidekick. That's a continuity problem I can't overlook.
Then we have the story Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story, which is story #32. In this story the Black Moon Maidens have already formed their group. This is less of a problem for me because I've always known that this story was out of order, and that I placed it in book 1 so that I could end with a Christmas ghost story, and not because it made any chronological sense. I'm okay with that. But it does make the other continuity problems even more confusing, and the story also references events in World of Hero (multi-part story that takes place in volume 2) that may or may not actually happen in the way they're mentioned/described in Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story. World of Hero is a story I've rewritten three times and it's still a jumbled mess, and I've decided that I need to rewrite it for the final time before I really try and resolve these other continuity problems. I even started doing that this week, but then I stopped. It's a big project and I'm not quite ready to tackle it.
I did rewrite Oceans of the Void this week to remove the scene mentioned above and try to tighten it up a bit. Hopefully it works better now -- that's a rewrite I had been planning to do for a couple of years.
While rereading the stories in book 3 I came across two very big problems. The first was a story called Gutbucket Magic. This was, hands down, one of the weakest stories I've written. It starts off with a nice little premise, Grandpa Anarchy and his sidekick are fighting a magical storm depression that actually makes people feel bad. Grandpa's sidekick is a magical girl named Mahou Shoujo Blues Summoner Stella, and Grandpa is complaining about having a magical girl sidekick and how it results in enemies you have to fight with feelings instead of just punching them in the face.
So far so good. Then Stella casts her magical girl summon spell -- a nifty little chant that calls upon the spirits of various blues musicians like Charlie Patton, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson -- and the spirit of the blues asks Grandpa to sing the blues. At first he refuses, but then the spirit of a black companion from world war II appears, and Grandpa is ready.
And that's the end. It's not surprising, you can see it coming from a mile away -- how else would a magical girl named Blues Summoner Stella fight a depressive storm except with the blues? It's not interesting -- you don't even get to see what Grandpa sings. And even the companion summoned is less than interesting and, to boot, kind of a stereotype. He was a driver for Grandpa during the war. I know I based that on the information that a lot of African-American soldiers were assigned as drivers and freight handlers and did a lot of the dirty work during the war, but that doesn't make it less disappointing that the one black guy who knows the blues and knows Grandpa was just his driver. That's not a stereotype I want to convey.
So the story had several problems, but the first two I knew how to solve. We needed to hear the song that Grandpa -- or perhaps his companion -- sings. I needed the lyrics, and a description, because that was one of the more interesting parts and I'd completely left it out. Second, Grandpa's black friend from the war needs to be more of an equal instead of the guy that ferried him around. He needs to be another hero -- one that perhaps died in the war, but a full-fledged member of Grandpa's Roaring Rangers. Because that was another thing -- elsewhere I'd established a list of people who were companions of Sgt. Anarchy during the war (mostly names I made up on the spot, I don't know much about them), and they were called Sgt. Anarchy's Roaring Rangers. That information needed to be in this story, and this friend Larry Paige needed to be one of them.
I christened him the American Screech Owl. Nice name for a blues musician, I thought.
I still didn't know how to fix the story though. There was no surprise/twist ending. I figured I'd think on it and a solution would come to me.
Most of the other stories seemed just fine. A few of them I was really happy with -- they seemed to work really well, or had bits in them that made me smile or laugh. Then I came across the story called Time of Your Life. This one was another mess, and worse than being boring and unfunny, with no joke or twist ending, it instead had an ending that I found incomprehensible and bizarre.
Grandpa and Wayback Lad are trying to stop Hitler from winning World War II. It's a time travel story in which they've messed up time and have to fix it. A sort of self-styled time cop named Time's Swift Arrow shows up, and they travel through time in her time Travelall to fix the problem. I have to say, I really like this character and her time Travelall, and she shows up again later so it helps to establish who she is in this story. But the way the story moves from a cafe in Germany to travelling through a time tunnel in the Travelall, to the encounter at the end, maybe doesn't serve the story so well. I may need to skip the opening portion of the story.
But my real problem is the big reveal. When they realize that the thing in time that's changed is something that it should never have been possible to change, Grandpa immediately says it's alien space bats. Then they arrive at their destination, and there the space bats are, and Grandpa prepares to fight them. End of story. There's a rather lame Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reference, "This is alien bat country", but on the whole I couldn't figure out the joke. Alien space bats, who go around changing time? That seemed to come completely out of left field. If the joke was that some random weirdness was responsible for everything, and that was supposed to be funny in and of itself -- well, it just wasn't.
I didn't know how to fix this one either, but I knew it needed a rewrite. Again I figured I'd think on it and eventually a solution would come to me.
I guess I know my mind pretty well, because as I was trying to go to sleep I thought about this story, and it occurred to me to Google the phrase "Alien Space Bats" because surely I didn't just pull that out of nowhere and expect it to be funny. And I was right: it's a reference to time travel stories and alternate histories. When the thing that created the alternate history -- the one thing in time that went different -- is so implausible that it defies belief, then it's said that Alien Space Bats were to blame, because what else could have caused such a strange outcome? It's a literary joke. So actually, my story really was kind of funny if you understood the underlying concept -- something I'd completely forgotten in the meantime. The joke is that, in Grandpa's universe, Alien Space Bats are a real thing and they really do go around messing up timelines.
The real problem with the story is that I just assumed everyone would get my very obscure reference. Even I didn't get it when I reread the story two years later. The solution, obviously, is to explain the reference ahead of time, and even emphasize that it's just a literary device, that Alien Space Bats don't really exist, before Grandpa proves that they do. A rather easy fix, actually, and the story should work pretty well at that point.
My mind was just getting started. I woke up later that night, and I thought about the story Gutbucket Magic. When I read the story, and Stella's little summoning spell, I thought, oh, that's a neat little bit, but where's Skip James? Skip James is my favorite bluesman, but maybe not quite as famous as the ones in the spell. So I shrugged and went on. But at 3 AM I realized that this is precisely something Grandpa should comment on: Skip James is one of those bluesman who really sounded like he was in pain and despair. A lot of blues is about pain and depression, but the music is often kind of happy or bouncy. It was often a music for celebrations and dancing after all. Skip James is one of the few blues artists who really does sound like he's at the end of his rope, and Grandpa Anarchy needed to say just that. And because Skip James was a virtual unknown in the 40's and 50's, it needs to be something he learned from his friend the American Screech Owl -- and Grandpa needs to sing the blues in his best Skip James approximation.
As soon as that thought occurred to me, I had an ending in mind. It may not be the best ending, but it's a fun little twist for a story that had no kind of surprise or twist ending at all before. I think it will work. ^_^
The first one is a story order/continuity problem. We have the story Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom, story# 42, in which our sidekick is Fire Maiden. Then we have story #43, Idiot Ball, in which our sidekick is Most Common Girl. Then we have story #44, Oceans of the Void, in which our sidekick is once again Fire Maiden.
This is easily fixed, just swap two stories around. However, this is only the beginning of our continuity problems. I removed a scene from Oceans of the Void in which Fire Maiden, Lady Lune, and Black Dahlia decide to form their own supergroup, and instead I wrote a new story called Black Moon Rising that covered this subject. But this is story #65. I left it in book 3 because other stories in that volume are concerned with the Black Moon Maidens, but when the story starts, Fire Maiden is Grandpa's sidekick. That's a continuity problem I can't overlook.
Then we have the story Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story, which is story #32. In this story the Black Moon Maidens have already formed their group. This is less of a problem for me because I've always known that this story was out of order, and that I placed it in book 1 so that I could end with a Christmas ghost story, and not because it made any chronological sense. I'm okay with that. But it does make the other continuity problems even more confusing, and the story also references events in World of Hero (multi-part story that takes place in volume 2) that may or may not actually happen in the way they're mentioned/described in Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story. World of Hero is a story I've rewritten three times and it's still a jumbled mess, and I've decided that I need to rewrite it for the final time before I really try and resolve these other continuity problems. I even started doing that this week, but then I stopped. It's a big project and I'm not quite ready to tackle it.
I did rewrite Oceans of the Void this week to remove the scene mentioned above and try to tighten it up a bit. Hopefully it works better now -- that's a rewrite I had been planning to do for a couple of years.
While rereading the stories in book 3 I came across two very big problems. The first was a story called Gutbucket Magic. This was, hands down, one of the weakest stories I've written. It starts off with a nice little premise, Grandpa Anarchy and his sidekick are fighting a magical storm depression that actually makes people feel bad. Grandpa's sidekick is a magical girl named Mahou Shoujo Blues Summoner Stella, and Grandpa is complaining about having a magical girl sidekick and how it results in enemies you have to fight with feelings instead of just punching them in the face.
So far so good. Then Stella casts her magical girl summon spell -- a nifty little chant that calls upon the spirits of various blues musicians like Charlie Patton, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson -- and the spirit of the blues asks Grandpa to sing the blues. At first he refuses, but then the spirit of a black companion from world war II appears, and Grandpa is ready.
And that's the end. It's not surprising, you can see it coming from a mile away -- how else would a magical girl named Blues Summoner Stella fight a depressive storm except with the blues? It's not interesting -- you don't even get to see what Grandpa sings. And even the companion summoned is less than interesting and, to boot, kind of a stereotype. He was a driver for Grandpa during the war. I know I based that on the information that a lot of African-American soldiers were assigned as drivers and freight handlers and did a lot of the dirty work during the war, but that doesn't make it less disappointing that the one black guy who knows the blues and knows Grandpa was just his driver. That's not a stereotype I want to convey.
So the story had several problems, but the first two I knew how to solve. We needed to hear the song that Grandpa -- or perhaps his companion -- sings. I needed the lyrics, and a description, because that was one of the more interesting parts and I'd completely left it out. Second, Grandpa's black friend from the war needs to be more of an equal instead of the guy that ferried him around. He needs to be another hero -- one that perhaps died in the war, but a full-fledged member of Grandpa's Roaring Rangers. Because that was another thing -- elsewhere I'd established a list of people who were companions of Sgt. Anarchy during the war (mostly names I made up on the spot, I don't know much about them), and they were called Sgt. Anarchy's Roaring Rangers. That information needed to be in this story, and this friend Larry Paige needed to be one of them.
I christened him the American Screech Owl. Nice name for a blues musician, I thought.
I still didn't know how to fix the story though. There was no surprise/twist ending. I figured I'd think on it and a solution would come to me.
Most of the other stories seemed just fine. A few of them I was really happy with -- they seemed to work really well, or had bits in them that made me smile or laugh. Then I came across the story called Time of Your Life. This one was another mess, and worse than being boring and unfunny, with no joke or twist ending, it instead had an ending that I found incomprehensible and bizarre.
Grandpa and Wayback Lad are trying to stop Hitler from winning World War II. It's a time travel story in which they've messed up time and have to fix it. A sort of self-styled time cop named Time's Swift Arrow shows up, and they travel through time in her time Travelall to fix the problem. I have to say, I really like this character and her time Travelall, and she shows up again later so it helps to establish who she is in this story. But the way the story moves from a cafe in Germany to travelling through a time tunnel in the Travelall, to the encounter at the end, maybe doesn't serve the story so well. I may need to skip the opening portion of the story.
But my real problem is the big reveal. When they realize that the thing in time that's changed is something that it should never have been possible to change, Grandpa immediately says it's alien space bats. Then they arrive at their destination, and there the space bats are, and Grandpa prepares to fight them. End of story. There's a rather lame Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reference, "This is alien bat country", but on the whole I couldn't figure out the joke. Alien space bats, who go around changing time? That seemed to come completely out of left field. If the joke was that some random weirdness was responsible for everything, and that was supposed to be funny in and of itself -- well, it just wasn't.
I didn't know how to fix this one either, but I knew it needed a rewrite. Again I figured I'd think on it and eventually a solution would come to me.
I guess I know my mind pretty well, because as I was trying to go to sleep I thought about this story, and it occurred to me to Google the phrase "Alien Space Bats" because surely I didn't just pull that out of nowhere and expect it to be funny. And I was right: it's a reference to time travel stories and alternate histories. When the thing that created the alternate history -- the one thing in time that went different -- is so implausible that it defies belief, then it's said that Alien Space Bats were to blame, because what else could have caused such a strange outcome? It's a literary joke. So actually, my story really was kind of funny if you understood the underlying concept -- something I'd completely forgotten in the meantime. The joke is that, in Grandpa's universe, Alien Space Bats are a real thing and they really do go around messing up timelines.
The real problem with the story is that I just assumed everyone would get my very obscure reference. Even I didn't get it when I reread the story two years later. The solution, obviously, is to explain the reference ahead of time, and even emphasize that it's just a literary device, that Alien Space Bats don't really exist, before Grandpa proves that they do. A rather easy fix, actually, and the story should work pretty well at that point.
My mind was just getting started. I woke up later that night, and I thought about the story Gutbucket Magic. When I read the story, and Stella's little summoning spell, I thought, oh, that's a neat little bit, but where's Skip James? Skip James is my favorite bluesman, but maybe not quite as famous as the ones in the spell. So I shrugged and went on. But at 3 AM I realized that this is precisely something Grandpa should comment on: Skip James is one of those bluesman who really sounded like he was in pain and despair. A lot of blues is about pain and depression, but the music is often kind of happy or bouncy. It was often a music for celebrations and dancing after all. Skip James is one of the few blues artists who really does sound like he's at the end of his rope, and Grandpa Anarchy needed to say just that. And because Skip James was a virtual unknown in the 40's and 50's, it needs to be something he learned from his friend the American Screech Owl -- and Grandpa needs to sing the blues in his best Skip James approximation.
As soon as that thought occurred to me, I had an ending in mind. It may not be the best ending, but it's a fun little twist for a story that had no kind of surprise or twist ending at all before. I think it will work. ^_^
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
The Grandpa Anarchy World Background Files
Way back when -- over four years ago now -- I had expanded my Grandpa Anarchy universe from seven stories to nine, and then to forty, and then to nearly sixty. I went back and read through the stories starting with the first one, and as I read I created a Grandpa Anarchy World Background file, which contained every character who had ever appeared in a story. I listed a short description for them and which stories they appeared in. (Except for Grandpa Anarchy -- I did not try to list every story he appears in, since it's nearly all of them.)
I believe I did this for the benefit of my friends, particularly Gene who was planning to write a Grandpa Anarchy story of his own. But as I've continued to add new stories it's benefited me quite a bit.
For a while I kept updating this, but at some point my updates dropped off... and then I kept writing Grandpa Anarchy stories, and writing, and now there are well over 100 stories that are not a part of my background file.
I have added other things to the file on occasion -- a list of various supergroups, villain groups, and entities; a shortened version of the Grandpa Anarchy timeline; notes on how to write certain characters -- such as a glossary of the Bronze Beach Bum's space surfer slang, which borrows a lot from various science fiction slang lingos. What I've fundamentally failed to do is add any new villains, sidekicks, or other characters to the data base. This can be a big problem -- today I was rereading Unfinished Business, my 2013 Christmas ghost story, and at the end of it Grandpa Anarchy has a puppy named Jenny. I'd completely forgotten about that, and Jenny never appears again. I need to fix that. It's not that Grandpa would have the dog with him wherever he goes, but when he's at home, the dog should be there.
Anyway, I started in on this project today, rereading Stronger and Unfinished Business. These are the two final stories in book two, and I have to say, both of them are very good. I'm proud of them. I've never read Stronger at writer's night, and I probably should. It's a longer Grandpa Anarchy story, something like 2,500 words, but I think it works. (I said something similar in July about The Eagle Has Landed -- it's a longer story that I like, and I think I should read it at writer's night.)
I was convinced that the end of book 2 was where I stopped transcribing stories into my files, but that's not actually true. Quite a few stories in book 3 have been transcribed. Stronger and Unfinished Business had not, because they were written at a later date, even though they're placed in book 2. Stronger was something I plotted and then didn't write immediately, and Unfinished Business was my 2013 Christmas Ghost story, as I said.
Anyway, it's going to be a long project. You don't read through 100 short stories in one evening, even if you're skim reading. ^_^
By the way, I've tried to write a Grandpa Anarchy Christmas ghost story every year since 2012. That year I wrote A Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story. I placed this at the end of Book 1, and my plan ever since has been to include a Christmas ghost story at the end of each book.
In 2014 I wrote a story called Gin and Ginger, which I was still trying to write at the party just before I read it. That's my least successful Christmas story so far, but I really liked the central idea of it and I had a plan to fix it, which I never put into practice. I still need to rewrite it.
My 2015 Christmas Ghost story was Conspiracy Claus, which I liked, but there were some suggestions that the middle of the story dragged and needed to be shortened. I haven't done that either. That's slated as the end of book 4.
I have a book 5 and a book 6 now. I have an idea for a 2016 Christmas ghost story, which would inevitably end book 5. It's just a few lines and I don't know if I'll pursue it or come up with something else, but at least I have an idea to fall back on if I don't come up with something better. If I actually do it, I'll have to rewatch It's A Wonderful Life a few times. Or maybe I can watch A Miracle on 34th Street and get some kind of idea from that.
I believe I did this for the benefit of my friends, particularly Gene who was planning to write a Grandpa Anarchy story of his own. But as I've continued to add new stories it's benefited me quite a bit.
For a while I kept updating this, but at some point my updates dropped off... and then I kept writing Grandpa Anarchy stories, and writing, and now there are well over 100 stories that are not a part of my background file.
I have added other things to the file on occasion -- a list of various supergroups, villain groups, and entities; a shortened version of the Grandpa Anarchy timeline; notes on how to write certain characters -- such as a glossary of the Bronze Beach Bum's space surfer slang, which borrows a lot from various science fiction slang lingos. What I've fundamentally failed to do is add any new villains, sidekicks, or other characters to the data base. This can be a big problem -- today I was rereading Unfinished Business, my 2013 Christmas ghost story, and at the end of it Grandpa Anarchy has a puppy named Jenny. I'd completely forgotten about that, and Jenny never appears again. I need to fix that. It's not that Grandpa would have the dog with him wherever he goes, but when he's at home, the dog should be there.
Anyway, I started in on this project today, rereading Stronger and Unfinished Business. These are the two final stories in book two, and I have to say, both of them are very good. I'm proud of them. I've never read Stronger at writer's night, and I probably should. It's a longer Grandpa Anarchy story, something like 2,500 words, but I think it works. (I said something similar in July about The Eagle Has Landed -- it's a longer story that I like, and I think I should read it at writer's night.)
I was convinced that the end of book 2 was where I stopped transcribing stories into my files, but that's not actually true. Quite a few stories in book 3 have been transcribed. Stronger and Unfinished Business had not, because they were written at a later date, even though they're placed in book 2. Stronger was something I plotted and then didn't write immediately, and Unfinished Business was my 2013 Christmas Ghost story, as I said.
Anyway, it's going to be a long project. You don't read through 100 short stories in one evening, even if you're skim reading. ^_^
By the way, I've tried to write a Grandpa Anarchy Christmas ghost story every year since 2012. That year I wrote A Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story. I placed this at the end of Book 1, and my plan ever since has been to include a Christmas ghost story at the end of each book.
In 2014 I wrote a story called Gin and Ginger, which I was still trying to write at the party just before I read it. That's my least successful Christmas story so far, but I really liked the central idea of it and I had a plan to fix it, which I never put into practice. I still need to rewrite it.
My 2015 Christmas Ghost story was Conspiracy Claus, which I liked, but there were some suggestions that the middle of the story dragged and needed to be shortened. I haven't done that either. That's slated as the end of book 4.
I have a book 5 and a book 6 now. I have an idea for a 2016 Christmas ghost story, which would inevitably end book 5. It's just a few lines and I don't know if I'll pursue it or come up with something else, but at least I have an idea to fall back on if I don't come up with something better. If I actually do it, I'll have to rewatch It's A Wonderful Life a few times. Or maybe I can watch A Miracle on 34th Street and get some kind of idea from that.
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