Over the years, I’ve started hundreds of stories. Unfortunately, too often I just have the idea for the opening scene and that is about it. I would write these opening scenes because if nothing else they were great writing exercises, but there was always the hope that one day I’d figure out what to do with it. These have languished on my hard drive for years, but now I’ve come up with a plan for some of them. I won’t be finishing the stories, instead I’ll just share them here.
There are three reasons
I’m doing this. First, what else am I
going to do with them? Second, these are
a sample of my writing, and maybe after reading them you’ll buy one of my
ebooks, which can be found here. And
third, for awhile I posted “Free Story Ideas,” which were ideas I had for
novels and such that I knew I’d never get around to writing, but I’d like to
read. So I gave these ideas to the world
in the hope someone might be inspired by them to write a bestseller. And I guess this is just a continuation of
that, but instead of giving you the basic idea of the story, I give you the
first few hundred words.
Anyway, I hope you find
the following, at least, interesting.
###
Story Starts – The mutant
dog story
Of all the things Joe had
learned to do over the past year, this was the one he hated the most. The first time, it had taken him almost five
minutes just to behead the corpse; what with the dozen or so swings with the ax
and all the vomiting. Now, he could
dismember a corpse in under a minute and barely feel a thing.
Mister Deneen had died
during the night, probably of a heart attack.
Before he had been a cubical Sisyphus: each day writing memos and
reports few people read, only to write more the next day, and the next, and the
next. Now he was bait.
Joe quickly set the
container of homemade napalm under the pieces of the body and hooked the trip
cord to Mister Deneen’s spine. Then he
and Karen – who had watched over him with a shotgun – retreated to a nearby apartment
building. Most of the apartments had
been looted and ransacked, but there were a few that had somehow been
overlooked. This resulted in a sizable
haul of canned foods. While there was a
chance there was more to find, it wasn’t that wise to stay in the same place
for long, especially with the trap they just set.
It did not take long for
a pack of mogs to find the body; drawn to the fresh blood. Joe and Karen watched from a second-floor
balcony as half-a-dozen fought over their last meal. Joe was starting to wonder if he had messed
up the trip cord when an explosion lit up the dim morning. Several of the mogs were only injured by the
blast, so Joe finished them off with his rifle.
When they were sure they
were dead, he and Karen made their way to the pile. As she stood watch, he piled the bodies
together, then doused them in gasoline.
Some of their fur still smoldered, and they were soon ablaze filling the
morning with a thick, oily smoke.
They then grabbed their
bags, heavy with all the cans, and started back to the compound.
Not long after they
started Kared asked, “Do you know what today is?”
Joe stopped and thought
for a bit. “I don’t even know what month
it is.”
“It’s August 29th.” After
a pause she added, “It’s my birthday.
I’m eighteen now.”
Joe looked at the girl,
her hair unevenly cut short, her face covered with splotches of mud and blood,
and tried to remember what that meant from before. Finally, he said, “Be sure you register to
vote.” He then turned and kept walking.
###
The idea for this story
began as I watched the movie Cloverfield. I … thought it was okay. There were good things, but there were also
issues. I know giant, unstoppable
monsters attacking a city is a genre, but I can’t suspend my disbelief that our
guns and bombs do nothing. We have missiles
that can blow through twenty feet of reinforced concrete, but they bounce off
lizard skin. I have a really hard time
buying that.
I think I was still in
the theater watching the movie when I started to wonder at a better way to use
monsters. One big monster is just one
big target that – will cause a lot of destruction – but should be taken out
fairly quickly. But tens of thousands of
smaller monsters? They could be killed,
but there would always be more to take their place. Over the next week I was thinking about this,
and I had the idea of these smaller monsters being something like a “mutant
dog,” which my brain shortened to mog, and that was that.
I had the idea of setting
a trap for mogs being the opening, but what of the rest of the story? Well, it would be your standard group of
survivors trying to rebuild the world while fighting off the occasional monster
attack. If I did have some idea for a
story, I didn’t write it down. All I had
was this prologue. Which was only about
90% finished and in need of some revising.
I do think my writing as gotten better in the … eighteen years since I
first wrote this.
The reason I’m posting
this today, is that when I first wrote this, I added in it being August 29th
just as a … easter egg/wink/ripoff of Terminator’s Judgment Day. It was in late July as I was reading through
some of the stories I’d started to see what I could use as this first Story
Start, and I came to it being August 29th in this story and thought,
I should post this on August 29th. That’s it.
Oh, and if you’re an
American citizen over 18, be sure you’re registered to vote.
