Story Starts – The mutant dog story

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.

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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.

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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 29^th 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 29^th in this story and thought, I should post this on August 29^th.  That’s it.

Oh, and if you’re an American citizen over 18, be sure you’re registered to vote.

Story list update

Back in March, I gave the random tip to keep track of everything you can for your writing.  To recap my situation, in Excel I had a Submission List where I kept track of every story I submitted, where, when, when I heard back, and when/if it was published.  I also had a Publication List, that listed in order each of my published stories, but I only counted the first time they were published.  This list also had a one sentence outline for each story to make it easier for me to find them since I’ll remember that I wrote a story about X, but can’t remember what title I gave for it.  Nice and straight forward, except my numbers didn’t match, and there were other things I wanted to keep track of.  After putting off making a new list for years, I finally decided to do it, and part of the reason for that post was to make myself do it.  Well, I didn’t expect to finish this new list so soon, but I’ve had some internet issues, so instead of spending hours watching YouTube videos, I worked on these new lists.

Anyway, while working on the new lists, I realized that I actually had a third list of my stories.  On my website I like to have a little blurb about my stories and a link to them if they are online.  Turns out, between the three lists, I had just about every mistake option.  There were stories on my Submission List that weren’t on my Publication List and vice versa.  And I had stories on my lists that weren’t on my website, and even one story on my website, but not on either list.  (That’s an interesting tale, but for another day.) But after countless hours of work, I can say that my new Submission List, my new Publication List, and my website are all in agreement, more or less.  There are a couple stories missing from my website, but they were first posted on websites that no longer exist and have been posted elsewhere, or in one case is a story I don’t really like that is still up on a dying website.  And there could be some fundamental flaw in my lists, but to the best of my knowledge I’ve covered everything.

So what did I find out?  Well, as of the posting of this blog, “Old Story” is my 679th published story.  My most recent publication is a reposting of the story “Worst Foot Forward,” which marks my 243rd reposting of a story.  Now, some of these reposted stories have been reposted three, four, and I think in one case even five times as they made the circuit of dying websites.  I haven’t worked out exactly how many of my stories I’ve reposted, but if for some reason I ever wanted to, I could figure it out.  Part of the reason I got around to finally redoing these lists, is because I jokingly thought that the reason I was able to publish so many stories is because half of them were under 500 words.  Well, now I know that 429, or over 63% of my published stories are under 500 words.  The full numbers are, I have 39 stories of 100 words or less, 155 between 101-250 words, 235 between 251-500 words, 116 between 501-750 words, 57 between 751-1,000 words, 59 between 1,001-2,500 words, 12 between 2,501-5,000 words, 4 between 5,001-10,000 words, and two over 10,001 words.  If you’re curious, my shortest story at only 20 words is “Never Done,” which is on a dying website and some may find in poor taste.  My longest story is “Relics” at 15,794 words, which some may also find in poor taste.

The other things I’ve found out, is that 612 of my stories, or 90.1%, were published by me, while 30, or 4.4% were published on a friend’s website or by a writing group I was a part of.  The remaining 37 or 5.4% were published by someone else.  The total number of words in all my published stories (using the word length of the most recent reposting) is 428,857 words.  I also have been keeping track of how many words I write each day for the past twenty years, and that stands at just over 863,000.  Meaning there are over 434,000 words that I’ve either cut from stories or are in stories I’ve started but never finished.   

Stories weren’t the only things I kept lists on, since I also dabble a bit in poetry.  These are mostly haiku, but there are a few non-rhyming poems thrown in.  Again, I had a Submission List, Publication List, and my Website list, and even though I do far less poetry than stories, these were somehow even more out of whack.  I had haiku on my website that didn’t show up on either list, and haiku on at least one list but not on my website.  It felt like it took just as long for me to hammer it all into shape as it did my stories. 

My most recent new poetry publication, is the haiku “the rich get richer” which is my 132nd poem.  My most recent poem publication is the reposting of “Stealer of Daylight,” which is my 35th poem repost.  Of my published poems, 116, or 87.9% are haiku, while the other 16, or 12.1%, are non-rhyming.  I’ve published 129, or 97.7% of my poems, 1, or 0.8%, were published by a writing group I was in, and the other 2, or 1.5%, were published by someone else.

So that is the update on my story/poem lists.  But it’s not the end.  When I decided to write a quick outline for my published stories so I could find them easier, I also realized I should do that for my unpublished stories.  Sometimes I’ll remember that I started a story about X, but can’t remember how far I got with it.  So I have an Unpublished List, that has the title or working title, what type it likely is – be it a short story, or more like a novella which also indicates which folder I have it in – as well the brief outline.  I set all this up, and kept it updated for a while, but I haven’t done such a good job for the past year or so.  Which means my next project will be sorting all that out and getting it up to date.  Which will be annoying because I’ll be revisiting all these stories that held so much promise, but I never got around to finishing.  Joy.

Writing Newsletter First Quarter 2026

 

As I said in My writing plans for 2026, instead of trying to write a story each month for my website, I’d only do one each quarter.  The story for this quarter was “Keep Writing,” which I almost didn’t finish in time.  I started another story, but it turned out to be too big for me, so I had to set it aside and then scramble to come up with something else.  But I did manage to do it.

As I also said in my plans, I was only going to post one story each quarter on my blog, and I came up with a story, but then things happened so I had to delay posting it until the second quarter.  So I had a story for the second quarter, and I had to scramble to get one for the first quarter, which I did with “Still Relevant.”

I wanted to post a story on Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee, but I didn’t get to it.  I did start a story for Buy Me a Coffee, but in the scramble of the last few weeks of the quarter, as well as yard and garden work, and a collapsing society, I didn’t get to finish it.  But that just means I already have a story mostly done for the second quarter.

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It seems so easy a task to keep track of how many microfictions and haikus I post, but I keep forgetting to mark what I’ve done, and then I get confused trying to go back and recount them.  So moving forward, I’ll just say that I’ve posted some of each, and if you really want to know how many there were, you can count them yourself on my Untitled Works Page and my Haiku Page.

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And I think that’s it.  With everything going on in the world, trying to get my garden stuff ready for spring, and a few mild illnesses, I really haven’t had time to do much writing.  Will that change?  We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Image from Pixabay.

My best story?

Many years ago, I had an idea and hammered out a story of maybe 200 words.  I don’t remember exactly how I felt about it at the time, but I’m sure I thought it was a very good little story.  I think part of why I wrote it was I needed more stories for my first collection, A Man of Few Words, and it was a perfect one to include.  In the years since then, I’ll occasionally dig it out and reread it, and at some point, I started thinking of it as my best story.  I’ve written longer stories, and stories with more meat to them, but this one has like the most impact per word. 

For years, I’ve taken some pride in it; it is my best story after all.  But lately, I’ve started to wonder: did I already peak with my writing?  I like to think that my writing has gotten better over the years, but then why hasn’t a new best story appeared?  Or is it just my best flash fiction story, and I should try to figure out what my best short story is and when I wrote it?  Or should I stop worrying about such things and just write? 

An idea for a story anthology for people more organized than I

A month or so ago, I was at work hating my job, when the phrase “A world not ruled by money,” came to mind.  I started thinking about it, but had to stop because I was depressing myself.  But I had the great idea of an anthology of stories based on the prompt of “A world not ruled by money.” That is a great idea, but for somebody else to do it.  I don’t have the patience, organizational skills, or money to do such a thing.  (While the stories would be about a world not ruled by money, we unfortunately live in one that is, so selected stories should get something, even if it’s just $10.) So if you are a person who could put something like that together, please do.  And then let me know so I might submit a story.

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To show why I was getting depressed, here was what I was thinking.  I was just getting an idea for the world, I hadn’t figured out a story for it, yet.  I’m not worried about someone stealing this idea, because one possibility would be to have all the stories set in the same world, and this could be it.

So in this world, everyone gets, say 1000 Credits each month.  Someone could have a modest one-bedroom apartment with water, electricity, and internet, all the healthy food they’d want without any worry of going hungry, no worry about any medications they need, and they could take classes – online or at a university – either for a degree or just out of interest, and once a week they could hang out with friends at a bar, or a game, as well as have a date night of dinner and a movie, all for, say 900 Credits a month.  And with what they save up they could go on a vacation or two each year.  Basically, you could live a healthy happy life without much trouble.

Now if you wanted a car, or a house, or more vacations, you’d have to get a job.  In this world a lot of the manufacturing jobs would be done by machines, so humans would be left to the more human jobs.  Skilled jobs – doctors, teachers, etc. – you’d have some set schedule, but a full-time job would only be like 15-20 hours a week.  For “unskilled” jobs – wait staff, janitors, etc. – it might be the company would have a list of workers and they would call them up and ask, “Can you work five hours on Thursday?” Some people might stick to one company, but I can also see people working at a different place each week.   

The beginning idea for the story I had, was a “Day in the Life of” type.  Character wakes up, not with an alarm but they just wake up, and they have breakfast.  Then they get on a subway to go into town.  Their phone has a cracked screen, so they stop at the phone store to have it replaced, and maybe they put in a new battery since it’s a couple years old.  Because if the phone companies weren’t so motivated for you to buy a whole new phone, they’d be easy to repair.  And maybe they get a call to see if they could come in to work in a store because someone is sick, and they go in and it’s a pleasant experience. 

This is where things started to depressing for me, because there are so many weird things the store I work in does in the name of capitalism.  Like, we have different sized drinks, but the bottles twice as large cost half as much because they’re not cold.  People want a cold drink, so they’ll buy the more expensive version because it’s “convenient.” And I don’t know how much of my time is spent just dealing with putting up and taking down sales.  The point of sales is take the $5 item that you don’t really need and would normally walk past and make it 2 for $9 and you think, “That’s a deal!” so you get two of these things that probably only cost $0.50 to make.  Shit like that wouldn’t happen in a world not ruled by money. 

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So that’s the interesting idea I had.  But unless somebody puts together such an anthology, I can’t afford to put time and effort into it.

Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.

What counts as writing?

Many years ago, I read some famous author saying that to make a living as a writer, you needed to treat writing like a job.  You punch in, do the work, day in and day out.  A few years ago, I was trying to think of some way to boost my writing, so I decided to try making it a job.  The first thing I needed to figure out was how many hours a week I wanted to write.  I quickly decided on 42, because that works out to six hours a day, and it’s also The Answer.  If I had six hours a day to write, that would be great, but I also have a part time job to pay the bills.  So instead of trying for 42 hours of writing each week, I go for 42 minus however many hours I work that week.  (I’ve also started counting my commuting time.)  So this gives me my weekly goal of hours of writing.

But what exactly is an hour of writing?  If I sat down and started typing, “Chapter 1, It was a dark and stormy night,” and continued for an hour, we’d agree that would count as writing.  (I never said it had to be good writing.)  But what if I sat down the next day and spent an hour revising what I had written?  Would that also count as an hour of writing?  I decided that, no an hour of revising would only count as thirty minutes of “writing.” I set this up years ago as a trial and I’ve just continued to do it, so I don’t remember my exact reasonings, but I believe it is because I can get stuck just doing revision after revision after revision.  Part of my goal was to put more words on the page, not just polishing the ones already there.  By only counting revising as half the time, I should be more motivated to write stories.

But what about blogging?  Some of my blogs are just random thoughts I’d like to put out to the world, but I have to admit part of it is the hope that someone goes, “This guy has an interesting take on … exploring Mercury, I wonder what their fiction is like.” It’s a slim hope, but we have to do what we can.  Just to keep things simple, I decided that an hour of blogging would also only count as thirty minutes of writing.  Even blogs about writing, which I don’t care to think too much about otherwise I’ll give myself a headache.

The final writing related thing I decided to count as writing, is social media crap.  Because it doesn’t really matter how many stories or blogs I write if they’re never seen by anyone.  So I spent time each week on Mastodon and Bluesky, just trying to find new people who might take an interest in anything of mine.  But I do see spending time on social media as less important than blogging, and so I don’t waste too much time, an hour on social media I only count as six minutes of “writing.”

I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually hit my goal.  I think the only time I came close was when I picked up some extra shifts and worked thirty-some hours, meaning I only needed to write for a couple hours that week.  But even then I don’t know if I made it because I also basically have a third job of taking care of a bunch of stuff around the house, which usually leaves me too tired to do anything but veg in front of a screen binging shows or YouTube videos. 

I still write, just not as much as I want to.  I guess I need to come up with some new motivation to make sure I put in the time.  Any suggestions?

3,000 Days!

If I’ve mathed correctly, then today – after I spent ten minutes polishing up a story just after 1 AM – marks the 3,000th day that I’ve “written” something.  Apparently, the last day I didn’t “write” was January 26, 2017.  Which, you have to admit, is rather impressive.

You’ll note that I did say “written” something, because to be perfectly honest there were probably hundreds of those days where I wasn’t feeling well, or had 8,000 other things going on, so I just opened up whatever story I was working on, typed “And they lived happily ever after,” and called it a day knowing full well that would be deleted the next time I got around to actually working on the story.  Not to mention the days when I realized I hadn’t written something about 11:55 PM, and just went and changed a word just to say I did something.

A few months ago I wrote a post on You’re allowed “sick” days, where I talked about writing every day and I didn’t know if I’d continue after hitting 3,000 days.  Now that I’m here … I mean, it’s not that far off to ten years. 

Short story – “Ticket to the Future”

 

“Ticket to the Future”

Part of Angelica Daffin’s mind told her what she was doing was illegal.  The rest of her mind told her that what she was doing was insane.  But right now, she was listening to her heart.  I. M. Allen was her favorite author and ever since she read his first novel Doomed to Repeat, she had wanted to meet him; to know what his motivations and influences were.

It was just something about the tale of human colonists landing on a world wiped out by a genetically engineered virus that struck a chord with her.  To her it was so realistic that while trying to “learn” more about the virus and the technology behind it – for the good of all mankind of course – that the colonists ended up wiping themselves out.  Angelica wasn’t an anti-technology, new-age, hippie type, but she always recommended Doomed to Repeat as a word of warning to anyone who felt science was the solution to every problem. 

Unfortunately, the prolific author (three novels a year) was also extremely reclusive.  He never gave interviews, or went to conventions, or even had a blog.  His agent and publisher said their only contact with him was through email.  Since his books were best sellers, nominated for and winning most awards, they allowed him his eccentricity.

For years Angelica lived with her disappointment.  She would preorder his books and take a day or two off from work to read them.  His stories and characters were always so fascinating.  From the generational starship where each generation descends further and further into madness in Going, Going, … to the simplicity of building a time machine and the complexities that result in Today, Tomorrow, or Yesterday?

With each book her curiosity grew and morphed into obsession.  The final straw was With This Ring, concerning the bigotry surrounding an interspecial romance.  When she finally put the book down and wiped away her tears, she vowed that she would meet him.  For months she tried every legal method she could to track him down, all without success.  In the end she had to date a hacker who got into his agent’s email and traced Allen’s computer.

So now, Angelica stood with binoculars in the woods surrounding a little log cabin in the mountains, fifty miles from the nearest paved road.  Not wanting to give away her presence, she had parked her car at a motel and hiked three days to get here.  She couldn’t see any vehicle or even a satellite dish, so she wasn’t sure how this could be the right place.

She had only been watching the cabin for about a minute when the front door opened and out walked a short, green skinned alien with large black eyes.

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Angelica woke lying on a soft bed.  The air was warm and filled with a flowery scent she couldn’t identify.

“Are you all right, Miss Daffin?” a soft, musical, male voice asked.

“Yes, I’m …” She opened her eyes and saw the alien standing a few feet from her.  She screamed and tried to get away, but the bed was against a wall and there was no where she could go.  Turning back to the alien she saw him just standing, silently, watching her.  A thousand questions jammed in her throat.  She swallowed and asked the first one that could get out, “How do you know my name?”

The alien reached over to a table and picked up her wallet.  Holding it up to her he said, “Your driver’s license.”

“Oh.” The situation was too weird for her to be disappointed by such a simple answer.  “How did I get in here?”

“You fainted at my appearance.  I couldn’t leave you to lie in the leaves, so I brought you in.”

Angelica nodded.  “Thank you.”

The alien bowed slightly.  “You’re welcomed.”

“Who are you?”

Holding his hands behind his back, the alien stood up straight and replied, “You couldn’t pronounce my real name, but you know me as I. M. Allen.”

Sitting down on the bed, Angelica nodded.  “Really?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, Angelica asked, “What are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?  Aren’t you afraid I’ll expose you?”

“To whom?  Yes, the people who wear tin foil hats would believe your tale that a famous author is really an alien, but …”

“All right, all right,” Angelica interrupted him.  Taking a deep breath, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“It is far easier to remain inconspicuous in a place like this,” he waved his hands to indicate the cabin, “than, say, an apartment in New York.”

Angelica paused.  Did an alien just tell her a joke?  “I meant on Earth.”

There came the faintest of smiles to his tiny mouth.  “I know.  Your species has accomplished much in a short time, but you have barely scratched the surface on knowledge of the universe.  You are at a critical point in your development where you not only have the ability to destroy yourselves, but also the mentality which makes such a fate a possibility.”

“Are you here to save us?”

Shaking his head, he replied, “No.  My … charitable organization is probably the closest term you have for us, finds species in such situations and we try to help them save themselves.”

Angelica raised an eyebrow at that.  “By writing scifi novels?”

The tiny smile spread.  “That is not all we do, but my specialty is artistic expression.  Most species have some form of art, but few have such a range as yours.  We’ve taken special interest in your science fiction because it’s perfectly suited to our goals.  What other art form forces you to consider how your species – and even you yourself – would react to First Contact?  Or time travel?  Or immortality?  Getting people to think about the future is the first step in making sure that you have a future and that it is a good one.”

Random Writing Tips – DEI

 

Twenty-some years ago, when I really started writing, one of the hot-button topics was gay marriage.  I wanted to do my part and show support with my writing, but most of the stories I wrote then were only a few hundred words and covered like a five-minute event.  So what I usually did was have a character meet someone at a company Christmas party who would introduce themselves as, “Beth, Jill’s wife,” and then they’d have a normal, pleasant conversation for a minute or so, and then the aliens would show up.  Did my “groundbreaking” stories change the culture of the country?  No.  The best I could hope for was that at some point a gay person read one of these stories and knew that there were people out there who didn’t hate them and just thought of them as … people.

When I create a main character, my default state is thinking of them as me, so most of my main characters start as a white, heterosexual cis male.  It’s what I know.  But something I started doing early on in my writing, was trying to have more women characters.  And when I say characters, I don’t mean damsels in distress.  When women show up in my stories, there’s a good chance they will be bosses, or starship captains, or Presidents.  Still, what I usually do is have a main character named Amy out walking her dog, and when she turns the corner there’s an alien.  When your stories are only a few hundred words, there’s not much depth you can go into.  Not to mention, I’m not the person who should be writing stories about the struggles women go through in the early 21st century. 

I would like to say that about half of my characters are women, but I don’t think the numbers would support that.  A few years ago, I was putting together a collection of short stories – some I’d published years before and new ones written for the collection – and I noticed that most of the stories had men as the main character.  So I gender swapped the main characters in a few of the stories, and it went from only having about 20% of the stories with women main characters to about 40%.  Not great, but better.

Another not great part of my writing would be covering race or ethnicity.  And there’s two big reasons for this.  One, years ago I read a novel and every time a character was introduced, we got a paragraph giving detail descriptions of them.  Like, this guy was 5 foot 9, 147 pounds, deeply tanned, very near-sighted but fixed by thick glasses, left-handed, enjoyed jazz, parents were from Greece….  What irked me was that none of these details were relevant to the story.  I’m sure the author wanted readers to have a vivid image of the character, but for me, my eyes just glaze over whenever exposition is just vomited like that.  The second reason, probably related a bit to the first, is that I don’t really care who the reader pictures when they read my characters.  If I have a character named Dave, unless there is an important reason, the story doesn’t care if he’s white, or black, or whatever.  I’ll let the reader picture him however they want.  I might put in that he took off his glasses, or scratched his beard to add some detail, but skin color is rarely important enough in most of the stories I write to be mentioned. 

And in the last few years, the hot button topic has been transgender people.  Which is a topic I haven’t figured out how to write about.  Even in my longer, thousands of words stories, I can’t think of a way to have transgendered characters without a character just vomiting exposition that they are trans.  The one, tiny positive of this though, is that if I ever become famous and my stories are turned into movies or shows, it will be perfectly fine to cast trans actors for any part, because I’ve never explicitly stated that they weren’t. 

Anyway, as a white guy, I knew that there were assholes out there who hated gays, women, blacks, trans, whatever, but I assumed that they were ever so sloooowly being pushed to the irrelevant fringe, where they belong.  But then, to steal a phrase, the Fire Nation attacked.  Jesus Christ are there a lot of assholes out there.  My privileges shield me from the worst, but I’ve been shocked at how casual some people are about being assholes. 

Which brings me finally to the point of this post.  Basically, if you are a writer, I’d recommend doing everything you can to have more characters who aren’t white, heterosexual, cis males.  Because there are many different types of people in the world, so why shouldn’t your stories reflect that.  But also, we need to redouble our efforts to push the assholes to the fringe.  Part of that will be having stories about black lesbian starship captains or even trans Presidents.  And if you’re worried that having such characters may harm your sales, it’s probably a safe bet that the assholes aren’t the biggest readers.  But imagine the loyal fan base you’d have if your stories are full of strong gay, women, black, trans, whatever characters.

***

Image from Pixabay.

The story ideas I had in January

Over the years, I’ve often bragged/complained that I have too many ideas for stories.  Admittedly, a lot of them suck, but surely there are some good ones I could write if I had a few centuries to actually get to all of them.  But you’d basically just have to take my word for it.  Well, sometime last December I was thinking about this and I thought, What if I just keep track of all the story ideas I have for, say a month, and put it up as a blog?  So that’s what I did.  Here are all the story ideas I had during January. 

Now, when I say ideas, what I mean are usually the “What if X?” beginnings of an idea that with a lot of work could be turned into an actual story.  Most of these, the bulb went off and I spent a minute or two figuring out what that could mean.  I then jotted it down, and most of them I didn’t think about again until I wrote up this post.  Some of these ideas could be fully explored in short stories of a few hundred words, while others could easily be novels. 

I’ve roughly grouped them to make things a little easier to follow.  Some of these grouped ideas happened within days of each other, while some were separated by weeks.  I suppose I should have also made a note of what I was thinking about when these bulbs went off, but I didn’t think to do that.  Maybe if I try this experiment again in a year or so.  We’ll see.

Ideas I actually got around to writing

I got the idea for “A Line in the Sand” after Trump spouted off nonsense about Greenland and Panama.  And I started wondering how a true leader would react to his BS.  “Not Worth It” similarly came about after some BS Musk posted. 

Speaking of rich pricks, I had an idea for story where all us peasants got together and purged the millionaires.  They were given the choice of their money or their lives, and a surprising number chose death.  Part of the story would be a monument to the morons who thought life wasn’t worth living with only $999,999.  While I didn’t write a full story for that idea, I did write a microfiction story which I posted.  Which is why I’m including it here.  As well as the haiku I posted that came from the idea for a story set in January 2029 that showed how things were so much worse than in January 2025.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing the two full stories from these ideas, but at least I got something out of them.

Unwritten story ideas

I had my first story idea not even half an hour into January.  I was thinking about my story “Legacy,” which I had started writing in December and just polished up to post in January.  The idea begins with us forcefully moving all the billionaires to Mars.  Then the idea split into would we just sit back and watch them Lord of the Flies themselves, or would we just nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure?

Speaking of billionaires on Mars, another idea had a bunch of them going to Mars, but then the Earth – where all their wealth was concentrated – is destroyed.  So overnight they become penniless paupers who have to start doing manual labor since there won’t be anyone on Earth to support them.

And speaking of billionaires obsessed with Mars, I had the basic idea of Musk actually being an alien sent here to see if we are advanced enough to make contact with.  It’s likely that we failed because we didn’t realize he was an alien. 

Since I brought up Musk, I might as well segue into the political ideas I had.  The first I’ll talk about is your basic political scandal story as the First Lady has an affair with one of the President’s advisors.

Another bare bones idea was for a reporter pushing Trump or one of his advisors into admitting that all the campaign promises were just lies to gain votes.

Another Trump inspired story is one where the rest of the world moves on to clean energy, while in the US we stay with fossil fuels.  But then one day, the rest of the world shut down all their wells and stop selling us their dirty fuel.  And we’re caught in the lurch because planning ahead for a day without fossil fuels is apparently woke, or whatever term they will use for the lack of basic common sense.   

Lacking common sense led to another story idea.  Some people think the country should be run like a company.  But what would it mean to be “let go” by your country?  This led to this hypothetical exchange: “Your grandparents didn’t meet their quota last month, we have to let them go.” “They’ve worked here for decades!” “But they didn’t meet their quota.  What do you not understand about that?”

The last political idea I had came when I realized I should write a sequel to my story “Other Means.” That was written during the campaign, and I thought it would be interesting to see the characters thoughts now that Trump is back in office.

From politics, lets move on to AIs.  Probably the vaguest idea I had was that the reasons AIs in movies and such always hate people, is because people developed a hatred for AIs after years of corporations cramming AI into everything.  Like, we don’t need an AI in our toaster.  I’m not sure if that’s a thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was trying to do that.

From hating AIs, I wondered about the assassination of the first “real” AI, a sentient being like we see in movies, not the crap now that gives people eight thumbs.  The point of the story would be that people actually feel sorry for it. 

The last AI related story is about a guy who finds a “rare” coin in his change.  Like, he thinks he might be able to retire just from this one coin.  But it turns out the app he has to check the value of coins is just this AI hack job that gives out random numbers and means nothing to actual coin collectors. 

Moving on, I had an idea for this Fox News type show going on and on about this evil socialist who healed people, without charging them a cent.  They would warn their viewers to be on the lookout for this Jesus Christ character.  Because someone against corporations making a profit off your health has to be anti-American.

Speaking of alternate realities, I had an idea of a writer who creates such great dystopian fiction.  How do they do it?  Well, they live in a better world with a portal that they can open up to peek into our reality to get ideas.  Which now that I write that up, sounds like the most basic “edgy” story a high schooler would write. 

Which brings us, not to an original idea for a story, but to a redo of a story.  I wrote a blog post about Rewriting the same story, about this book I read years ago of the collected short stories of an author.  Something of interest I found, is that there were a couple of stories that were basically the same, and part of me wondered if the author liked the idea and just rewrote the story every few years.  This led me to think I should dig out one of my earliest stories and write a new version of it.  Hopefully, I’ve grown as an author over the years and I could turn out a higher quality product. 

The last writing story idea I had was for a writing couple to be flirting with, either their failed story ideas or with the rejected stories.

Some of the oldest human art are of hand stencils on cave walls.  I had the idea for a spacesuited astronaut making some glove print painting on some lunar boulder.

And another moon story came after I watched the video The Search for Apollo 10’s Lunar Module.  The idea would be a mission to find Snoopy – the name of Apollo 10’s Lunar Module – and take it to the moon as a museum piece. 

And now the group of ideas for things that didn’t really fit into a group.  The first is the idea of an online store that hires parents to take their cranky, screaming kids into physical stores.  All so people might think to do their shopping online instead of having to deal with screaming kids.

Someone finds a message of some sort on a dollar bill.  For whatever reason, the message really speaks to them, and they wonder about the person who left it.  Then we find out the person who left it had entirely different reasons for writing it on a bill.

Something happens that makes everyone perfectly healthy and roughly twenty-five years old.  From ninety-year-olds on their death beds to newborns.  What happens then?  This was another weak idea in that there are a million ways to take this, most of which would suck.  For this to be an okay idea, there would need to be some interesting hook to one of these million ways.

To end this section, here’s the idea I probably put the most work into.  I recently got around to rewatching Dark, which I’ve been meaning to do for the last … six months or so.  While it is one of my favorite shows, there are some issues with it.  And as I rewatched it this time, I thought about what I could do differently if I were to make an American version.  Basically, there are some loose ends I’d like to fix.  But I eventually realized that the story of Dark wouldn’t really fit in America.  If you took the skin of the story and pasted it onto America, there would be a lot of weird spots where things don’t fit because the underlying bone structure of America is different from that of Germany.  If that makes sense.  So instead of an American Dark, I started thinking about a Dark-inspired story set in America. 

This is the opening scene I came up with.  There is a sheriff of a small town somewhere out west driving around one evening.  At the edge of town he sees a man in an army uniform stumbling along.  The sheriff stops and asks what’s wrong, and the guy – who has some injuries – is babbling about a train.  The sheriff sees the name, I don’t know, Jones on the uniform, and asks if he is Corporal Erik Jones, and the guy says yeah.  So the sheriff puts him in handcuffs and puts him in his car.  But instead of going to the jail or even the hospital, the sheriff takes him to a nice house with a gate.  He buzzes in, and a guy asks angrily if he knows what time it is.  The sheriff replies that “They have a visitor,” and the gate opens.  The sheriff takes the man into a basement room and ties him to a chair.  The owner comes in and starts questioning Jones.  At first about who he is and we find out that this twenty- or so-year old guy in modern times was born in the 50’s.  Then the owner starts asking what was on the train, but Jones says he doesn’t know.  So they shoot him in the leg, but he still claims he doesn’t know anything.  He was just added security, that’s it.  So they kill him. 

Then we see a big board labeled “The Missing” with photos of dozens of people.  Some have been crossed out.  The first name on the list is Corporal Erik Jones who is shown to have disappeared on some date in the seventies, and they cross out his name.  Then maybe a flyover of the town ending on a monument with a plaque for those – including Jones – who died in a train derailment back in the seventies.  (In case you’re wondering, he was assumed dead, but they never found a body.)

The idea is there was something – maybe from a crashed alien ship? – the military was transporting by train when it derailed.  As a result, there are now … time doors, that appear at random times and locations around this town.  By knowing when and where they are, you can travel through time.  And there is a secret society working towards some goal.  Probably, there are two or three groups, sometimes working together, and sometimes working against each other.

What the series would actually be about and who all the characters would be, I didn’t get that far.  Maybe if a network gave me money for a treatment, I’d hammer something out.

Dream ideas

Speaking of dreams, I don’t know if me being a writer is part of the reason, but I have weird dreams.  And every now and then I’ll half-wake up from a dream and think it would make for a fantastic story.  Although what almost always happens is I think about it for a minute when I’m fully awake and realize it’s just gibberish.  Like the kind an AI could come up with.  (A couple months ago I had the idea that our dreams are just AI hallucinations.)  Anyway, here are the two dream ideas I had I thought would work.

The first had a group of people playing poker to see who had to deal with some annoying character.  Apparently, the loser had to take this apprentice jester.  What that meant, I don’t know.

The other dream came in two parts.  In the first part there was a pile or rocks about a mile from my house, so I walked to them.  But I wanted to take them back home, and it wasn’t until I got to the pile that I realized it would be easier if I drove.  Especially since they were more boulders.  But since I was there I started smashing them, while also hiding from any cars that went by.  And then I was back home where a wizard – possibly even Snape – was going around the house trying to find these portals that let you collect gems.  It was like being inside a video game.  I had already collected these gems, but the puzzles had reset, but I couldn’t remember how to do them.

Now when I half woke up from this, I thought it would make for an interesting idea that I knew I had to remember for this list.  But when I fully woke up, I couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to be.  Maybe an AI does write my dreams.

Lost idea

I did pretty well keeping track of ideas, but there is one I lost.  Basically, just as I got home from work one night, I was getting out of my car when I had an idea for some story.  I stopped and thought it was pretty good, and I would need to remember it.  Well, I went inside, took care of some things and heated up some leftovers.  It was twenty or so minutes later I sat down in front of my computer and I remembered I had an idea, but I could not remember what it was. 

***

So that’s it.  Those were the twenty-five (if I counted correctly) story ideas I had during the month of January.  Most of them suck, and I will never do anything with.  But a few could be something.  If new ideas don’t crowd them out.

Five Sentence Stories

 

Over twenty years ago, a writing friend and I would email each other these short, five sentence stories.  I think one of us had read about some famous author using such short stories as a way to get the juices flowing.  It was a challenge and we saw it as a way to hone our skills.  Ultimately, I turned a couple of these exercises into longer short stories and I’ve had a few in some of my story collections.

A few years ago, I gathered four of these stories and posted them on a website.  Unfortunately, the other week when I randomly remembered these and went to reread them, I found the website was no longer around.  But I fortunately was able to find a copy of the post I had made, so these random writing exercises from over twenty years ago will see the light of day again.

***

It’s uncanny how at the most inconvenient times – for me at least – my neighbor will start having sex. Last week I was talking to my parents and his girl of the week started screaming unintelligible words.

“What is that?”

“Nothing mom.” It would probably be really annoying if he could last more than a couple of minutes.

***

While walking home one day, I saw a guy waiting at a bus stop look in my general direction and mutter something. I thought I heard him ask what the time was. I looked at my phone, but before telling him that it was 4:37, I asked, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

A few seconds after I had passed him I realized how odd it would be if you were minding your own business and some stranger walked up to you, told you the time, and then continued on their way thinking they had done you a favor.

***

“Living Death”

Nick sat on the couch with the TV remote in his hand. Click, click, click. The talk show channel, the game show channel, the unbelievably bad movie channel all flicked across the screen. Click, click, click. The sound of his life passing by.

***

“Captain Belch verses Sir Sudorific, Part III”

When last we saw brave Captain Belch, he had just discovered that the villainous Sir Sudorific had captured the lovely Polly Precious and tied her to a keg of gunpowder.

“You’re too late Captain Belch; all I have to do is drop this torch and your Polly Precious will be gone forever.”

“Bleeeeeeeaaaaaaacch,” replied the Captain. Not only did the noxious fumes of his belch render Sir Sudorific unconscious, it also blew out the torch, thus saving Polly.

“My hero,” she said, as Captain Belch untied her and took her in his arms.

***

Image from Pixabay.