writing – Page 9 – Cubey Terra

August 25, 2003

Monday story pitch

Kirk Murkburger, a used car salesman in Des Moines, Washington, leads a quiet life of contemplation and rusty Hondas, until a spacecraft lands on his roof. The pilot, Princess Weenie of the Purple Slime Dimension, enlists him as her Hero and they set out on a quest to win back her claim to the throne of Barflesnack.

In a pitched space battle, Kirk is reduced to a shapeless blob of jelly and taken prisoner by the Nefarious Rog of Quarnon, the evil leader of the Barnacle Army, which inhabits the underside of a rock on a beach outside the Barflesnack palace. Kirk pretends to be an expert on the intricacies of interdimensional time-space travel and sells the Nefarious Rog a ’91 Honda Civic in exchange for his freedom and a fresh Mason jar.

Once free, Kirk defeats Rog in a battle of logic and marries Princess Weenie. They live a long and happy life and together raise several little jars of raspberry jelly.

August 22, 2003

Jailtime for work of fiction

When Brian Robertson was 18, he wrote a story–a fictional account of an armed invasion of his school. He was charged with a felony and could spend up to ten years in jail, if convicted.

After searching Robertson’s car and his parents’ home, authorities found no weapons, traces of explosive material or any other evidence that the teen was planning to attack his school.

But authorities said the story Robertson wrote was sufficient to charge him under an Oklahoma state statute, which was passed in the wake of school shootings across the country in the last few years. *

Well, maybe it’s for the best. We certainly don’t want children to waste their time writing fiction anyway. All kids who write “dark” fiction should be rounded up and charged with sedition. It would solve the problem of over-crowding in schools. This is a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

Link: Wired.com: “Write a Story, Go to Jail”

August 18, 2003

Monday story pitch

Gus McFlatulence-Davis is a rich kid who thinks he has everything. When he isn’t buying and selling drugs to small, furry mammals, he’s playing the zither as the token human in an all-platypus polka band, named “Gus and the All-platypus Polka Band”.

Fate hits him with a cold crème-brulée-in-the-crotch when he falls into a trans-dimensional rift inside a Starbucks men’s room. He wakes up in the Trellian Valley–formerly home of Narwin, the Golden Rhinosceros. As you’ll remember from the prequel, Narwin was crushed by the Standing Stones of Aelia. The spirit of Pip, the exploded pelican, has returned to send Gus on a journey to find the Lever of Archimedes, with which Pip plans to lift the standing stones off Narwin.

After a wacky adventure involving a shipment of illegal anchovies stored in a balloon in Gus’ nether regions, Gus returns with the Lever of Archimedes, but in a tragic miscalculation, they accidentally move the world out of its orbit and they all die a fiery death as they crash into the sun. In a final twist of irony, it turns out that Narwin had faked his own death and has been working at the Starbucks, safely on the other side of the dimensional rift the entire time!

August 13, 2003

Heinlein in Dimension

Fans of science-fiction writing and specifically Robert Heinlein may find this link interesting. It’s a critical analysis of the works of Robert Heinlein, entitled Heinlein in Dimension, by Axelei Panshin.

August 9, 2003

Deletia and oxen

In an attempt to correct a nasty problem, today I removed about a thousand words from my story, then replaced it with almost two thousand more to bring me to a total of 11,200. Our heroine now enters the story on an oxcart rather than in an endless, vomitous spew of exposition. Every story should have an oxcart. They’re so useful.