Tag: On Writing Fiction

Have I ever introduced you to Lord Morrisey Morrisey?
     I thought as much. Seeing that few, if any, of you are fee-paying students of mine you probably are completely unaware of my latest writing project, the historical mystery series of Lord Morrisey Morrisey and his ever changing in rank (and service) wartime chum, Stickle. In part this is an answer to a recent question of what I have been writing, fiction-wise, recently. The answer, as it is not currently clear, is that I have been working on little two minute audio dramas that I then produce and perform in.
     Somewhat based on the episodic nature of radio detective serials, with a dosing of faux-Victoriana, Lord Morrisey Morrisey has been in a few fairly interesting cases. ‘The Unusual Case of the Corpulent Fowl,’ ‘The Fascinating Conundrum of the Absent Page,’ ‘The Strange Affair of the Black Murumba!’ and his latest escapade, ‘The Case of the Aspirant Demagogue.’ We have theme music, sound effects, background noise and a cast of… Well, three. But there will be more.
     The task (enjoyable as it is) of writing these snippets of larger stories has been interesting; you need to feel that you really have just come across an episode of a far larger work yet still be able to understand what is going on in this particular episode. it is, I suspect, rather akin to the way soap operas work, in that a good soap opera is one where you can sit down and watch an episode several years into the main storyline and be able to pick up on the salient details within a twenty-two minute slot. It helps to be using a well-recognised formula (the detective duo) and an easily recognisable period (Holmesian Victorian England). The comedy helps as well.
     The eventual aim of this is to write a full half-hour story featuring Morisey and Stickle and record it professionally. It is part of a plan Jon and I have for a new Critical Thinking textbook which would use the individual scenes as examples of fallacies and suchlike. Our take on reason and argument is fairly different to the available textbooks and courses being taught, and this could be the ‘zing,’ as Bertie would put it, to make our work the cat’s pajamas.
     And here are some non-representative samples of the plays…

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Morrisey: Enough of the Johnny Foreigner politics, Stickle. Tell me of the threat to the monarchy of England!

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Stickle: Oh, I agree. Why, the other day we were speaking about the mysterious chucaphra…

Morrisey: Your interest in cryptozoology is commendable, Stickle, but let us return to our suspects.

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Morrisey: That, Stickle, is a matter to which I want an answer. Who would want to kill an unsightly, ghastly creature such as a film critic?

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And it all leads towards writing and producing the ‘Jack Danger and Trip Hazard’ radio series Jon and I have planned for next year.
     Radio really is the next TV phenomena. You read it here.

So, someone accused me of writing a death note (I presume she meant a death threat, because the connotations of a ‘death note’ play out very differently in my mind)… Which, if a good friend of mine (and former flatmate) is correct in his assessment, is a drastic misinterpretation of a doodle committed whilst stuck on hold.
     Like most people, I’ve spent my time in the trenches of telephonic warfare, awaiting the signal from HQ to go over the top and actually speak to a salesperson or related ‘qualified’ tradesperson. Some people doodle when they are stuck in the intermidable wait that is the labyrinth of modern phone policy; I tend to write down pieces of dialogue or character ideas that wander through the muzak. I sometimes wonder whether I should go full time into the ringing of large corporations and multi-nationals; the horrible suspicion is that my idea hit rate might sky rocket (whilst my bank account will fall ever lower as I buy lawn furniture and a collection of ‘Massacred Gnomes’).
     I’ve been pondering for several years now a rather large issue in re my writing, which is that what I would really like to write about are all-powerful entities who can do almost anything they please, and make such a written testament a) worth reading and b) a character study. The problem I have is that all-powerful characters who can almost anything are rather boring to read (I feel, at least) as they, well, don’t face many issues other than which almighty superpower to use this time around. Thus I’ve worked out lots of dialogue and pieces of angsty thoughts for such characters (all powerful characters often become goths, if only for a dirty weekend in Soho; I actually want to avoid that (the goths, not the dirty weekend, which is another matter best not mentioned to the parents)) but not much in the way of a plot. The Servant stories have been my closest attempt to work this through, and it’s been a bit of a step forward and a loll backwards in achieving what I want. I’m especially interested in having all powerful characters kill other characters and make it interesting. Not by way of how they die but rather why, and for what expressed reason.
     Thus, if friend and (former-)flatmate is right then a few words that struck me (and they probably weren’t very good ones) whilst listening to yet another bad cover of ‘The Carpenters’, written down so as to become meaningless in a few days time when the context escapes me, have been taken as a threat of death… Which has a lot of virtue, I am sure, although it strikes me as almost entirely post-modern, seeing that the reader(s) read in a lot of information which I am sure wasn’t there in the first instance.
     It’d all be a lot funnier if I hadn’t also been told that I apparently barely escaped criminal charges for writing it…

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For those of you wondering how the submission is going, then I can say that I know as much as you do. One rejection (almost six months late) for a zombie story I wrote a long while back; not entirely sure where I will send this one next. It is the Year of the Zombie (revised Chinese Chronology) and thus such stories will have a brief surge of popularity before the five or so ideas are wrung out (Still, wouldn’t mind turning the story into a novel one day). Otherwise, I await replies and work on my other major writing project, the thesis. Very little new fiction is being produced (on paper, at least). If only that ‘Spore’ story would sell…

Good afternoon.
     I’m currently writing a thematic sequel to ‘Sympathy for the Enemy’ a story that I’m trying to sell to the Australasian market. It’s actually got a fairly good chance of acceptance (1 in 3, which is better betting odds than most; hurrah for informed decision making processes), but it’s not exactly a done deal, is it? So why, the bloody hell, am I writing another story related to it?
     Well, on one level you don’t need to have ever read ‘Sympathy for the Enemy’ to make sense of ‘For the Time After’ (well, that’s the plan). Also, it’s a thematic sequel (regular readers of this column will know my distaste of sequels…) and thus if the first story gets rejected the second can still be sent out into the wilderness…
     Which leads me to the big question; if ‘Sympathy of the Enemy’ does sell, do I submit the thematic sequel to the same magazine or send it elsewhere? I have two other story ideas set in the same milieu, one of which is straight horror and thus not really applicable to the market this unnamed magazine sits in. If I ever write this story then I can’t really send it in good conscience to the magazine in question (although if they were to take story one and two, then I could send the third (if it were the third) in with a ‘I know it really isn’t your kind of thing, but…’ note attached to it…)… It’s all rather worrying (the number of ‘…’ I have in this paragraph alone (along with my bracketted asides in bracketted asides)).
     Still, am actualy writing non-academic work, so life be good