8:25 pm Wednesday May 14, 2008 No backtalk Play Rough, Fight Dirty by McGehee   Wednesday evening: new content. I enjoy writing fiction because I enjoy creating characters and developing the chemistry among them. The best part is knowing that as each character is true to what he is about, his relationship with other characters will be influenced by that as well as by them. And as a given character interacts with newer ones, the way he relates to previously introduced characters offers a guide to how he should interact with a new one. And it can be fun to make readers stop and wonder, when one character responds to another in a way you hadn’t led them to expect. Which points to another aspect of writing characters: if they aren’t a work in progress, they’re not real. They’re not so much a character in a story as a plot device designed to move the actual character in your desired direction. I find a lot of walking, talking plot devices in passable but mediocre fiction, especially genre fiction. The best and worst of these, interestingly enough, generally influence the plot by responding to a character or situation in a way the reader has not been led to expect. So a writer has to be careful. It’s especially challenging when the line is so thin between a transparent plot device wearing the mask of a character, and an actual character in a character-driven story. I enjoy creating characters. Which means my stories will at least try to be character-driven, even when perhaps that may not be my intention. And frustration for me comes when my characters derail the plot by behaving in a way I’ve found to be more true to themselves than to the story I’m trying to tell. Damned, willful characters. I’ve tried before to write stories (example (I can give Wiley Calhoun’s father a different career without compromising his character.), reference) based on various versions of the characters I’m bringing out in this one. I like them. Their relationship has actually become strongly formed in my concepts of them beyond anything I ever actually wrote for any of them. Here, I try writing about that relationship, just to see what story they want to tell. » Read more "Play Rough, Fight Dirty" [Me] [Short Stories]

11:07 pm Tuesday May 13, 2008 No backtalk From the LITTLE SPRINGS POST-RECORD: May 23, 1880 by McGehee   The preceding August, some cowboys who’d had trouble in the West Fork country sold off their stock and pulled out. Apparently their involvement in the West Fork country wasn’t quite at an end. (This is for continuity’s sake, to make it plausible that descendants of some of these guys might be in Clearwater more than a century later.) » Read more "From the LITTLE SPRINGS POST-RECORD: May 23, 1880" [Me] [Short Stories]

12:44 pm Wednesday February 13, 2008 6 talked back! Dark Heart by McGehee   An idea for a story can come to me in any number of ways. For this one, I thought about supernovas, and how it might be desirable in a future, spacefaring era, to be able to tell when one is going to go off. Well, how do you tell when one is about to go off? You have to study them to learn these kinds of things, right? And when you’re watching all the potential supernovas relatively close to human settlement, and you can’t learn anything more from them until one goes off and potentially causes trouble for people in the neighborhood, you might want to expand the number of stars you’re watching so you can gather more data and make your forecasts more accurate before they’re needed closer to home. And that’s where these folks come in. Still in progress. » Read more "Dark Heart" [Me] [Short Stories]

12:16 pm Wednesday December 26, 2007 2 talked back! The Reluctant I by McGehee   In this, the first of the exercises mentioned here, the challenge is to write a 600-word story from the first-person point of view, but severely limiting the use of the first-person pronoun. The “I” nevertheless has to be important to the story. This will indeed be a challenge. » Read more "The Reluctant I" [Me] [Short Stories]

3:45 pm Friday September 14, 2007 No backtalk Inorganism by McGehee   Having recently seen I, Robot, I’ve been inspired to write something based on what I see as a more likely evolution of existing technology—one in which robots as conceived by Asimov don’t quite exist. Advanced cyberservants are inevitable, but I see them more likely to be extensions of the persons they serve rather than as potentially distinct entities that just happen to be manufactured. The close integration between the organic source identity and the inorganic extended identity is what will blur the line between “created” life and its “manufactured” image. As far as I know, Asimov never really integrated the concept of nanotech into his robot stories, and though it played a role in the movie its full potential wasn’t explored. Certainly I’d rather my robots were linked to me than to the robots’ version of Microsoft. “Three Laws Safe” would work better that way, I think. » Read more "Inorganism" [Me] [Short Stories]

11:10 am Saturday June 30, 2007 No backtalk Medicine Mountain by McGehee   I’ve used this opening sequence in previous story attempts, but finally decided that having the story told from the point of view of a policeman who didn’t even know the victim well, wasn’t the way to go. The victim’s brother, however, was enough of a screw-up that it might make for a more interesting tale, and one in which I could take a freer hand with the ways and means. By the way, one of the 5 Hat cowboys mentioned in this piece was named Calhoun in the unsuccessful short story that inspired it. I suppose it’s possible he or one of his descendants returned after 1879. One of these days I should try that story again—only, you know, better. Update, August 26, 2007: I just dug up the hard copy of the original submission of the 5 Hat short story mentioned above; I might just be able to take a crack at telling this story again, in a way that people would actually want to read it. » Read more "Medicine Mountain" [Me] [Short Stories]

11:44 am Sunday March 26, 2006 No backtalk Wash & Zoë’s Wedding by McGehee   Prior to the release of Serenity, the studio-hosted Browncoats website hosted a number of contests, including one calling for fans’ versions of the vows said by Zoë and Wash when they were married. I couldn’t settle for merely writing vows—I had to write the whole scene. » Read more "Wash & Zoë’s Wedding" [Me] [Short Stories]

9:53 am Saturday September 17, 2005 No backtalk From the LITTLE SPRINGS POST-RECORD: August 3, 1879 by McGehee   Years ago I wrote a story called “The Lynching of Lefty Pross” and submitted it to a magazine that was in the business of publishing Western-themed fiction. It was rejected. But some later stories I tried to write, including Medicine Mountain, have been built around the idea that the 5 Hat cowboys described in this old-style newspaper article, stayed in the West Fork country. Maybe I should have stopped trying to write those stories after I wrote this piece. » Read more "From the LITTLE SPRINGS POST-RECORD: August 3, 1879" [Me] [Short Stories]

11:26 am Monday April 25, 2005 No backtalk Just a Slob Like One of Us by McGehee   Just another post-modern “it sucks to be all-powerful” tale. » Read more "Just a Slob Like One of Us" [Me] [Short Stories]

12:03 pm Monday March 28, 2005 No backtalk Have No Master by McGehee   The “noble wolf” is a predator, people! » Read more "Have No Master" [Me] [Short Stories]

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