Modular Stories

Monkey on my back

The Stranger‘s Paul Constant triggered my latest fleeting manic obsession yesterday. His suggestion for my Labor Day Weekend? Spend it indoors confronting your demons and writing a crappy novel for the 32nd Annual 3-Day Novel Contest.

I’m sure there are a lot of folks out there who have prepared for the contest—people with long, detailed outlines, lists of character names, settings. They’ll write brilliant works of compressed fiction. I won’t. Mine will be crap. It’s liberating to know that in advance.

Prep
I need to buy groceries. I don’t have anything in the house except a dozen eggs.

I did just buy a crapload of office supplies, though. They’re more like totemic objects for me than actual writing tools. I have no idea if all these pens and tape and post-it notes are going to get used. But I feel better having them.

The thing is, I just got back from my honeymoon (Mazatlan) Wednesday evening and I had been planning a nice relaxing weekend… do some laundry, get a little bit of writing done, try to loose some of the 10-pounds I put on.

That’s not going to happen now, though.

Why do it?
I’ve been plodding along through my first novel since March. It’s going ok, except that I’ve nearly reached my target length and it’s nowhere near complete. Plus it seems too episodic and it’s become evident that the central plot will have to be threaded in during the next draft. I have a lot of daunting work ahead of me on that one.

In the middle of this writing, I had an idea for a new story. This new story really captivated my attention, and I started to think maybe it was just a procrastination reflex because I was getting bored with my first project. The trilogy, or whatever.

So the 3D contest is going to give me a chance to exorcise this new idea once and for all so I can return to my trilogy. And it’s going to give me the sensation of finishing–something I’ve never had in the context of creative writing.

And probably it will give me practice overcoming those writing demons I’ve always blamed for keeping me from even trying to get anything published until this month, when I will turn 34.

The new idea
Dwindling resources and overpopulation on earth have driven the wealthy, the powerful, the useful to a successful colony on a new planet far away from our solar system.

Travel between earth and the new colony cannot be achieved in the lifetime of a single human, and so those who travel raise clones of themselves en route, syncing their minds through electronic implants as they sleep.

Even after the mass exodus, Earth continues to decay. Those who remain on earth have reproduced well past the planet’s capacity to sustain them.

Through a period of collective hysteria brought on by deprivation and extreme overcrowding, the social order has more or less collapsed, down to the most basic of taboos. There is no collective entity, no city, no community, no family, no tribe. When there is nothing left to eat, people eat each other.

Two organizations have returned to earth to reverse the decay. Green arrived first. Their solution? Wipe out all humans left on earth. Once purged, allow earth to lie fallow until the global ecosystem gradually heals itself.

Green’s agents have been authorized by the colonial government to conduct field trials and executions for any eater who has committed murder. Case law has established a precedent by which any person of a majority age who engages in cannibalism on earth will necessarily be deemed to have taken an active role in murdering their prey.

With little oversight or accountability, Green has almost full legal reign to hunt and kill the eaters on sight.

A second organization, Philo seeks to rehabilitate select eaters and form primitive, sustainable hunter-gatherer communities with the tools, culture, and knowledge necessary to work in harmony with the earth and help it to recover over the long term.

Although Philo and Green agents are infamously antagonistic towards each other, they also receive mutual benefit from collaboration: Green patrols the borders of the wild lands in which the colonial government has authorized Philo to establish their colonies. And Philo’s presence helps to legitimize Green’s anti-social agenda, helping them to maintain political favor as they pursue their own program of destroying the eaters.

In practice, there is a great deal of tension between Green and Philo, however, since their missions are ultimately at odds. On-the-ground collaboration between the two organizations is typically grudging and unfriendly at best.

The hero, Sean, is an agent of Philo, and an instance of a six-person clone pod that has just arrived on earth to investigate the seeming disappearance of one of Philo’s oldest and most successful rehabilitation colonies on what was formerly an island in Washington’s Puget Sound.

Why blog?
Admittedly I won’t have a lot of time for blogging over the next 72 hours. Unless I get more time in front of the computer before midnight tonight, this will undoubtedly be my longest entry.

However, I’m already overwhelmed by the number of holes I see in the idea I’ve outlined above, and I’m not sure yet how I’m going to BS my way through it. On top of that, I’m starting to feel like the idea is not that great to begin with. Oh, and there’s still my whole incompetence at putting together a coherent plot to begin with.

If I’m not going to get a good manuscript out of this, then I want to at least learn from the experience of writing it. I’m going to use this blog to help me remember what it was like to do this, to see what walls I ran into and how I overcame them.

And if I’m journalling for myself, I may as well make it a spectacle and let you see it too….