“For the Galaxy” – Stall Tactics

In 1991 and 1992, I wrote what may be considered “a book” by some low standards. Printed out, it was 180 pages single spaced. The title of the book is “AllardWorks – For The Galaxy”. It’s a science-fiction/comedy affair, and featured my good friends of the time. I am hardly in touch with any of those people any longer. I wasn’t in the story. My last name is in the title. That’s enough.

Rereading it would probably be painful, but I stand by the story and most of the gags that I remember.

A lot of the story was based on alter egos and parodies. There was a big Indiana-Jones like scene in a restaurant. There was a Rambo scene in a city environment; he low-crawls through the streets on a mission; people keep interrupting him to ask him for the time, etc. Errrr… I think there were more parodies, but those are the two that jump out at me. There are several other jokes that persist the entire story that I really like.

I was rushing to finish the story before heading to basic training in April of 1992. I mostly finished it, but not quite. I was thinking about the sequel.

To be young and naive... I never finished the first and never started the second. I got pretty caught up with the computer programming thing.

In the passing years, I’ve attempted to write some stuff, but it never gets too far off the ground. I think the primary reason is that I’m just not that good of a writer, but I am a good coder. Its easier to just go back and write code in which I can see tangible results.  I can write funny and I can write witty, but it tires itself out after the length of an email.

There are several stories that I’ve been mentally developing for years and have tried writing more than once.

• TSAD – this is the oldest. I wrote the original of this in high school
• BATTLE CHRISTMAS – my biggest problem with BC is setting up the back story in order to justify the primary story. I’m having real trouble answering “how did we get here?”
• SAVIOR – despite its long mental existence, it only recently got a name. I wrote chapter 1 a few months ago. I like this story a lot… not the part I wrote, but the 1000 parts I didn’t write.
• SUICIDE HERO – that’s a working title; i doubt it will stick, but it is growing on me. I wrote a little bit of that a few weeks ago. (I just wrote a paragraph describing what this is about, then deleted it in fear of it being stolen. As-if.)
• BOYNTON BEACH ZOMBIES – with all of the zombie movies these days, how could I not think about one? I wrote the first couple scenes of a screenplay about a year ago. It quickly became apparent that there’s no way I could make it, so stopped writing it.
• OTHER ZOMBIE PROJECT – this is the newest one that I only recently started kicking around. It’s a first-person zombie story from the zombie’s perspective. I have a few paragraphs on it.

Stephen King could write all of these in about a week and have most of them transferred to the screen within a year. I can’t do any of them, at least not now.

But maybe I can do FTG. The thing that’s different about FOR THE GALAXY is that it was funny, at least in theory. It was a fully flushed out story with a lot of characters, but there was a lot of foolishness and it was fun to write. So, recently I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s the one I should focus on.

A lot is going to have to change. The alter-egos and parodies have to go away, and the number of characters has to be reduced. The title has to change; AllardWorks will need to be replaced with something not involving my last name. Also, a significant part of the plot has to be gutted. I’ll have to eliminate time travel. In 1992, Time Travel stories didn’t completely appall me. Now they do. As soon as a movie involves time travel, I cringe. The recent STAR TREK movie wasn’t so bad because they didn’t use time travel as a cheesy way to right a wrong or as a cheap way out of a predicament. I let that one slide. But, to get back on point, “For the Galaxy” did somewhat involve time travel. Time travel never happened, but there was a machine that could do it, and it probably would’ve in the sequel. I don’t want to be appalled by my own work.

I’ve recently become discouraged about my non-work related endeavors in the technology world. I think I’m ready for a break, so now may be the time to take another swing at writing something readable. Or maybe not. Maybe this blog entry will be as far as I get. But, at least for this brief moment in time, I’m excited to consider rewriting FOR THE GALAXY. I just created a new Google doc and wrote the name of a character that I haven’t written since 1992. I considered changing this character name, but didn’t.

In another window, I’m installing MICROSOFT ONE NOTE. I haven’t used it before, but I’m hoping it will help me keep track of things; characters, plot points, etc. We’ll see.

And, in this window I’m writing a blog.

What do one note and Windows Live Writer have in common? They are both a means of stalling from doing the actual task at hand, which is to try to do something productive. As I write this closing paragraph, I’m trying to think of something else I can do in preparation of the story without actually writing it. If nothing else, at least I wrote some character names.