| Works In Progress Page |
| SOME SHORT STORIES Ok, I have written several short stories over the years. I wrote my first when I was roughly 11 years old. One thing I used to do was take an existing story, or even a TV program or movie, and change around the characters and plot to how I wanted it to be. I liked the idea of controlling the events in a really cool story. Ever see the movie The Dirty Dozen? At 13 I wrote a 60 page treatment of that movie and changed the ending so that a few of the characters I liked came out alive while I let Charles Bronson take a bullet to the back. Around this time I also wrote a few "radio plays", little plays which my friends and I voiced and recorded on audio cassettes. Thank God none of them exist to this day....I hope. My voice caught in the tumult of puberty was not a pretty thing. Enough about me! At present I am supposedly at work on a group of short stories, about five, most of which are still in the idea and "research" stage. What I am doing is writing a collection of stories I would eventually like to have released as one book. They all deal with the same theme; the effects war has on those who live through one and on their families. Yes, another war themed book with an audience, it's marketable, blah, blah. It's not war so as much as the emotional trauma that comes with that type of experience. These stories actually come from a strange place. I am scavenging them from a novel I tried to write eight years ago. I began work on a book about a nonconforming malcontent who is shipped off to Vietnam and spends his entire time there trying to get out any way he can. I was writing this book to see if I could write, I never meant it to see the light of day. And it never would have. It was bad, really bad. I had read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller not long before and what I think I was trying to do was be Heller. And if I know one thing, I'm no Joe Heller. But this book did have some great ideas and plot points and characters, there were a few good things about it. So while I scrapped the 8 chapters I had written, my brain retained these things. So what I am doing now, quite by accident at first, is ripping the guts from the old novel, changing setting about, and making short stories from some of its chapters. And it works. The old novel was somewhat episodic and the chapters could practially stand on their own as they were. So now I'll tell you about some of the stories themselves. I'm a long winded bastard, ain't I? The most difficult one to write is also the one I like the best. It will need the most "research". It is entitled "Gott Mit Uns". It involves the story of a US army Rabbi at the end of World War Two. He is on loan to the Russian Army to deal with the Jewish survivors of Auschwitz recently liberated by the Russians. The Rabbi is a young man and, having seen what he has in the liberated death camp, is having a crisis of faith. He cannot answer a question put to him by a survivor he is counseling; "Where was God?". As he is struggling with this question he meets with, and begins conversations with, a young SS officer who is now a prisoner in the camp he helped run. They begin a semi confrontational, semi friendly series of debates over whose side God was on in their struggles. As the story progresses, the Rabbi comes face to face with his belief system and hopes to restore his own faith as he tries to convince the German that God was on the side of the victors. I hope to work a lot of philosophical and religious debate into the story. I hope to show how each side believed they were right and how they justfied what they did. The title, Gott Mit Uns, comes from an inscription on German army belt buckles of the era. It means "God is with us". I think I'll end the short story section on that. the others all deal with how people comes to terms with the war experience, whether they fought in one or they have a family member who came home from, or died in, one. A Few Other Ideas I Had I have a few other ideas for novels that I may get to by the time I am an octagenarian. 1). A novel about the rise and fall of a punk rock band. It would be a political allegory with much black humor. 2). A novel following the murder trial of a small child in a small town. It would be a character driven book told from multiple viewpoints showing how the murder affects he cops, lawyers, parents and even the killer. 3). A novella about a man born with genetic memory. He has the entire history of mankind locked away in his head and he becomes pursued by scientists, sociologists, theologians, etc. A cult actually forms up around him. I see this as a black comedy too...some cheesy social commentary. 4) A short story about an Englishman visiting America and who falls in love wih baseball. He carries this love back to Britain and has to hide it as he was known as a rabid soccer fan. He hides it like a dirty secret, daydreaming about it. This will sort of be an allegory for homosexuality. He becomes a closeted fan...i see some funny possibilities with this story. |