I’m not sure how many people will find this interesting, but I often have some background / thoughts on stories that I write, but I’ve never really found a good time/place to communicate that. But, with this secondary blog, I think I’ll start posting these sorts of commentary pieces here, talking about stories, how I came up with the idea, how it connects to the larger network of themes and settings, and other things that may or may not be relevant. Hope you find it at least somewhat interesting!
So, for those of you who don’t know much about where I get my story ideas, the vast, vast majority of them are created in what I might call brainstorm sessions. Those of you who contribute more than ten dollars a month on Patreon might be familiar with these documents–they’re massive, and I usually keep one running for several months at a time, adding to the stories in that document over time. For those who don’t here’s how those brain storms are created.
A quirk I’ve always had, for years, is that I create odd little TF games using porn pics and complex folder systems and algorithms to essentially generate semi-random transformations. At some point, it occurred to me that I could also create games designed to give me random story ideas! Basically, I put in a bunch of random photos, and with the help of some random number generators and creative force, those photos get sorted into sets of three to four pictures, all of which contain in them the nugget of a potential story I want to write. As such, for nearly every story I’ve been posting to tumblr for the last several years, there is associated with it, three or four (or more) pictures which more or less inspired it. For example, here are the pics that inspired “Joining the Family”:
Gramps, the narrator
Mikey before
Mikey after
The rest of the story just emerged from there. It wasn’t really intended to head quite as directly into horror as it did–if anything, the story as I’d originally imagined it was going to be much more conventional, without much supernatural at all. I just liked the idea of Mikey having a fairly normal teenage rebellion, one which just happened to include getting his grandfather to relapse and start drinking again, start smoking, and then also have some good old fashioned incest. However, that original idea was a bit too slow paced for tumblr (I try to have sex in every chunk if possible, and this original idea wouldn’t have had much sex at all until the end. A slow burn is great, but not when you’re posting a story in bits).
So I ended up speeding things along with a haunting. I honestly have no clue what the haunting is–it’s just there. Given that this story is yet another instance of Louisiana Acres, it’s definitely tied to the trailer–all of these characters were sucked in at some point, and were likely never related to each other at all to begin with. It may or may not have something to do with TV static–I just thought that was such a strange detail, when I wrote it, and even though it just sat there as an unused Chekov’s gun, I kept it when I went back and revised, because of everything it hinted at. There’s been a lot of more conventional horror elements in my stuff lately, and I blame @vikingzombieboyfriend for suggesting I read some Ramsey Campbell a few weeks back, and I demolished one of his short story collections, and it’s been influencing my thought process a bit.
If the story seemed to end a bit quick, that’s because I’d originally planned a fifth chunk, but scrapped it. I hate first person stories that don’t provide some context as to why they’re first person. First person implies an audience outside of the reader, and without addressing that, I always feel like the first person is unnecessary. It was meant to take place at some point in the future. Gramps is telling his story to a new person trapped by the haunting, giving him some explanation as to what’s happening to him. It would also give a chance to see how the other family members had progressed since. But I just didn’t feel like writing a reunion special, and so I skipped it. If you’re desperate to know, the dad’s a huge slob, the twins are muscular brute dumbfucks, Mikey’s a chubby pig, Gramps is a decrepit old fuck with a huge cock, and the audience of the story, the new guy, is probably going to end up as the dad’s new toilet pig, since he’s too fat to move much anymore. See? No reason to waste 1000 words on that, when 50 will do just fine.
Bracken's Corner 