Short stories, excerpts, random scenes, and ideas for expanding later.
New site, new capabilities! Over the next several whiles, I will be copying old scrivenings to this new site, as well as adding new material.
In the meantime, rather than leave errant visitors to this nacent realm with nothing but the 20teens equivalent of "under construction," why not check out my oldest friend's videolog about his family's quest to ramp up to a 100-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail: Will Hike for Food.
Story idea: American Slavery: An Adventure
Tell the story of slavery in the U.S. as a multi-generational adventure with protagonists from one family spanning the centuries. Invaders to Africa, helped by natives who betrayed their own, are abducted and taken across the ocean. There, they are sold into slavery to people who claim Divine Right to own human beings. Their children are subjected to the same lifelong, inherited condition.
There are people in the new land who argue against their enslavement, but they are stymied by the sheer number of people who refuse to relent.
The bloodiest war in American history is fought over the issue, finally freeing millions—and, perversely, leaving many of them lost and afraid, victims of generational Stockholm Syndrome and infantilization. Well-meaning laws create lasting animosity that result in a compensatory set of laws that perpetuate a lesser condition for these people. Free, with more and better opportunities than their parents, still they struggle in the face of a hostile and self-styled superior people.
It is another one hundred years before the terrible laws are struck down, opening even more opportunities for these people, but lingering resentment, stoked by yet more well-intentioned laws, continue to challenge these childrend of abduction as they work bit by geteration bit to relinquish the hold that those who would continue to trade shackles for an ever-lighter set of fetters, always seeming to try to avoid the day when all restraints fall away, and the children of abduction can stand beside those others as equals without the coercion of laws that made acrimony into a cultural more.
Vanessa stared out the sliding glass doors of ker kitchen, one hand wrapped around a mug of still-slightly-too-hot tea. She was lost in a daze of non-thought, her unfocused eyes snared by the light of the newly-risen moon just past sunset.
Vanessa felt a hand fold over her wrist. "V. You know you've been doing that a lot since the haspital, right?"
Slowly, and with obvious effort, Vanessa turned her eyes to her best friend's sardonically smiling face. Vanessa blinked a few times, coming back to herself.
"Youve been talking to me, haven't you?" Vanessa said. "Aside from the 'Earth to V' bit."
Miranda simply nodded, her smiling creeping further into her left cheek.
Vanessa sighed.
We have a culture of contrition for success. We make excuses for positive qualities we're born with, downplaying them. We are embarrassed by accomplishments, attributing to luck or privilege what we achieve through the sweat of our own effort.
We have relapsed into the culture prevelant in the Middle Ages, only instead of attributing all things to a god, it is to the society in which we live, and we are merely the lottery of the macroculture's aggregate output.
It was stuffing then. It is no less so now.