Voboy
Sometime Wordwright
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2016
- Posts
- 4,482
Since everyone else is doing it...
When I was a boy, I played with Legos. Not the way kids do now, by buying a set and following the instructions; no, I just pawed through a bucket of a thousand loose Lego pieces, my fingers making a racket that set my father's teeth on edge, and let my hands build whatever my brain thought about. And it was the 1980s, so there were few curvy pieces and nothing ended up smooth. And I could never find the other piece of the hinge when I needed one.
I played a Lego game of interstellar war, where creatures called Tygons flew fighters called Tygon Interceptors against some nameless foe. Robotech and GI Joe heavily influenced my scenarios, but the game had a sort of glorious aimlessness: my war had no cause that anyone knew, no end in sight. It was just Tygons vs... someone.
Then I grew out of Legos and into words: I wrote a story, which I thought of as a novel, longhand on college-ruled paper. When my family got a home computer, I continued the story of my interstellar war in the whining screech of a dot-matrix printer. And, in the end, I made a Story.
I think I was about thirteen or so.
That story ended up between the flimsy covers of a Trapper Keeper, where it presumably still lives... somewhere. I have no idea where it is. It fell victim to life's transitions, the moving trucks and change-of-address forms that framed my nineties. I know that if I found it and read it now, it would mortify me, but as I aged into Real Life the story slept. It had been told in Lego bricks and reams of my dad's printer paper; it was no longer a part of my life.
Until? Along came Lit's Geek Pride event, spearheaded by @PuckIt.
I wanted to write a workplace story of a computer nerd getting seduced by some sort of coworker, but PuckIt decreed that all entries needed to fit in Fantasy/SF as a category. So, having committed to the event, I grudgingly produced a story... with that old, glorious aimlessness. The war in that story had no cause that anyone knew, no end in sight. But it did have a character, spunky Fleet officer Pixy Pfeiffer, and a catchphrase I imagined an interstellar military might say, the way modern soldiers say BOHICA: "Dry. No lube."
Because that's how Fleet gives it to ya.
I set my story on an unglamorous ship named for a famous naval fuckup of cinema's sepia past, among listless sailors and their small problems as they tried, in their way, to fight some nameless enemy during some endless war. They fight, they sleep, they fuck, they cry (sometimes), and they overcome their fears to do amazing things when they must.
I buttoned up that story and posted it, expecting it to stand as a one-off that would help PuckIt get his event off the ground. It turned into much, much more. And the reason was because I'd finally found a character to fly my Lego Tygon Interceptors, the missing link that had made my dot-matrix scribbles so unreadable. Because Pixy intrigued me, I wrote more and more about her. Meanwhile, my series became as aimless, as unfinishable, as the war it chronicled. And, as Tolkien said, "the tale grew in the telling:" I produced appendices, treatises, a glossary. I developed side plots. I thought about creating a spinoff. It got to be too much, the voracious demands of my 2,000 or so readers haunting me with their expectations.
It had to end eventually. I tried. I transferred Pixy; she persevered. I killed off Pixy; she came back. And in the end I banished her someplace far away, but I gave her an ending amidst a universe with no other ending. It was the least I could do for her: she had spent some fourteen chapters among drifting, aimless story components as jumbled as the Legos in the bucket, and it was time to leave her fully assembled.
I'm glad I did. I'm proud of the story. People seem to like it. Thanks, PuckIt, wherever you are.
Dry, No Lube Ch 1
When I was a boy, I played with Legos. Not the way kids do now, by buying a set and following the instructions; no, I just pawed through a bucket of a thousand loose Lego pieces, my fingers making a racket that set my father's teeth on edge, and let my hands build whatever my brain thought about. And it was the 1980s, so there were few curvy pieces and nothing ended up smooth. And I could never find the other piece of the hinge when I needed one.
I played a Lego game of interstellar war, where creatures called Tygons flew fighters called Tygon Interceptors against some nameless foe. Robotech and GI Joe heavily influenced my scenarios, but the game had a sort of glorious aimlessness: my war had no cause that anyone knew, no end in sight. It was just Tygons vs... someone.
Then I grew out of Legos and into words: I wrote a story, which I thought of as a novel, longhand on college-ruled paper. When my family got a home computer, I continued the story of my interstellar war in the whining screech of a dot-matrix printer. And, in the end, I made a Story.
I think I was about thirteen or so.
That story ended up between the flimsy covers of a Trapper Keeper, where it presumably still lives... somewhere. I have no idea where it is. It fell victim to life's transitions, the moving trucks and change-of-address forms that framed my nineties. I know that if I found it and read it now, it would mortify me, but as I aged into Real Life the story slept. It had been told in Lego bricks and reams of my dad's printer paper; it was no longer a part of my life.
Until? Along came Lit's Geek Pride event, spearheaded by @PuckIt.
I wanted to write a workplace story of a computer nerd getting seduced by some sort of coworker, but PuckIt decreed that all entries needed to fit in Fantasy/SF as a category. So, having committed to the event, I grudgingly produced a story... with that old, glorious aimlessness. The war in that story had no cause that anyone knew, no end in sight. But it did have a character, spunky Fleet officer Pixy Pfeiffer, and a catchphrase I imagined an interstellar military might say, the way modern soldiers say BOHICA: "Dry. No lube."
Because that's how Fleet gives it to ya.
I set my story on an unglamorous ship named for a famous naval fuckup of cinema's sepia past, among listless sailors and their small problems as they tried, in their way, to fight some nameless enemy during some endless war. They fight, they sleep, they fuck, they cry (sometimes), and they overcome their fears to do amazing things when they must.
I buttoned up that story and posted it, expecting it to stand as a one-off that would help PuckIt get his event off the ground. It turned into much, much more. And the reason was because I'd finally found a character to fly my Lego Tygon Interceptors, the missing link that had made my dot-matrix scribbles so unreadable. Because Pixy intrigued me, I wrote more and more about her. Meanwhile, my series became as aimless, as unfinishable, as the war it chronicled. And, as Tolkien said, "the tale grew in the telling:" I produced appendices, treatises, a glossary. I developed side plots. I thought about creating a spinoff. It got to be too much, the voracious demands of my 2,000 or so readers haunting me with their expectations.
It had to end eventually. I tried. I transferred Pixy; she persevered. I killed off Pixy; she came back. And in the end I banished her someplace far away, but I gave her an ending amidst a universe with no other ending. It was the least I could do for her: she had spent some fourteen chapters among drifting, aimless story components as jumbled as the Legos in the bucket, and it was time to leave her fully assembled.
I'm glad I did. I'm proud of the story. People seem to like it. Thanks, PuckIt, wherever you are.
Dry, No Lube Ch 1
