[Female Voice]
This is Behind the Cut with Christopher Gronlund. The companion show to Not About Lumberjacks.
[Christopher Gronlund]
Each story for this year’s Christmas episode is a first draft. Granted, they are polished first drafts (and by that, I mean I wrote them, read them for any typos or any glaring errors, and then called them done), but none of the stories received much consideration beyond their creation.
It’s obviously not the way I write novels, but it’s how I write most of my short stories. Of course, that means I sometimes end up thinking, while recording, “Oh, man…I would have loved doing more with that part of the story,” but I rarely think, “I should have cut this part or rewritten everything.”
“The Crock” was written for a writing prompt. On Patreon, I support the crew doing the audiodramas, Alba Salix: Royal Physician and The Axe and Crown. They also do an actual-play roleplaying show called The End of Time and Other Bothers.
On the Discord server available to patrons, there’s a closed writing group that sometimes creates stories based on writing prompts. While I love that kind of thing, I rarely take part…because I always have enough other writing going on. But there was something in this prompt hooked me:
An evil spell is cast upon a mundane household item, but the homeowner has no idea.
Granted, the narrator of “The Crock” figures out that her mother-in-law placed a spell on the Crock Pot gift in the story, but to me, a prompt is just that: a thing to spark an idea.
With that in my head, I knocked out the story in 15 or 20 minutes on a lunch break.
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Patrick K. Walsh does a horror podcast called Screamqueenz: Where Horror Gets Gay. It’s a lighthearted look at campy horror movies. I’ve been on the show twice: episode 228, discussing Dave Made a Maze and episode 250 talking about Night of the Comet.
I’ve wanted Patrick to narrate a story for Not About Lumberjacks for some time. So, when looking in the Evernote file I keep of story ideas, “Greetings” jumped out. And when I began roughing out the idea with Patrick in mind, the story—as they say—practically wrote itself.
I wrote the opening before bed one evening and then, the next day, I finished the story during my lunch break. Like “The Crock,” my wife gave it a quick read, pointed out a couple typos, and then I called it done.
Because I viewed the story belonging to Patrick as much as to me, I told him he could run with any idea he had as he narrated. There are a few lines made better in the moment by him, which is why I love working with other people on projects. Sometimes other people make a good moment in a story great. Patrick definitely has a knack for that…
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I almost wrote “Naughty” for last year’s Christmas episode. I had a note in my story ideas file that was something like, “A shitty little kid does something to Santa Claus and gets what he deserves or learns a lesson in the end.”
I had NO idea what I was going to do with the story until I started writing it.
When I was young, my big sister showed me how to open wrapped gifts to see what we were getting before Christmas even arrived. It was a shitty thing to do to a single mom who busted her ass to ensure we had memorable Christmases. So I figured I’d start with Bobby getting caught unwrapping hidden gifts. From there, the story flowed.
Initially, I planned to have Santa Claus in the story, but it made more sense to have Santa’s menacing brother arrive to teach Bobby a lesson. When it came time to discuss the tattoos on his knuckle [sic], “PAIN” spelled out across them was an easy option. For the other hand, I had no idea…so I opened a web browser and searched a Scrabble dictionary for four-letter words that seemed fitting.
I had jotted down other options before settling on MOJO, but MOJO was too good to pass by. And just like that, Not-Santa had a hand with which he could dish out physical pain, and then a magical MOJO hand that could do ANYTHING.
Once it was established that Bobby was properly shitty and that Not-Santa could do anything he wanted, the story turned dark. I got to watch a couple people listen to this story in person (I didn’t even have my wife read this one before recording it), and it was great seeing the horrified looks on their faces as a kid is actually tortured on Christmas Eve…and then the uncomfortable laughter that comes with taking pleasure in a little kid being electrocuted and suffocated while lashed to a Christmas tree.
I wanted to finish the story on an upbeat note, so…in the end, Bobby learns a lesson, and Christmas day is saved.
Like the other two stories in this year’s Christmas episode, “Naughty” was written on my lunch break in a quick blast before it was time to log back on to my day job.
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There’s something to a story written in a whirlwind that I love. Like an artist sketching ideas, sometimes what is made in the moment has more life than the polished final version. It’s possible that in one’s effort to refine a work, that the demands of expectations destroys the work’s rougher edges, where you can often see when and where an idea actually came into being.
The novels I write will always be fully realized, polished things, examined from many angles. But where short stories are concerned, sometimes I’m often fine watching a reader cut themselves on the sharp edges.
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Thank you for listening to Not About Lumberjacks and Behind the Cut. Theme music for Behind the Cut is a tune called Reaper by Razen. Visit nolumberjacks.com for information about the music, episodes, and voice talent.
Next time, it’s the post-apocalyptic corporate office story I’ve talked about for over a year. At this point, it might be built up so much for some that it can’t live up to their expectations. But if I didn’t release it, the Dungeon Master in our Dungeons and Dragons campaign—who’s been patiently waiting over a year for this one—would probably kill my character at this point, so it’s in my best interests to FINALLY finish and release it.
HOWEVER…some other writing stuff is going on behind the scenes that could possibly affect the release of “Alive in HQ,” so we’ll see…
Until next time: be mighty, and keep your axes sharp!
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