My sci-fi comedy action short A Natural History of the Pancake Badger has just been posted on The Town Drunk. It’s been a whole year since Gimpbomb Enters Room, my chilling vision of the chatrooms of tomorrow, appeared on the same site. Man, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a year, but I guess it has.
There’s quite a long explanation behind "A Natural History of the Pancake Badger," but I think I will only touch on a little of it here.
Partially this was a response to a regular attendee at the slugtribe writer’s group, a man who responded to everything he read by declaring it boring. So I wrote a story that was one long chase sequence. Sort of like Run Lola Run, but with Catholic schoolgirls and aliens. Which automatically makes it a contender for the title of most exciting short story ever written.
The second half to the story behind the story involves me confiding the plot to an actor I met while doing some crew work for a local theater company.
"I had this dream where an alien attacked some Catholic schoolgirls," I told him. "And bigfoot showed up. I think I’m going to make it into a short story."
"That sounds interesting," he said with an actorly straight face.
A week or so later I was drunk at a theater party and I overheard him telling people about my idea. They laughed. Everyone laughed at me. Well, WHO’S LAUGHING NOW YOU LOCAL THEATER WEIRDOS!?!?!?!? IT’S A GODDAMN PUBLISHED STORY!!!!
No revenge is sweeter than success.
