laila
15 April 2008 @ 11:31 pm
Further Bad Ideas From My Back Pages  
Those of you who have been here for a while may remember a little entry I entitled My Back Pages, containing a brief synopsis of all the hideous stories I wrote as a teenager. I wanted to be creative but, at the time, I had a regrettable tendency to suck at it. I sucked hard, but I like to think I have gotten better since then.

I must take a fair amount of the blame for the suck - however, I would be lying if I claimed all of the fail I spawned as a novitiate writer was my fault. You see, I also had a co-author.

Now, some co-authors are awesome. (See [livejournal.com profile] pichi, [livejournal.com profile] cards_slash and [livejournal.com profile] caseyvalhalla.) My first co-author, however? He was not awesome. He was, if his ideas are anything to go by, clearly quite demented. The two of us were children when we first started writing together, which would go some way to explain the stupidity of a lot of these things... but, unlike me, my co-author did not get more thoughtful as he got older. Where I learned from my mistakes and struggled to improve my work, he simply started wondering why I was spending so much time editing nowadays, and why I no longer seemed to like his ideas much.

I like to think it's obvious why I started going off these things...

  • He had a tendency to create casts who were far, far too big. There's nothing the matter with ensemble casts if you can pull it off, but if you can't - and we certainly couldn't - you're left with a story overburdened with about 437489789234780234 useless characters. Worse, he utterly refused to let me prune the deadweight, never mind that the characters in question were badly-characterized, had no clear effect on the action and contributed absolutely nothing.

  • Our first story ripped off, amongst other things, Ronin Warriors, Sailor Moon, Tokyo Babylon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. He 'forgot' to mention that the boys in Ronin Warriors were also mentored by the Goddess Athena.

  • In fact, just about every time he liked a book or movie or whatever, he wanted us to either rip it off or just outright rewrite it, changing practically nothing. It took a lot of patient explaining that this was, you know, blatant plagiarism to get him to drop these ideas.

  • His idea of an awesome plot twist for a gently comic story about high-school kids? Add a train crash. Yes. A train crash. His plan was to send the characters off on a class trip and have the train crash on the way there (or maybe it was the way back), killing off several cast members at a stroke and letting the rest fight their way from the wreckage and find help as best they could. Why? Because he'd just read Dragon Head, which started with its protagonist surviving a train crash that killed the rest of his class on their way to a class trip. In spite of the fact 1. Dragon Head did it and 2. Our story was a comedy, it took me weeks to convince him this was not a good idea.

  • He thought he could speak Japanese. When he wasn't writing entire songs using words pulled out from a Japanese dictionary (heedless of the fact that they had to be conjugated when used in sentences), he was creating 'hilarious' character names. Examples? Characters called Kanenomi Shiro (Crab's Eye White - WTF?), Sayona-Ra, Mi-So, Watashi Perfect and Yasue Binbangu.

  • Why in the world would anyone think it a good idea to rip off Deep Space Nine by including mysterious voids and the super-intelligent formless beings who inhabit them in a story about espionage and black-ops agents?

  • His most brazen self-insert, from a totally different story, utterly derailed then largely wrecked the first few drafts of a high-school comedy by showing up as a teacher. He, of course, had the answer to every single one of the cast's problems and action quickly shifted from the campus to his home as ninety percent of the so-called 'main characters' ended up moving in with him and his teenage kids (more on them anon). His house was quite absurdly massive and boasted a 'sky room' lined with about nine thousand lava lamps. I like lava lamps, but that's just absurd.

  • In fact, just about every other story featured at least one stupendously wealthy major character with a huge, super-opulent house.

  • One of our stories - reveling in the title Thieves though the main characters were, in fact, Weiss-ripoff black-ops agents and never actually stole anything, featured a family that would have done Joseph Smith proud. The father married four times, two of hias wives were sisters, and just about every last one of his wives metamorphosed into a baby-making machine the minute the ring hit their finger. He had about twenty kids, all told, ranging in age from almost thirty down to about ten. They all showed up in the story, despite the fact that ninety percent of them had nothing whatever to do.

  • And then there was the incest. The story about the non-larcenous Thieves featured a fourteen year old girl who my co-author had decided (in the face of my protests) had the hots for her fifteen year old brother. Another boy had previously knocked up his half-sister, who was in high school and now the mother of twins herself. His justification for writing about incest was 'these things happen'. Yes, but people also get eaten by tigers and that's not a good enough reason to randomly have a tiger chow down on one of the cast.

  • A thirteen-year-old girl character he created, who was seeing a sixteen year old boy named Heiji Makisaka, got forciably engaged to him to save his life after he stumbled upon her father's secert double life: the only way he could be saved is if he joined the family. Not too uncommon in anime and manga. I admit. However. The family home had an in-built computer, and his fiancee's entry on the database had been changed to Mrs. Makisaka one day after their engagement. The girl, once again, was THIRTEEN.

  • Two-year-old supergenius toddlers in flying saucers. I repeat, two-year-old supergenius toddlers in flying saucers.

  • A teenager has twins. The twins are then magically aged by the powers of plot contrivance, growing thirteen years in a matter of hours and showing absolutely no ill-effects as a result of this, nor any sign of adaption issues. The girl turns out to be a total ho-bag and tries to screw everything in pants, despite being about three weeks old. They then show up in another story set at least ten years after the first and have aged only two years in the intervening time. Why my co-author thought this was such a good idea I will never know.

  • One story featured a character (the one who was boffing his fourteen year old sister, in fact) being abducted, held in a subterranean basement, and subject to hideous scientific experiments. My co-author wanted to name the chapters after the episodes of Star Trek he was missing while being held. Sure, that's what I'd worry about in that situation. Missing my TV shows.

  • The first story we wrote contained not only my serially abused uberuke Stu, but also my co-author's self-insert Stu. He was a brazen self-insert: he looked like my co-author, acted like him, and was half-French like him. Not so odd for a twelve year old. It wasn't that odd that the character was the team leader or that he was was killed off doing something stupid heroic and I had to write out scene after scene of the characters moping over his death. It wasn't even odd that he came back from the dead. What was odd, though, was my co-author's decision (after the character came back from the dead) to have him transform into a woman so that he could carry his girlfriend's twins to term and then give birth to them for some unknown reason. He was then turned into a female superwarrior flange-beast by the bad guys, because of course they had no warriors of their own who were (whisper it) better than his Gary Stu self.

  • His self-insert Stu was nicknamed Gai, but his full name was Julien-Paul Gordon MacGordon. Even at thirteen I thought this was a stupid name, but no amount of pleas, bribery or threats on my part would induce him to change it.

  • Another story gave a no less blatant self-insertion a thirteen year old girlfriend, who ended up pregnant with his character's baby.

  • Ten year old comedy rapists. Yes, ten year old comedy rapists. A prepubescent boy in a bathrobe of seduction wanders around eating raw meat and plots to rape a cute thirteen year old crack addict by offering her drugs then climbing aboard. The girl is later forced into sexual slavery by this ten year old version of Clare Quilty. What was far, far worse was my co-author intended this entire digression to be seen as comic and, once again, his response to my protests was 'these things happen'.

I have long since fallen out of contact with my co-author. The Internet being what it is, he could no doubt find me if he wanted to - and I him, if I wanted to, but the fact he hasn't tried tells me he doesn't want to and in all honesty I feel the same way about him. I really can't be bothered. Looking at what we churned out, and how much worse it is than the things I produce either by myself or with my current writing partners, and there's absolutely no point us trying to get back into touch. By the end we were only really together as co-authors, and why would I still want to co-author this?
 
 
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