To kick that off a bit, I’ve got an idea for an episodic serial story that I’d like to eventually podcast—here’s a quick pitch:

Working title: “To Reach the Farthest Star”

Jack Arden is an internet billionaire who’s been in the right places at the right times as a software architect and entrepreneur. He’s had a hand in some of the most brilliant rising stars and flamboyant failures of the last 20 years of the web.

But, today, Jack turns 35 and plans to retire from that life to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Unlike most children who’ve had that same dream, Jack has spent the last decade training and conditioning himself while quietly funding and directing research to make his fantasy of private spaceflight a reality.

And finally, as Jack prepares to step away from some of the most lucrative terrestrial opportunities of his charmed life, a way to the stars opens before him.

As these things usually go, however, neither his training nor his lifelong obsession with science fiction have left him fully prepared for this journey and its strange destination.

…and that’s it so far. The title’s up in the air, and the premise is a bit melodramatic - but I’m hoping to write something with a bit of a good old junky scifi pulp feel. I’ve got lots of ideas, and I’m idly working on a bible for a dozen or so stories. Let me know what you think of the pitch, oh hypothetical readers.

For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

I’m thinking that this is now part 3 of 6, and I hope that I can actually get my brain back into writing and finishing this. The previous two parts - and the whole thing - will need some revisions when I’m done. The 7th Son trilogy so far is complete, and there have been some revelations which make it plain to me that I’ve missed a few things. My brief characterization of Special(k) is totally bogus, for instance.

But, nonetheless, I forge ahead with Alpha vs Delta - Part III:

On the first day of invasion, trillions of Spores had rained down from the upper edges of the sky. Of those trillions, barely a hundred had made successful contact with poor Marten’s shambling form, as he had made way his home on yet another winter afternoon of early darkness. And of the hundred or so that had landed on Marten, most had succumbed to exposure or had simply fallen away as he’d walked.

For a lucky dozen, though, passage had been found into the warm interior of Marten’s coat. Some had fallen down the waist of his pants or under his scarf. Others had found lucky paths through small tears in fabric, or into his coat pockets to be ferried up into his sleeves on his wrists. Of those dozen Spores that had breached Marten’s armor against the wintry air, only seven had managed to further traverse the layers of clothing that had swaddled his body. While the others had lost their way in odd twists of fabric or had simply turned up dead on arrival, a miraculous seven Spores had touched down on bare human skin.

Upon successful landing, the seven siblings had immediately begun working. They’d sunk quickly through layers of skin, burrowing instinctively deeper into tissues. Had anyone been able to observe them, the Spores might have been mistaken for something merely microbial. But, upon closer inspection, their construction would have been found unusually simple and straight to the point. Pruned of any vestigial features left by a process of natural evolution, their design had clearly been the result of intelligence — a very determined and ambitious intelligence.

In small stages, the Spores had subverted Marten’s own cells. Their psuedo-genetic payloads were sparse and highly specific, targeted against the wealth of code already present in human DNA. Through precise and deft tweaks, the Spores’ machinery had spliced and rearranged sections of Marten’s genetic material like mashed up computer code. In short order, the Spores had assembled the alien biomechanical bootstraps they needed to progress to the next stage.

In the nuclei of freshly subverted cells, the rewritten genetic code had translated into novel proteins and nanoscale fragments spilling out of cell bodies. These had rapidly self-assembled into structures that — although obscenely foreign — had somehow managed to convince the local authorities that they were just part of the ancient human body plan. By the time visible large-scale construction had begun in earnest, many further iterations of genetic subversion had been achieved. Marten’s body had eagerly fed and helped shape the triangular forms resolving beneath his skin. As his craving for burgers and the worst side of the fast food menu had ramped up to provide energy and raw materials for construction, his body had given a warm welcome to the Triangles’ umbilical stalks wending deeper toward his gut, lungs, spine, and brain.

In the majority of hosts, the course of infection had flowed smoothly from incursion to control without mishap. The Spores had been built expertly to exploit the human genome to build the Triangles. The Triangles, in turn, had been expertly designed to exploit the human brain and body for information and growth — leaving nothing behind when they were done.

And, for the most part, Marten had been no exception as a host. The Spores’ tasks had gone without a hitch, and the parasitic fetal Triangles had firmly established themselves within Marten’s body. They’d begun stirring awake, alien synaptic networks sparking to life. Synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters had trickled into Marten’s bloodstream as the creatures stretched and oriented themselves. Calling out with plaintive voices encoded in chemical traces and nerve impulses, the Triangles had found each other and had collaboratively mapped out their respective locations and conditions throughout the host.

The seven had taken a poll measured in chemical concentrations leaked into the host’s bloodstream to find the Triangle nearest the head. They needed to gain definitive control over Marten’s mind, and proximity was essential. Luckily, one of them had been found embedded in the back of the neck. To become the group’s new proxy for control, the creature had extended its umbilical stalk up the spine, creeping carefully through soft tissues to tickle Marten’s brain stem. With host brain contact made, and communication established between the siblings, the first word the Triangles had stolen from Marten’s mind was…

(hungry)

The first sign of trouble, however, had come with an unexpected rush of excitement hormones. The odd mix of potent anxiety and joy had stunned them into quiet confusion, all of the children silent as they tried pulling the reason for it from the tentative connections they’d cast into Marten’s brain. To satisfy impulsive and impatient curiosity, the seventh sibling had driven further umbilical nerves deeper into Marten’s brain — almost too dangerously fast. The host’s mind had been so busy, words and ideas roaring through too fast for the Triangles to decode. He had been so energetic, drawing away even the Triangles’ own sustenance.

The second sign of trouble had come with an agonizing blast of complex electrical current and magnetic flux that had surged through Marten’s nerves, along with a strange wash of chemical signals sweeping through his arteries. The situation had outstripped all host environmental conditions expected by the Triangles, and had crashed through them all with hurricane force. They had quivered and lost contact with each other. They had squirmed and all consciousness flared out into white hot overload.

In the aftermath, after hours of darkness, instinct had taken hold. Umbilical stalks had thrust deep and branched repeatedly, forming calcium-laced barbs that slipped into soft tissues and anchored into bone. Bits of Marten’s own complete nervous and muscle tissues had been harvested and grafted into service in repairing the Triangles’ wounded minds and bodies.

Of the original seven Triangles that had found purchase within Marten’s body, six had found each other alive and well and reaching out once the flood had cleared. The seventh, however, had seemed somehow crippled: While it had seemed to respond weakly to its brethren’s queries, it hadn’t made much sense. Mournfully, another poll was taken, and the job of primary control had fallen to the Triangle stationed under Marten’s right clavicle. That sibling had withdrawn its umbilical from lungs and heart, had slowly rerouted it back along the spine toward the fallen seventh Triangle.

Passing along the route the seventh sibling had taken, the sixth had found the injured Triangle gibbering and twitching in a way that would irritate the host’s tissues. The sixth had tried to make contact, but without success. With resignation, the Triangles had attempted to secrete chemicals that would sedate the seventh. Continuing on, the sixth had reached out with umbilical nerve probes to replace the connections now unreachable through the seventh. Not quite as adventurous as the seventh had been — cowed by recent danger — the sixth had reached into Marten’s brain, but not quite as far.

As the Triangles had regained awareness of Marten’s mind, what they’d found was as strange and alarming as anything they’d yet experienced. In terror and confusion, they’d burned enormous amounts of calories and fat tissue from Marten’s body while he had finally slept — the Triangles had redoubled their efforts to grow and reach out to brethren beyond the host body.

Hopefully, I’ll begin regularly producing my own ficlets over here on my Ficlets author page. If I get a habit going, I might pipe and republish some of the stuff from there to here.

…around the bushes and up a tree…

“Billy,” said Jake, rubbing his hand, “that damn cat bit me!”

“Jake,” said Billy, “what the hell? I told you I’d be right back!”

“It looked like I could grab it by the tail. But, it bit me and ran around the bushes and up a tree out back.”

“Jake, I’m telling you that weren’t no cat.”

“What the hell was it then, huh?”

“I don’t know, but cats ain’t got wings. Or glowing red eyes!”

“It sure howled like it was a cat.”

“Well, hell, I’d howl too if I had a tail and you grabbed it like that!”

You go into your kitchen in the morning and there’s a note next to your coffee maker. What does it say?

“Warning: Consumption of beverages produced by this machine may counteract community-mandated tranquility agents introduced by municipal drinking water treatment.”

Mark found the transparent and still-tacky sticker upside-down on the counter next to the coffee maker. Looking up, he could see a clean spot on the machine’s stainless-steel casing, where the past few years’ worth of accumulated crud abruptly stopped. He scratched his head: He’d never seen warnings on the machine before now.

He finished the last sip of the best cup he’d ever brewed — and startled himself with a spontaneous yawp.

Just then, jack-booted thugs burst through his door.

“Time to wake up, Mikey,” said his mother, softly nudging open his bedroom door.

Mikey had slapped the snooze button on his alarm clock fifteen minutes earlier, at six o’clock. As his mother lacked a similar feature, he groaned and rolled over with his pillow covering his head. Undaunted, she continued into his room to his bedside, to gently shake him awake.

“C’mon sweetie, you’ll be late for school.”

“School sucks. Wanna sleep.”

“You should’ve gone to bed earlier, kiddo. Now get up. If I don’t hear you in the shower in the next ten minutes, I’ll be back with a bucket of ice water.” She turned and left the room, her footsteps traveling down the hall and downstairs.

Mikey mewled at the injustice and sat up in a huff, the pillow left behind and covers falling away. Nine-and-a-half minutes later — just as he was starting to doze off again — he swore he heard running water and ice cubes being emptied from a freezer tray. Less than thirty seconds after that, he was in the bathroom lathering his hair.

After brushing his teeth and throwing on a t-shirt and jeans, he bounded down the stairs to find a bowl of hot oatmeal, a pile of pills, and a glass of orange juice waiting for him.

“Aw, Mom,” he said, “orange juice tastes like crap with toothpaste. Can’t I have some Fruity Flakes and a juice box?”

“No,” she said. “I have let you eat enough of that crap for the week. You need to balance out with something less likely to send you to school hyper today and give you Diabetes tomorrow.” As he slumped into his chair at the table, she ruffled his hair and added, “And do not forget to take your vitamins.”

She did let him turn on the TV in the dining room, though, and watch cartoons while he ate. Since he’d actually gotten his homework finished early up the night before, she’d let him play online for an hour or so before bed. So, the cartoons were a nice bonus. She tolerated the bonks, sproings, and booms with a smirk as she ate a bagel, drank her coffee, and read a book across from him.

Finally, just as he was downing the last of the horse pills she’d laid out for him, there was a frantic banging at the door. Mikey jumped up from his chair, ran through the living room to the foyer, and wedged his feet into his shoes. His mother followed calmly behind and opened the door to greet little Janey Franklin vibrating outside on their front step.

Janey collected herself enough to recite, politely, “Good morning Mrs. Peterson. Is Mikey ready to walk to the bus stop?”

“Yes, just about,” said his mother. A beat later, Mikey was back to his feet, slipping his arms into the straps of his purple backpack. She leaned down to receive a peck on her cheek, then opened the outside door and ushered him out. “Have a good day at school, angel. I love you.”

“Yeah, you too Mom,” he yelled as he and Janey ran down the sidewalk toward the school bus stop in the cool air of the early spring morning.

Once the door to the house had closed behind him and they’d gotten a block or so out of earshot, Janey snagged Mikey’s hand and said, “Jeeze, Mike, your Mom is kinda creepy!”

“Yeah, well,” he said, grinning, “I guess it’s a good thing you like me enough to rescue me from the monster house.”

Janey punched him hard in the arm with her free hand, but giggled. “Yeah, you’re pretty lucky, and don’t you forget it.”

Unnoticed by either Mikey or Janey, a boy named Bret Smalls had emerged from between a couple of houses behind them. He’d been cutting through yards on the way to the bus stop, and knew these two would be taking this way.

He’d been keeping an eye on Mikey for a few days now. Bret had a crush on Janey, but he’d eat a slug before he told anyone, even Janey herself. But, seeing that little asshead hold her hand had really pissed him off. Fuming and almost panting, Bret walked fast down the sidewalk in his black hoodie and grey corduroys. He was trying to catch up to the pair, yet stay quiet enough that neither of them would turn around and see him before it was too late. He reflected on how hard being sneaky was in these jeans, as he hefted a nice solid rock in his right hand.

Once he got within throwing range — without even a single rearward glance from either of the pair — he reared back and whipped his arm forward to launch the stone right at the back of Mikey’s head. Bret had good aim throwing rocks. It whistled through the air in a perfect arc, and Bret felt a thrill anticipating the sound both it and Mikey would make on impact.

A foot or so just behind Mikey, though, the rock’s momentum suddenly slowed as if it had hit a wall of water. It tumbled slowly to the ground without a sound, just like a crow’s feather shed from a tree branch. Incredulous, Bret drew another, smaller stone from his hoodie pockets and chucked it after the first. Then another and another — he’d filled his pockets with ammunition from driveways on the way this morning, but they must’ve all had something wrong with them. He’d tried whipping every rock at the asshead’s stupid ass head, and every one had gone fluffy by the time it got near him.

Really mad now, Bret balled his fists and started off in a run to close the quarter-block’s distance between he and Mikey. If rocks wouldn’t do the job, he’d do it with his bare hands. Still oblivious, the lovebirds giggled and babbled to each other in complete ignorance of Bret’s approach.

Just about ten feet away from Mikey, Bret caught the toe of one of his shoes in an unnoticed buckle in the sidewalk. A car passed by as Bret went down hard, covering the sound of the pavement driving the air out of him with a woof. His knees bruised badly, and he’d smacked his right cheek into the hard ground with a shock of pain that brought tears welling up. But, he’d have a pile of slugs for breakfast if he let that happen. He mouthed at the air like a spilled fish, felt the shiner already throbbing and growing under his eye. He slowly picked himself up off the ground, and started again toward the bus stop. He wasn’t moving all that fast now, though, as stiff knees forced him to limp the rest of the way and he hoped he wouldn’t miss his ride.

Not once having become aware of Bret’s attempted ambush, Mikey and Janey arrived at the school bus stop outside the church on the corner. They sat next to each other on the front steps, waiting. Bret Smalls dragged himself past them, just in time for the bus to round the corner. He looked in sorry shape, with a black eye, limping, holding his stomach.

“Jeeze,” said Janey, “what the heck happened to him?”

“I dunno,” said Mikey, “looks like he got into a fight on the way here.”

She whistled low, “I hope his folks didn’t beat up on him or anything.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I heard his Dad can get pretty mean. Poor little guy.”

As the pair got onto the bus, they paid no mind to Bret’s baleful, sullen, eye-squinted glare tracking them all the way to the seats in the back.

Mikey’s mother closed the front door behind the kids, chuckling to herself. Little Janey was a little cutie, and she’d turned Mikey into a goof. He’d die if she ever told him that, so she’d just have to keep that under wraps for a few years. And keep an eye on Little Janey.

She returned to the dining room, scooping up the remnants of her son’s breakfast. Raising a child was not what she’d expected, she mused. It was at once harder and more rewarding than any of her research had lead her to believe. Mikey was so annoyingly dependent, ignorant, and petulant - but she could see glimmers of an adult intelligence developing within him, a little more every day.

Rinsing out his bowl and juice cup, she considered that her son had given her enough satisfaction so far to keep her from flushing the whole project. She guessed he must fulfill what she’d imagined were the beyond-ancient tatters of deep maternal instinct that had drawn her into this to begin with. One day, she hoped she could have conversations with him as a true peer — if he made it through his encroaching teen angst era without hating her in the course of differentiating himself from her.

She gazed out the kitchen window over the sink, at the empty backyard outside, at blades of grass just starting to reach up from the ground made mush by the spring thaw. She was surrounded by a handful of friends, she sensed. At her current time scale, though, she didn’t hear much from them directly. There were a few of them who took turns keeping an eye on she and Mikey. Although they very rarely paid a visit in person, she was comforted by the almost constant presence of a number of guardian angels presiding over Mikey and herself. Their help had come in handy on a handful of occasions over these past dozen trips around the sun. Since her son’s birth, her friends’ small interventions and corrections had kept both mother and son healthy and clear of tragedy.

She turned off the sink taps, placed the bowl and juice cup into the dishwasher behind her. It occurred to her that, at some point, she’d have to have a discussion with her friends about letting a few non-fatal incidents slip through to Mikey. She’d seen the Smalls boy stalking her son on a few occasions — maybe they’d need to get into a brawl or two at some point and trade bruises. Mikey couldn’t be allowed an entirely paradisal childhood and still develop into a fully functioning adult. As it was, she was looking forward to the day she could extricate herself from her biological confines and leave him to his own devices for a few decades. That would probably be the boy’s greatest trauma, and he needed to be more experienced with pain in general before he could successfully absorb that particular blow.

As she returned to the table to finish her own breakfast, she sighed. It was difficult going it alone from day to day, minute to minute — but, Mikey had been her idea after all. His father had been there at the beginning, but he’d disappointed her: He’d let his corporeal instantiation expire as he’d absentmindedly slipped back into a more conventional pace of consciousness. By the time his next slice of awareness ticked over, and he realized what he’d done, she would have already put Mikey through college and be well on her way to senescence. His passing hadn’t gone easy for Mikey, though — since from Mikey’s perspective, his father had simply, inexplicably fallen into a coma one day and never woke again.

As for the rest the people in this world, well, they were really just extras in this story. She supposed she could reach out and play at making a few friends in town, if only to pass the time when Mikey was away from her. She was pretty sure that her nearest neighbors had worrying thoughts about her and how she kept to herself. Not that what anyone else thought really had any bearing on her, but they did influence Mikey’s development — that was why, after all, she and her friends had created the sun and the world and filled it with people.

The people were real enough — they’d taken a few millennia to develop a sufficiently rich and stable civilization in which to plant Mikey — but to her, they were just soil for his growth. Once she and Mikey were done with the world, its fate was a toss-up. Maybe her friends would lose interest and leave it to continue unchecked on its own, or maybe they’d have some ideas of their own to try. Either way, she didn’t much care.

She sighed again, more deeply this time: If her only regard for others here were as dirt, she could see how she might rub them the wrong way. And right now, she was one of them — instantiated in a tangle of muscle, bone, and nerves and breathing the same air as everyone else on the planet. And eons ago, she’d been in a place not at all unlike this one, a child herself in the decades before she and her friends had all pulled themselves free.

Draining the last of her cold coffee, she supposed she would have to get out and interact with the others around here — for Mikey’s sake at least. They might not be as interesting as her real friends, but they were the best she had for now.

Almost on cue, there came a knock at her kitchen back door. Standing there, she could see a woman with an uncertain yet friendly smile, bearing an aluminum foil wrapped bundle. Mirroring that smile, Mikey’s mother stood and strode from the dining room to the door.

“Mrs. Peterson,” said the woman softly, “You’re Mike’s mom, right?”

Bemused, Mrs. Peterson replied, “Yes, I am Mikey’s mother. And whom might you be?”

“I’m Janet Franklin, little Janey’s mother. I made zucchini bread, if you’d like some.”

“Come in, please,” said Mrs. Peterson, gesturing for Janet to step inside, “I have fresh coffee or orange juice to go with that bread. Also, I would like it if you called me Nicola. “

“Pleased to meet you, Nicola,” said Janet, accepting the invitation and stepping into the kitchen. “I’d be grateful for a cup of coffee - mine’s black. It smells wonderful.”

With two cups of black coffee and two slices of freshly baked warm zucchini bread, Janet and Nicola sat down together at the dining room table and spent the entire morning — and most of the afternoon — getting to know each other and gossiping about their kids. By the time Mikey came back home with Janey in tow, they discovered with a dawning sense of pre-teen dread that a maternal conspiracy had begun.

Update (03/08/2007): Got a few more hundred words written - pretty pitiful. Still trying to work out how to get writing done after a brain draining day at work.

I know a lot of this just comes down to building new habits, slogging through the work, choosing to work. The really good inspiration and creative moments come on their own, captured with various tools at the ready. But, the rest of it is just putting butt-in-chair, fingers to keys, pen to paper. The rest is work and habits that I don’t have down yet.

Old-school Doctor Who from the BBC seemed to have a good formula. Unlike the more recent regeneration, the original series told stories stretched over a handful of hour-long episodes, usually four to six in number. And, although plot details from previous tales might come up again, each new story tended to start from an abruptly new premise. Accordingly, for a podcast, a single tale might not fit into a single half-hour or hour long narration - but a convention of splitting stories up into four or five parts might work.

This also has some implications for the overall framework, if we’re really following the Doctor Who conventions: The series, as a whole, is really more about the central character and hangers-on than a coherent arc of plot. I wonder if there’s some variant of this that can work for me?

Looking my batch of podcast subscriptions, I could see myself trying to submit some of these stories, once polished and finished, to something like Escape Pod. They’re one-off short stories, many circling around a shared theme. I’ve also considered together a limited run podcast collection of these stories, based on that theme.

But, beyond that, I’ve been trying to come up with something that’s not so much a short story or a novel, yet generates entertaining tales for an ongoing period. If I were to do a fictional podcast, I think I’d like to do it in the spirit of a TV series. That is, a season of episodes, each self-contained but contributing to a continuing arc — like a string of pearls. To do that, I need to come up with a framework that can help anchor and support interesting short stories. It should offer some interesting features for exploration, some ongoing conflicts to revisit often, and some paths for longer-arc development.

It seems to me that there’s a subtle difference between a season of a TV series and a novel proper. They both can carry a big story over a broad stretch of time, but an episodic series format appears to offer some flexibility in terms of flow that a novel can’t:

• An episodic series handles arbitrary cancellation more gracefully than would a novel that just stopped in the middle.
• Vice versa, an episodic series handles carrying on for an arbitrary number of seasons better than a novel that just never finishes.
• Last but not least, an episodic series offers more opportunity to make it up as you go along. For better or worse, that contributes to being able to actually release material over time without having to create it all up front.

All of this sounds attractive to me in considering the production of a podcast that I might start up, run for awhile, and then one day abandon or place on hiatus. I know this sounds like a pessimistic premise, but it’s a practical one. I’ve moved and changed jobs enough times to know that I need to keep my options open. And, given that, it sounds like an episodic series offers the least disappointment down the road for either audience or storyteller. It sucks when your favorite show gets canceled, and maybe the longer-arc concerns are left as loose ends — but, if it was done right, at least you had the individual stories along the way.

Hmm, things to think about. I have an idea I’m working on - so maybe in the next post or so, I’ll make another pitch to flesh out the idea.