Steven H. Wilson - January 2nd, 2008

I finished the bleeding Trek / Dark Shadows thang the weekend before New Year's. Now I have to actually read it. I'm one of those writers who doesn't have a clue what he said in the paragraph before the one he's working on now. 65 pages of script boggles my mind. 500 pages of a novel puts me into a coma from which I may not emerge for days.

I'm ambivalent about actually performing that script on the podcast. I think it's funny (from what little I remember from writing it) but... half the cast of Dark Shadows is dead, and I fear so are half its fans. What if no one gets it? But best not to show any doubt. Doubt for an author is just an opening for people who are too lazy to create anything themselves to tell you how to create it.

And, as if I hadn't written enough Trek parody with that show, I'm diving right into the show to be performed at Farpoint – Lux Radio Theater Presents the Road to Orion – Star Trek, as it would have been performed by Bing and Bob. The research has been fun, as the Lux Radio Theater is always fun. Where else can one hear the very dignified C.B. DeMille selling soap? Toilet soap, yet.

I don't imagine it'll take me too long to put that one together. I have a solid outline, and parody usually flows pretty easily. If it doesn't, it's not worth doing. I'm a firm believer that one should only parody what one loves. Is that odd? I guess a lot of people like to make fun of things they hate, but, for me, there's not much fun in hate. To parody well, you have to know your subject. Who wants to take time getting to know something they hate? That's not to say that a good parody or farce can't include caricatures of people we hate. That's probably healthy, hence all the pictures of Hitler on the comic covers of the 40s.

Still and all, I'll be glad to get past the parody and back to serious material. I left the final Arbiters series two script in first draft form – mostly complete, but once scene ends with "Atal says something along the lines of [fill in something here] as a pithy closing remark." I really want to polish that one and get it ready to podcast. And then there are those novels to write...

I have a lot to say on the non-Trek writing front, about a story that I'm going to feature in this week's podcast, but I think I'll save that discussion until later.