Saturday, March 12, 2011

Post Mortem - The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities

This story needs a post mortem more than most, I think.

There is a natural tendency for people to assume that the views in the story are the views of the author, so I'd like to state right out that I don't actually want to kill the Jersey Shore cast, Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber.

Well, okay, maybe Justin Bieber.

I don't actually mind the way celebrity culture has come to make people famous for, basically, being loathsome in an arguably entertaining way. As I write this, Charlie Sheen is right in the middle of what is clearly a very public and very amusing meltdown, and I am just as amused by his antics as anyone else.

The inspiration for this was in the violent reaction some people do have to that sort of thing. I know a couple of people who get really riled up about this sort of thing, and I started to wonder what would happen if someone really tried to do something about it.

As ideas often do, this ran into Randy Quaid's "Starwhacker" idea and became, well, this. Someone who decided to kill celebrities because he felt they didn't deserve to be famous when he was still a nobody.

There's a subcurrent there that's probably going to be labelled misogyny, but I don't think it is. Johnny's original crime unfolds the way it does because the victim is a woman, but it doesn't happen because she's a woman. He's deeply misanthopic and egomanical, but it's not directed to anyone in particular.

From a writery wank point of view, the tricky part was that our point of view character is falling apart mentally as the story goes on. He ends up in a sort of (to his mind) messianic place. Getting there without it seeming too fast or too obvious was tricky. I think it turned put reasonably well, but we'll see when I go for a revision.

This also indulges one of the tendencies I have when I write prose, which is to tell and not show. Yes, I do indeed know that this is against the rules, but I'm okay with it. The style fits the story, or at least I think it does and I like it.

So, pbbbbth.

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