So What Happened to Dobja?

Several people have actually asked me what happens to the character Stefan Dobja after the end of my short story Doctrine so I thought I would address that. www.allegoryezine.com

Ergo: SPOILER ALERT! (Unless you don't care, then read on.)

The easiest answer is I don't know. I tried to write a sequel twice and I never got past page 2 either time. It isn't because I don't care or I wouldn't like to do so someday, it's just that there are a couple of obstacles in the way that I don't know how to get around.

Problem 1 is what to do about a sequel. Most publications want short stories to be 5K words -- 8K tops. So I can't add much more to the existing story and wrapping things up in about 3,000 words would be too rushed and truncated. I could just write a new story as a sequel, but how would I provide context? With 5,000 words you can't waste time doing much background and without background no one would know what was going on, least of all the editor you are trying to convince to publish it.

Problem 2 flows out of where I wanted to take the story. My two abortive attempts at the sequel began with the bandits waking up in the meadow the morning after the slaughter in human form. The story was then going to follow the bandits as they search for a cure to their disease/curse (whatever you consider lycanthropy to be) and as they gradually begin to lose their humanity under the stress. That would parallel Dobja's hunt for the killers and build to a climax for the final encounter.

The problem here is the level of research that would be necessary to realistically depict Transylvania and Romania/Wallachia in the 1850s. God is in the details and never more so that when you are writing historical fiction. You have to get the period right -- the clothes, the weapons, the locations and even with the blessing of the Internet, you can't always find what you need. A lot of stuff is in old books and you have to try to find them at bn.com or through inter library loan. And then you have to read them and take notes about what you need if you are lucky enough to find it in them. That's before you start to write and it takes a lot of time. Too much time given that I am trying to make my internally imposed one-year deadline (the end of May) to finish my novel. And that I have another 450 page novel that I was in the middle of when I kicked back to my current project (the rationale being that project was actually finished and copyrighted and just needed to be revised - substantially revised rather than completed created from scratch). And that I have ideas for two or three other books that I like better right now.

Thus, the sequel is on the way back burner because I don't have the time to do it right.

As far as the final encounter between Dobja and the bandits, I sort of envisioned the build up as him slowly whittling down their numbers, sort of like Predator, before a final confrontation. Dobja is driven by revenge and a conviction that he is fighting evil, but the bandits aren't really evil any more than a bear that attacked you in the mountains would be. They're petty criminals who were robbing a gypsy caravan and it got out of hand and a few gypsies got killed and someone cursed them. But they aren't really evil -- they fear the full moon as much as the peasants do. I don't know how it would come out but I like Dobja better so I assume he would have gotten over somehow. Maybe someday I'll get around to writing it.

The Old Bowls Were Better

Let me preface this by saying that I'm in favor of a playoff system. All of the arguments against one are inherently flawed and put forth by stakeholders who have the most to lose from the triumph of common sense. I'm not going to demolish the logically invalid crap that the BCS Conferences and their weak-sister enablers at the NCAA put out. That isn't the point and you can get that anywhere you want. My point here is that the BCS is so fundamentally flawed that the system it replaced was actually better. Never mind our faith in progress and evolving processes, we've actually gone backwards as far as college football is concerned.

It seems heretical to argue that things were better in the old days of back room deals when you weren't guaranteed to have the top two teams meet in an annual ultimate game, but I think it's true. Some advance the theory that the unusualness of a do or die Penn State - Miami Fiesta Bowl (1987) or a Nebraska - Miami Orange Bowl (1984) made it that much more rewarding when it actually happened. That's a pretty bass-ackwards was of reasoning because what happens when you take that thread to its logical extreme is saying it's good that things suck most of the time because of the heightened contrast when things actually work out. I like to think we can hope for more.

The reason the old system was better is because some of the other bowls actually meant something when it came to determining #1. Take away the proliferation of lower tier games matching up .500 teams that finished 6th in their conference. Take away the destruction of New Year's Day as the best day of the college football season by moving name bowls as much as a week further out. Other than the BCS Championship Game and maybe the Rose Bowl or the occasional Boise State - OU tilt, none of the other games matter to the casual fan. The awful Sugar Bowl between Florida and an overmatched Cincinnati team? The unwatchable Orange Bowl pitting Iowa vs. Georgia Tech? Did anyone who didn't have a rooting interest or money on the line actually make time to watch those games?

At least back in the day, if you didn't have #1 vs. #2, you might have #1 vs. #3 and if the top team went down, #2 could win it's bowl and end up with a National Championship. If things broke right, #3 or #4 might even have a shot or #1 and #2 might tie and who knew what the voters would do. Was it unsatisfying on a variety of levels, especially when many bowl match-ups were set before the end of the season? Hell yes it was! Nobody enjoyed the 1990 Orange Bowl which was supposed to be Notre Dame vs. Colorado for all the marbles, only the Irish got beat by Miami after they accepted the bid. It wasn't just imperfect, it was an outright bad system and it should have been replaced by a playoff but we all know it never was. Yet it at least made the other bowls relevant which is something that doesn't happen now.

If the bowls end up dying out, I'm sure they will blame it on a playoff system, but the BCS will bear a large proportion of the blame.

New Published Story

I am pleased/happy/proud to announce the publication of one of my short stories in a very prestigious e-zine in the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genre. (Please bear with me because I don't do promotion or P.R. very well.) I'm really excited to have one of my works accepted by Allegory E-zine (formerly known at the online publication of Peridot Books) and to actually get paid for it. "Doctrine" is something I wrote way back in a creative writing class in 1994 and it's gone through several evolutions although the ending has always been the same. I did a minimal amount of research in the first iteration and then a significant amount more for the updated 2006/2009 version. I updated it several years ago and submitted it to a Writer's Digest online contest, but the story wasn't what they were looking for and didn't make the top 100. So I dusted it off again this fall, did more revisions, tried to develop the ancillary characters a bit more and submitted it again. Thankfully, the good people at Allegory liked it and here we are.

The story is available at http://allegoryezine.com/ in the Fall 2009 issue of Allegory which was published today (1/1/2010). So if you get a chance and care, go and take a look and let me know what you think. (Even it's only "You Suck", I still can use the feedback.)