Going On The Account: Blogtober – Was It The Way We Remembered It…?

This is the thirteenth of Blogtober, as our minds start to wander…

So who else wonders if history could have been different?  Other than Karl Rove, I mean…

(Yeah, it’s a cheap shot, but damn, that just ain’t getting old any time soon…)

Early on in my career, I did a lot of alternative history for the sorely-missed Rooftop Sessions.  I think the first piece I did online that got something other than just a byline was “I Read The News Today” which was an epistolary examination of what happened after NYPD picked up Mark David Chapman at 10:40 PM the night of December 8^th, 1980.

I remember being in some workshops with that one at the time and getting reactions from the folks I was with that were, well, not quite raves.  The main criticisms were not with the technique or approach, but the subject matter; there were not a lot of John Lennon fans among these folk, and the idea of him getting a second wind to his career with some “out of studio” influence after 40 seemed a little far-fetched.

Mind you, at that time Bono was only in his thirties, so who had a point of reference to work from in my favor…?

And it was fun to keep mining that vein for a while.  I got to use an AltHis focus on the Beatles to do some writing about the Kennedys, Doctor Who, and comic books.  All said, I think I got more ideas to explore out of that than I had before then.

There were a few other ideas I never got to fully develop, that didn’t see the light of day in their original form.  Some of that ended up in bits of RED JENNY AND THE IRATES OF BUFFALO, in a somewhat adulterated form of course, which makes a great argument for recycling.  Or at least for explaining why you have a messy desk at home…

I bring all this up as I consider what happens after RED JENNY.  As does any novel, this one too has an end, which will go up online in a few months, an end I am polishing between other distractions.  Which of course leads to that question, “So now what?”

I happen to be a little superstitious and have issues with discussing works before I’m ready to share them.  There have been too many times where I talk up an upcoming project that dies before it makes its way to the other side, and I’m left holding the bag with nothing to show for it.

But, I am willing to experiment, like any writer willing to work in AltHis.  So what I am going to say is, I did leave a clue in one of these three posts I made here.  Hopefully if this works, I can obliquely discuss the future, or at least an alternative for it, and if it doesn’t I can claim that the past never occurred, or that it happened in a different way than we remembered it having done so.

Just like an AltHis writer.  Or Karl Rove…

(Nope, ain’t old yet…)