Recently in Fiction on the Spot Category

    If I were to be kidnapped and dragged to the universe where chaps are worn and not met for tea, this is what it would look like.


A bullriding event is an excellent place to form bizarre fictional plots.  For instance, in the above incident, a clown with very large pants attempts to flee an angry bull. This could certainly stand on its own in one of those artistically rendered, painfully long short fiction pieces that one finds in the speculative fiction magazines.  But we aspire to more than that. We aspire to plot.  We aspire to character development. Who is the clown? How has he arrived? Why are his pants so large? Is it that his pants are so large,  or is the real thing here that his pants contain so...little? You see, our clown has reached the far edges of the ring, and safety lies just over the final bar.  He reaches, oh yes, he reaches, but--

Well that was lucky, wasn't it?  The clown hangs on to his pants for one more day. The valiant cowboy triumphs with his sturdy rope.  Perhaps the story is really the cowboy, with his compact horse, and his secret love for the clown, who has provided him with many nights of comfort in the back of a half-empty animal trailer, my goodness, perhaps we are back to the pants after all--


--now this is the sort of twist I wasn't looking for. I had a good thing going there, a sort of bullriding version of Brokeback Mountain, but now I find that I am wrong, so WRONG, that there is not secret love for the clown, no happy bed of straw mussed with streaks of red facepaint and a loose foam nose.  No, the cowboy and the clown are members of a bizarre satanic cult of Anglophiles, who conceal the true nature of their love for all things tea and crumpets by pretending to be rough-hewn cowboys, signaling their true Brit-obsession to one another by the affecting of elaborate chaps.  Chaps for the chaps, the boys say, chaps for the chaps.

And so concludes this episode of Fiction on the Spot. You may now return to page 322 of James Joyce's Ulysses, to which your left eye has been stuck for six weeks with no forward progress.

The Guardian is wondering why nobody has bothered to make academic writing more exciting.  I suppose they're right. How about a new take on the typical biology research paper:

The 1918 flu killed millions worldwide. In the course of this paper, we will examine the spread of the pandemic, as well as the intimate details of the life of Ms. Glendeen Rockhopper, the former secretary of a famed flu scientist who had a series of torrid affairs and climbed Mt. Everest with her poodle, Mr. Fancy.

I took a peek at the New York Times mainstream fiction besteller list today, and noticed that up there near the top was "The Sandworms of Dune". Written not by Herbert, who is dead, in the nonfiction sense of the word, but by his son & one other from the late Frank's notes. 

Add to that the Tolkein book--which was mostly written by the late JRR himself, but with significant help from son Christopher--and I wonder if I'm going the wrong way about this writing business.   I don't have any dead relatives with unfinished manuscripts, but perhaps I can invent one.  Here's a couple of ideas inspired by my recent trip to the Minnesota State Fair.

"The Lost Book of Madame Buckley's Dairy Cow Chronicles".  Would have lots of mooing.  I would need to do extensive research at an actual dairy farm, and manufacture some terrible crime to take place in the proximity of a mechanical milking machine.  In order to continue to qualify as "literary fiction" rather than  some version of genre fiction (cow fiction? bovine mystery?) I would need either the human protagonist, or one of the cows, to have deep internal conflicts over the nature of her universe.  Perhaps one of the cows would be carnivorous.



"The Life of Cookie"
The lost manuscript of my dear greatly removed and long worm-ridden Aunt, who baked.  Wherin a woman and a zoo animal become hopelessly trapped inside this menacing cookie barn.  They will have esoteric philosophical discussions while eating cookies. There will also be milk.  In order to add conflict, the zoo animal will be a Republican, and the woman will be a Unitarian.