The Storymaker (Part Three)

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

A while later Gordon finished his third and, damn-it, his final draft of a nine chapter novella called The Venusian Project that had first taken shape in a somewhat shorter form some eighteen months previously. In its first manifestation the story received a few initial criticisms, mainly about minor technical problems, which he quickly ironed out, but those criticisms were overwhelmed by a torrent of encouraging comments. It was one of his best pieces, Gordon reckoned at the time, and he was very proud of it indeed. Until, that was, Buffalo Mozzarella stuck his boot in and demolished it paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence and word by word. “Twee,” Gordon growled, deep in thought - that was one of the words that the fucker was fond of in his vitriolic bombardments. 'Hackneyed' was another one, and 'old-hat' also came to mind.

The Venusian Project was a simple story about the interaction between a pair of settlements on Venus less than a mile apart, a human mining community that had been established for thirty odd years and an ancient Venusian village. As well as convincingly exploring the ups and downs of the two vastly different sentient species, the Storymaker had been told by his fellow writers on several occasions in what now seemed like the distant past, the tale also described the native flora and fauna of the planet rather beautifully.

“Personally I think it needs a touch more adventure, Storymaker,” the Buffalo suggested during his last assault shortly after Gordon had completely revamped the story following an earlier, totally different set of suggestions. “No, I take it back. It needs an awful lot more adventure, it needs a severe kick up the arse to get a little blood flowing through your numb, brain-dead, shop dummy characters. That's apart from your rather amateurish attempts at describing alien wildlife, which I've told you about before, but that's only a minor grumble; I suppose you can't be expected to convincingly describe the assorted lifeforms of Venus seeing as you've never been there.

The mind-boggling lack of action is the worst problem with this feeble attempt at entertaining us, and no one with more than a few lonely braincells will want to read this as it stands. Nothing happens, my friend, nothing of any consequence, anyway. It reads like a Crossroads script from the late nineteen sixties, and at several points while I laboriously waded through it I was on the verge of drifting off to sleep. Perhaps I'm being over critical, but as you well know, you have to be cruel to be kind. Actually the first third or so of the story seemed quite promising, but after that it went into a steep decline. Lordy, the final three chapters were so dull I thought I was going to die of boredom or fossilise in my chair, if I didn't shoot myself between the eyes first, that is. I'm afraid this piece needs another major overhaul, matey. I'm sorry and all that, but it won't do, it simply doesn't ring my bell – to be brutally honest, it's shite.”

The Buffalo then dished out a long list of propositions, propositions that the Storymaker wasn't happy with at all, but he felt that he had no other choice but to comply.

“Fucker,” Gordon groaned as he logged into XYZ Tales. He deleted the last version of The Venusian Project and laboriously copied and pasted the chapters of its all singing, all dancing, action packed replacement.

The story was, he admitted with a sigh, considerably better than its predecessors. Or was it? To be honest he didn't really know, and he was past caring. The Venusian Project was a totally different entity now, and its original magic, if it ever had any, was obscured by numerous layers of literary whitewash, but maybe he felt that way simply because he was sick to death of traipsing through it. Gordon hadn't enjoyed working on the piece at all, he knew that much, and he feared that his readers would probably pick up his creeping discontent. He had written the final version of the story in strict accordance with Buffalo Mozzarella's poxy, predictable formula rather than giving his creativity free reign and letting his thoughts run wild, which was how he preferred to work. “You want adventure, you Buffalo faced bastard?” the Storymaker growled. “I'll give you a bloody adventure, you nauseating prick.”