Touch the Sky, Embrace the Dark: Why I Wrote… (Part 1)

Every story has a story behind it. So to give you a small glimpse into the stories in Touch the Sky, Embrace the Dark here are the influences, the ideas or the inspirations for each of these stories. I hope by learning a little more about them you’ll appreciate them even more.

Here are the first five stories in the collection. Tomorrow, I will write about the remaining five. And if you missed it, yesterday I wrote about 10.5 cool tidbits about Touch the Sky, Embrace the Dark.

ΔΠ (Delta Pi)

I challenged myself to write a story where a basic, simple assumption we make about the world changes. For me, this is a cornerstone of horror: playing with what we assume to be immutable and showing we are not as safe or settled as we imagine. Rather than using usual idea like disease, personal security or our own sanity, I thought about mathematical constants, which led to the basic idea of Pi. What would it look like to change this constant ratio of circumference to diameter?

Since I couldn’t picture it, I knew I had a great idea.

Ascension

I wanted to write a different kind of zombie story. But how?

How about telling it from the zombie’s point of view? No, it’s been done.

But what if I turned it on its head? What if what’s happening in a zombie’s mind is not the mindless craving for human flesh, but something wonderful?

The Machinery of Government

Inspiration for this story has been kicking around since Frannie Goldsmith (Molly Ringwald) told Harold Lauder (Corin Nemec) she couldn’t go to the movies with him since she had R.E.M. tickets in the TV version of The Stand. I started thinking: did R.E.M. die from Captain Tripps? What did other celebrities and people of means do?

So many disaster stories are told from the everyman’s or everywoman’s point of view. Sometimes, a general or president will be a character. But what about those in the middle? Not über-powerful and not everyday, but someone with some power and influence?

The conflict and main character went through many changes before arriving at a low level cabinet minister in the Canadian federal government caught between his personal and professional obligations as his city is overrun by an invading force. These two competing forces are echoed in how technology can make our lives more efficient, but at the cost of our humanity.

Full Moon Hill

This story owes a lot of Ramona Louise Wheeler’s “Blink. Don’t Blink.”: using nanotechnology to transform the human body. But in my story, I wanted to play with one of my favourite themes: what makes someone human and what makes them monstrous? And are they mutually exclusive?

So in this story, who is more monstrous: the werewolves or the business interests?

They Told Me To Shuffle Off This Mortal, Infinite Loop

This story is the thematic child of two stories that never quite worked.

Several years ago, I wrote a story where an advanced search engine achieves sentience. But rather than use it to better ourselves, the machine realizes we can’t spell, would rather look for porn  rather than works of art, and are horribly cruel to one another when hiding behind online anonymity. So the machine, disgusted by how it is  being used, self-terminates.

Another dealt with souls from the recently deceased unable to pass into the afterlife. The electronic networks that surround us have formed a net that trap the (electromagnetic) soul before it can pass over. This results in actual ghosts in the machine.

These stories never sold, but the ideas stayed with me. “Infinite Loop” deals with the interface between human and machine, the cruelty of humankind and the nature of time. It is also the most experimental piece I have ever written.

Coming up tomorrow..

I’ll explain the inspirations and motivations for the final five stories in Touch the Sky, Embrace the Dark.

If you like what you’re read so far, you can buy Touch the Sky, Embrace the Dark from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble (Nook), Apple iBookstore, Google Play and Smashwords.