Before started rock nyc I wrote fiction, all the time, from 1986 to 2007. 100s of short stories and 7 full length novels.But I write so much at rock nyc, I have no words left for fiction and haven't written much fiction since then.
But ideas happen whether you want them to or not.
I was editing Alyson's post about Dr. Dre thinking of using Marvin Gaye and others in a similar way to the Tupac hologram at Coachella and it triggered a a thought. Dr. Dre's son died several years ago in a car accident.
This is what I thought.
There is a man, a scientist, an expert in cutting edge holograms. Married with a song and daughter. The son and he are often fighting and one day they have a terrible fight and the boy takes the car,races off, and dies in a car crash.
The father goes into mourning and slowly builds a hologram of the son. And he keeps on modifying so it isn't the rebellious son his real one was, but an obedient one.
His wife and daughter… actually, no daughter. Why clutter it up with another character where I don't need one. Just a son. n only child. So his wife gets more and more upset with this slavishly obedient hologram and it leads to a violent showdown between husband and wife. The wife says, either pull the plug on the hologram or I'm leaving. In a fit of rage, the father kills her.
And in remorse builds a hologram of his wife…
So that's about it.
Obviously, it is about the impossibility of perfect families.
Secondary, about the malfeasance of using the deads image and persona without their approval. If 2Pac had said: "when I am dead, make a hologram of me and singalong to it…" OK. Do it. If he hasn't I think it is a terrible idea. The dead person, TPac, can't control how he is being used, it is a scary, nast thing. In my story, it is taken to an extreme.
But just under there is what interests me: the ending of pain. This is a subject that fascinates and, for me, os at the heart of addiction. I don't think it is the high we change, but the way an addict can feel very sick, take a drink, and feel instaneously better. And I think this is th scientists problem: he wants to end the pain of his sons death without suffering through the mourning period.
I have a relation, this guy tied his daughters hand behind her back till she went from being a righty to a lefty. Powerless, pathetic men, tend to bully their families. I would have based the scientist. on him. I wasn't rebellious as a teenager. I was on my own by the time I was sixteen and had no one to rebel against. But my brother and father fought a great deal. I was going to use my brother when he was 17 years olds. Incidentally, I don't like my brother and I would make the son and the father both unsympathetic characters. The mother I would base on a woman I know very well, who was terribly bullied by husband (he died recently), secretly, not many people knew. She would not be the POV (it would be written in the third person) but as she tries to deal with her husbands insanity, she would be the character we root for.
Very short. Two thousand words top. Just three characters.Except for the sons car accident, it will never leave the home.
And I will never write it, but I don't need to because now you know how it ends.
Whoops, wait, the title is from the Lambchop soong. i think the reason is self-evident: the scientist is trying to change the fucked up to the sunny. And, indeed, kinda succeeds.