Pilot's Log

My father's best friend from childhood was laid to rest today. Dad couldn't travel to his hometown in time to make the funeral so I'm a little depressed for him.

The IRS rejected my tax return...again! I do my best to play by their rules and this is what I get. Grr.

1) Got a response back from Hershey's. It was an automated form letter about the fact that they have an active R&D department and so they don't respond to ideas sent in by the public.

2) I'm still mulling over whether to get back to a magazine who expressed an interest in me writing for them. I got their guidelines back and it appears they don't pay more than $5 per article--and they're only published quarterly.

3) I looked over the job listings for my area at Monster.com a little while ago. Most of the demand is for salesmen and branch managers of retail operations and restaurants. And the rest--either they require higher degrees than I've got or they want money up front. It just galls me. Bleh.

FP

Hey.

Was looking through my old letters files lately. Found a critique that Antarctic Press editor Herb Mallette gave to some scripts and ideas I submitted back in the middle 1990s. Of course, the overall complaint about my work was the ideas were all too derivative of existing works. And of course, I had pacing problems...too much dialogue in one story, too much action in another, and so on.

Of the stories I submitted, I was told that one titled Peace Dividend: Woodland Camo had the most promise. Let me tell you about that one...

Peace Dividend was planned to be a set of stories, all concurrent to one another, with the same general theme: Advances in Military Technology, and attempts to use these advances to better society in general. At least, that was it on the surface. It was also to be the story of the last twelve months before a nuclear war destroys our civilization. Woodland Camo would have been a more personal story wrapped up in this larger saga.

The central character of Woodland Camo would be a teenage Asian-American girl named Sally. Because of her criminal record (habitual shoplifting), she was being "posted" to a youthful offenders' boot camp run by the U.S. Army. "Woodland Camo" was the name for the boot camp program; it was created by the Army as a way to boost activity at underutilized Army bases, and so doing protect them from the Pentagon Base Closure Commission.

What made this particular Woodland Camo operation special was the fact that the base was also testing new combat robots...and the youths would be working with these machines. I was going for a Patlabor-esque tone for this story...the machines would have been very similar in design and capabilities. "Heartbreak Ridge With Robots" was how I described the concept to my buddies.

It's actually a little bizarre seeing how I would have told the story of the future in 1995. By now, the Second Great Depression would have hit America--banks all over failing because of corporate fraud and the collapse of the credit system. Just as 2007 starts, Russia starts annexing its former Soviet neighbors again, the Saudi Kingdom is overthrown and replaced with a Baathist regime aligned with Iran and Syria, and Mainland China invades Taiwan. Cyberterrorism runs rampant and some states declare martial law to restore order. Midway through 2007, open war would be declared...the Woodland Camo kids would be summarily drafted and sent to the front lines. Three months later, nuclear Autumn. End of story.

I gave up on this story at the time I moved to Tennessee because I had more important problems...and I finally got onto the Internet.

There's a part of me that still wants to be proven wrong...that somehow we as a people can work out or problems and step back from the brink. But I have this awful suspicion that we're on a path from which there is no return.

FP