The Greatest Thing Ever

2001: A League of Gentlemen.

Job Schmob

This is the earliest example of my writing I can find. It's dated 18 August, 2000. That's six and a half years ago, if you can believe it. Anyway, this is a piece of Star Wars fanfiction. (Yes, I used to write fanfiction.)

Wedge's Luck

Wedge Antilles had absolutely no idea where he was going except forward. It seemed like he had been crawling in this chute forever, and the smell was getting distinctively worse.

Why does it always come to this? Wedge thought. How does a member of the New Republic and Rogue Squadron get stuck on a backwater planet crawling through a chute to obviously meet some kind of dead animal?

Wedge saw light ahead. It was just a pinpoint, but it was hope.

***

Wedge crawled out of the chute, and into a world of which several thousand Oreliusians were training to be soldiers.

Wedge pulled out his hand-held comlink, and tuned it to the frequency of Leia Organa Solo.

If anyone can help, it's her! he thought as he started to speak into it.

His attention was caught as he heard the compound's speaker system blare: "Unauthorized communication in Section 543! Unauthorized communication in Section 543!" It continued to blare this, and Wedge saw several guards above him on the catwalk about twenty-five feet up.

"There he is! Blast him!" they yelled. Wedge dove out of the way and into a small hallway. He ran along it, and took a left, immediately coming out onto the edge of a catwalk. He looked down and saw a sewer system. He started to step back, when he heard several shouts and the clanging of booted feet on metal. They were coming toward him.

With limited options, he dove into the murky slime that lay below.

***

"And so there he was, and I sez 'Job Schmob! I'm down to me last pint o' beer!'" an old local said.

The other man next to him exploded in a roar of laughter.

The first man looked down at Wedge, and said to the other man, "Shhh! He's wakin' up!"

Wedge groaned, yawned, and stretched, then opened his eyes and saw two old men looking down at him. He wasn't sure what to do, wasn't sure if they were working for Hyggyns or not.

"Don't ye' worry there son. We don't work for that old, fat bureaucrat Hyggyns!" said the second man.

The first man piped up, "Is you the one them Geed's been chasin' all over the place?" He paused, and then said, "Oh, where are my manners. Would you like somethin' ta drink?"

Wedge propped himself up by his elbows on the bed. "In answer to your first question, that's me. In answer to your second question, no."

The first man paused in his act to get Wedge something to drink. He sat back down. "Oh, okay then, well, my name is Pete, and—"

The second man interrupted Pete, and said, "—and my name's Tom."

Wedge nodded. "Why exactly am I here?"

Pete said, "You got knocked out from jumpin' that great distance down into the muck. The muck looks deep, but actually's very shallow. You must be careful."

"Thanks for giving me the heads up..." Wedge muttered under his breath. He got up and off the bed. "Well, thank you gentleman for your hospitality, but I really must be off."

Pete extended a hand and said, "No! Please! Stay here! You're the first person we've seen in years!"

Wedge shook his head. "Sorry. No can do." He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving Pete and Tom giving cry for him to come back.

***

Wedge uttered a small prayer, and waded into the muck. It's not THAT bad! Wedge thought. It smells better than that chute I was crawling through, anyway.

He started to make his way forward, when he saw dirt up ahead. He continued onward, at a faster pace than before.

When he finally made it out of the goop, a blaster bolt tore up the earth next to him. He dove into the safety of shadow, and continued to run. He looked back and saw two guards start to fire at him. He ran in a zigzag pattern now.

Since he couldn't go anywhere else, he ran into the blaring hot sun of a dirt clearing. Blaster bolts now were everywhere, from behind him, and some ahead of him. He somehow managed to make it to an open chute, and dove in.

***

He fell directly into the hangar bay of the compound. He looked around, expecting hundreds of guards to have surrounded him.

None were, so he carefully made it to an empty shuttle craft. He punched a button, which opened the hatch. He jumped in and closed the hatch. He looked around for a familiar button. One button looked vaguely like the start up button on a New Republic craft. He punched it, and the engine started to whine to life.

A glimmer of hope spread through Wedge. That was exactly when the engine came to a grinding halt.

He noticed there was a small hand-held weapon sitting on the seat next to him.

Wedge pulled off a panel, and tried to hot wire the vehicle, when he looked up and saw several guards about thirty feet away running to surround the ship.

If "High Voltage" were written for "A Bit of Fry and Laurie"

# Well you ask me 'bout the clothes I wear
# And you ask me why I comb my hair
# And you ask me why I make my bed
# I'm just doing one nice thing

The League of Gentlemen

I've just discovered that Joby Talbot, composer for The League of Gentlemen, arranged and conducted the string orchestrations on Paul McCartney's latest album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. My pants will likely explode from this massive erection I've just gotten.

You Have No Faith in Medicine

Damn IT Band Syndrome. I've only just started running again. Between inactivity and the cold weather, I can barely run half a mile without wheezing like an asthma-ridden octogenarian.

"Midheaven"

This story is getting stranger and stranger by the sentence. In the past few days, I've introduced KingDome Come, a tiny food court that is Augustine of Hippo's castle. Only it's a tesseract from the fourth dimension, and it has a massive horsefly as its greeter...

New story!

The title is, as of now, "Empire of the Grass" - it's loosely inspired (very loosely) by Nicholas II's assassination. But instead of the story being about the Nicholas II character, it's about the people who kill him and his family and then have to destroy the evidence. But deeper than that, it's about this one person in particular and how he came to be in the position necessary to kill the Nicholas II character - and what events shaped his life that allowed him to kill this person.

The title is actually pretty clever (if you know the story) for what originated as a misreading of something my professor wrote on the chalkboard. He had written "Empire of the Tsars" and due to his awful chalkmanship (ho!) I read it as "Empire of the Grass."

But yeah. This thing is gonna be awesome. I've already got a basic structure for the beginning, middle and end, and I have an idea of who the characters are, although they haven't been finalized yet.