"Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model" Posted

My new story "Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model" is now on-line for people to read. CAUTION: Story contains bad puns. Proceed at your own risk.

http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/tom-swiftly-and-his-incredible-traffic-model/

"Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model" is a sample of transportation planning humour. Puns and Tom Swiftlies count as humour don't they?

The story tells the tale of a transportation planner and his team as they struggle to convince the city council to accept their proposal.

The original idea actually came to me almost 20 years ago. I tried and abandoned several different approaches before I found the right one. I worked on that approach off and on for six years. Finally, in October this year, I decided to give it one big push and get it done. I feel it is now ready for release into the wild.

Let me know if you think I over did the puns a bit.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"Tom Swiftly" and Puns: The Bad and the Lame

I completed the second draft of "Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model". It is an improvement, but there is a problem I haven't decided how to deal with yet.

I'm not sure if Tom Swiftlys are considered puns or not, but I would lump the two together. They are both words at play. As it stands, most lines of the story are either a Tom Swiftly or a pun. Maybe that is a bit of over kill.

The problem I have is that in order to have the story follow a plot, I needed to create some new Tom Swiftlys. I was fortunate in that I was able to find a fair number of pre-existing Tom Swiftlys I could repurpose. However, many of the ones I created were not of the same quality.

Now, bad Tom Swiftlys and bad puns are often what you want. They both provoke the groans that the punster desires. While some of my Tom Swiftlys are bad, many might be better described as lame. I fear that they cannot elicit the groan I aim for. I don't want readers to think "that's awful" and really mean it.

The dilemma for me is what I do about them.

·         I could simply remove the Tom Swiftly and leave the sentence as a straight line to move the story forward. My goal with this story was be to have every sentence be a Tom Swiftly or a pun. I am reluctant to lose too many Tom Swiftlys, even if they are lame.

·         I could just leave them as they are, publish and hope that the readers will accept the occasional clunker. While this keeps up my Tom Swiftly count, I worry that too many clunkers will disappoint readers and drive them away.

·         I could take my time to develop bad Tom Swiftlys to replace the lame ones. When I did the second draft, I was able to eliminate replace some of the lame Tom Swiftlys with bad Tom Swiftlys. This would be the best option,  but would may take a long time and many rewrites before I can publish.

I am not sure how reliable my judgement is when I decide if a Tom Swiftly is bad or lame. Maybe the ones I worry about will work, and the ones I think are bad are really lame.

What I lean toward now is to publish and have readers tell me which are bad and which are lame. Since it is all on-line, I can always do a release 1.1 or 1.2 to address the lameness problem.

I should end this post with a bad Tom Swiftly, but I wasn't able to come up with one.

Note: I wasn't sure the proper way to pluralize Tom Swiftly. In the end I decided to use Tom Swiftlys rather than Tom Swiftlies. Maybe someone who knows for sure can give me some advice.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

First Draft of "Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model" Done

I surprised myself this week. I actually finished the first draft of "Tom Swiftly and His Incredible Traffic Model" just like I said I would.

It came in at just a bit over 2,000 words. That makes it one of my non-formulaic short stories. That could change after a few more drafts.

Most lines are either  a Tom Swiftly or a pun. I want to have another go at the non-pun lines and see if I can bring them into line. Some of the puns and Tom Swiftlies are pretty bad, so I want to see if I can come up with improvements there.

I don't normally make much use of a thesaurus in my writing, but this time I used it quite a lot. A short time ago I saw an interview with John Cleese where he talked about how they wrote the Parrot Sketch. He said they used a thesaurus for that one, so I was inspired to try it on this story.

I am worried that I may have overdone the Tom Swiftlies. I think I have more than 200 now. Most of the time, when people read Tom Swiftlies, they only do a dozen or so at a time. Will people burn out after a hundred or so?

One article I read about comedy writing recommended that you write a good story first, then go back and make it funny. I tried to do that with this story. It has some similarities to "The Barrier". As it stands, the story is kind of thin, but I think it is enough of a story to make the humour work. I'm sure people will be more than happy to correct my impression.

See "The Barrier" at: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/the-barrier/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog