Well, that wi-fi emergency did not last long, just long enough to frustrate me and cause me to post a brief excuse for being unable to write about my story idea, the one about the guy who goes to bed in Cleveland and wakes up in a prison cell in North Korea. Now that easy Internet access is available, I have no convenient excuses for being unable to write the story.
Here’s the thing. Those kinds of stories, the ones I call absurdist fantasies but others might call science fiction or Rod Serling Stories, are easy to conceive, but damn near impossible for me to write. I can come up with bizarre scenarios til the cows come home, but making them interesting is a lot harder. I can understand the terror I would feel if I were to go to bed at home, and inexplicably wake up some time later in a foreign prison cell, an English speaker in a harsh environment in which everyone around me speaks a language I cannot understand. What I cannot understand is the back story. How did I get there? Why am I there? Who will care? Does it matter?
And dialogue in such a scenario is a bitch. One guy talking or thinking to himself rarely makes for interesting conversations, though I might argue that I engage in such conversations ALL the time.
So, back to the story. What caused me to conceive of such a bizarre story line? Well, I cannot answer that. It had something to do with the guy telling his children the reason he had not been home for dinner was that he had been working late. In fact, he had been engaged in a liaison with the wife of a South Korean man who regularly traveled to Cleveland. His punishment, both for the lies and the liaison, was incarceration by the businessman’s arch-enemy. Yeah, that makes sense.
