GEKO AT PLAY Julius has a front story -- his failed attempt to evade GEKO’s pre-emptive revenge -- and a back story -- his childhood, education, and path to inventing the Doodad. (That term, by the way, sounds over-cute to some. But recall that the plutonium bomb was called “the Gadget” by the Manhattan Project.) The first writing complication arose in that the meeting at which GEKO acquired the Doodad takes place very late in the backstory. And without knowing what happened there, a reader would not appropriately understand the “Rapture”. So I had to take it out of chronological sequence, and place it at the beginning. But the details of GEKO’s plan came about at a subsequent party in Georgetown. The question then was where to put that scene without interrupting the momentum of the front story. The answer? Just cut it out -- thought it contained a Gilbert & Sullivan parody I liked. We could gather all the information we needed from that meeting’s effects, and the little bit we couldn’t, I rewrote into the early GEKO chapter. I went to a couple of Georgetown parties when I was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Even this broad satire is not far from what actually goes on! 

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

MODIFIED RAPTURE

 "So mon ami," Thorn asked, "What would you say are the most pressing crises?"

 He was sitting with Julius on a Duncan Phyfe love-seat, in an elegantly appointed Georgetown room, at an...

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